Sisterhood Everlasting Read Online Free PDF

newspaper clipping stuck to her easel by a so-called friend from her first year in graduate school. It was from The Wall Street Journal , and it declared Kostos Dounas to be the youngest managing partner in the history of his bank. At the top there was a line drawing of Kostos looking groomed and serious. The article went on to trumpet the multibillion-dollar deal he’d negotiated between one gigantic conglomerate and another. Lena had stared at that sketch, but she couldn’t see her old Kostos anywhere in it. Because the portrait was stiff and artless, for one thing, but also because she had the strange sense that he was rocketing irrevocably from her world into a different one.
    That sense only increased over the next few years. She didn’t make a habit of reading business journals, but his name and picture found her anyway. She couldn’t avoid it. He’d been named one of Time magazine’s most influential people under thirty-five. Nobody from Santorini could help bragging about him, including her grandmother. Even her father rhapsodized about him occasionally, failing to pick up on the sharp looks from his wife. Once Lena saw Kostos’s face on the cover of The Economist as she passed a newsstand at the train station.
    I doubt he’s thought of me , she found herself musing with uncharacteristicself-pity as Kostos stared at her from the magazine cover as if she were any other passerby.
    Kostos had said “Someday” to her, but the notion seemed preposterous to her now. He was so far beyond the scope of her small, quiet life; he occupied an alternate universe that intersected nowhere with hers. He no longer represented someday , a possibility. He represented a road not taken, a road that suddenly shot so far into the distance she couldn’t see where it went anymore.
    Did she regret her decision? She asked herself that question once in a while. What if she’d gotten on that plane? What if she’d gone to Greece that summer, as he’d wanted her to? Would a life with him have suited her?
    Probably not, she decided. The force of her feelings, the fear for her heart, might have overwhelmed her. She liked the life she had. She loved habits. She craved a day with nothing in it, a long, quiet stretch of hours in the studio.
    And in that quiet, her life as a painter had flourished. Her gifts as a teacher had blossomed. She was the only graduate student who’d been offered a salaried teaching job at RISD upon finishing her master’s degree. Now there was a waiting list among undergraduates to get into her class. She was proud of that. Could she have achieved any of it standing by the side of the mighty, world-conquering Kostos?
    When her grandmother Valia had died the January before last at the age of ninety-two, Kostos had sent her a beautiful letter of condolence. Regardless of how alien the Kostos of the magazines appeared, those words came from the person she had loved. To say that the letter touched her didn’t come close to capturing the ache of it.
    She’d carried Kostos’s letter around with her for two weeks. It had taken her four drafts to write him back. She’d lavished hours on the response. She’d written and crossed out and written and crossed out, done and undone, so that by the end it hadn’t said much of anything at all. The intensity of feeling summoned by that letter exhausted her.
    And yet. A life spent with Kostos would have been something, wouldn’t it? She’d never felt about anyone the way she’d felt abouthim. Not even close. She knew that when she got old it would be more fun to look back on a life of romance and adventure than a life of quiet habits. But looking back was easy. It was the doing that was painful. There were plenty of things she would like to look back on but wasn’t willing to risk: hang gliding, cave diving, ecstasy.
    She and Drew stopped to pick up a pint of Ben & Jerry’s from the Foodmart on the way back to her apartment. She liked the kind with the cookie dough in