She needed someone to trust too, she thought. What was she letting herself in for?

‘We’ll just slip in quietly, do what we have to do and leave,’ she said. ‘I’m hoping we’ll hardly be noticed. I’ll show you the places where I swam and played when I was a little girl. I’ll figure how to stop Demos digging his great big diamond mines. Then we can go home, with as little contact with the locals as possible.’

‘So we won’t see Nikos and Christa?’ He sounded astounded. More. Sad.

‘I guess we will,’ she said and he lit up again.

‘Good. I like them. Christa likes Oscar.’

‘Oscar.’ She glanced down at the dog on the deck beside her. Crazy. Coming all this way and bringing a dog.

But she needed to. She needed as much family as she could get. Nicky and Oscar were it.

We slip in quietly, do what we need to do and leave, she said to herself again, as she’d told herself countless times before. I’ll give Nikos the authority he needs and leave.

But what about…Nicky? The small matter of Nikos’s son.

It can’t matter, she thought. Yes, Nikos was angry-maybe he even had a right to that anger, but there was still the matter of Christa, conceived three months before Nicky. When he and she…

It didn’t bear thinking about.

‘We’ll get in, do what we have to and get out again,’ she said again to Nicky. ‘No fuss. Nothing.’

And then the boat passed the headland and turned towards the harbour. And she discovered that no fuss wasn’t in the island’s equation.

She’d come. Right up until now he’d thought she’d back out. But he knew she’d boarded the ferry in Athens. Short of jumping off, she had to be here.

So he’d let it be known. Demos had been acting Crown Prince. If Athena arrived on the quiet, as if she didn’t want the Crown, it would give everyone the wrong idea. The islanders were terrified by Demos’s plans. They needed Athena.