Sisterhood Everlasting Read Online Free PDF Page A

hated and which ones she loved. And it was true she experienced even the strongest pleasures and poignancies down pretty deep. They tended not to make it all the way up to her face.
    Lena finished her sandwich and sat at a table to wait while the rest of the customers made their way out. She rested her chin in her hand as she watched Drew put away the food, lock up the kitchen, turn off the lights.
    “Ready?” he asked.
    She followed him out of the shop and watched him pull down the noisy metal gate and lock it with a key. As they walked he didn’t reach out to put his arm around her shoulder or grab her hand, and she didn’t expect him to. They walked side by side along the dark sidewalk. Companionable as they were, she felt as though the night air encapsulated each of them separately.
    A few months before, Effie had declared, having already broken two engagements (and sold two rings on eBay), that if you were almost thirty years old you should not be in a relationship with a guy you didn’t at least think you could marry. Lena wasn’t sure Drew met that qualification. No, if she was honest, she did know. Drew was considerate and smart. His eyes were a lovely pale blue and he liked most of the things she liked. But she wasn’t going to marry him. She knew that, and it didn’t put her in any hurry to break up with him. Truthfully, it was kind of a relief not to have to be spinning into the marriage vortex.
    Lena was content walking beside him, but she knew there was more. Drew might not know that, but she did.
    She’d fallen in love with a Greek boy the summer she’d turned sixteen, when she’d gone to stay with her grandparents on the island of Santorini. Kostos was the pride of the village, grandson of her grandparents’ dearest friends. He’d broken Lena’s heart by mail at seventeen, and later she discovered he’d gotten married to a girl he’d knocked up from his village. Two summers later he’d come to the United States to find her, and she’d angrily sent him away.
    The last time Lena had seen him was at nineteen, when she and Tibby and Carmen and Bee had returned to Santorini together in search of their lost pair of pants. Kostos had explained a few important things that last night: there wasn’t a baby, there had never been a baby, the girl had manipulated him, his marriage had been annulled. He hadn’t stopped loving Lena, he said. He said they’d be together, not now but someday . He said the word in Greek, whispered it in her ear, where it had stuck.
    When Lena was almost twenty-two, the day after she graduated from RISD, Kostos had sent her a long letter, seemingly out of the blue, asking her to come back to Santorini to spend the summer with him. No pressure, he’d said.
    He might as well have sent her the Ebola virus tucked in with the letter. She’d been racked with desire, misery, uncertainty. She said yes. Her agitation grew. She bought a plane ticket to Fira, set to arrive on July 4. She called her grandmother and made arrangements to stay.
    As the days passed she became too nervous to sleep. Her stomach and intestines teamed up against her and stopped digesting properly. Once, in the middle of the night, she went to the emergency room with terrible pains in her chest, fearing her heart had turned against her too.
    On July 3 of that year, the morning of the night she was supposed to fly to meet him, she’d canceled the trip. By email. “Now isn’t the right time,” she’d said, and made some excuses that felt cowardly to her even as she typed them. Kostos didn’t write back for two long days. He didn’t try to talk her out of it. He was disappointed, he said, but he’d figure out a way to get over it. Instead of flying off to Greece, she spent another summer in the studio in Providence.
    She didn’t see him or talk to him after that. Six years passed without a word between them. But while her life ambled along quietly, his did not. She first became aware of this by means of a