The Summer House in Santorini

One More Chapter

an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

Copyright © Samantha Parks 2019

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Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

Samantha Parks asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008324452

Ebook Edition © August 2019 ISBN: 9780008324445

Version: 2019-07-25

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

To Averi and Shauna, my gorgeous, strong, passionate sisters. When faced with hard decisions, I hope you always choose to stay true to yourselves.

Something like four thousand years ago, before Troy had fallen, in the height of the Bronze Age of Greece, a volcano erupted in the Aegean, the force of which is unrivaled to this day. The tiny island of Thera was destroyed, ripped apart from the middle, birthing legends of hidden cities and buried treasure that would perpetuate for millennia to come. The volcano erupted over and over again, its magma chamber refilling and depleting, until the entire area had been devastated beyond recognition.

But Thera did not die. It became Santorini, or Thira, a small archipelago of islands – one large, reverse-C-shaped one and a few smaller ones – with an ecosystem defined by its volcanic history. The ashy soil birthed unbelievable produce, especially grapes for wine. The caldera that had formed from the island’s near destruction made for a gorgeous landscape, and tourists eventually found their way to the hidden treasure of Santorini.

In the middle of the island is a small village called Exo Gonia, a town where, from some points in the village, the sea can be seen on every side. The roads up into the village are curvy and narrow, lined on both sides by whitewashed walls concealing houses and gardens that extend farther back into the hills than is evident at first glance. At the top of one such road – up the hill from the Agios Charalambos, a beautiful yellow church with three crosses atop round spires – is a small white house with three archways out front and views over Kamari and the Aegean Sea.

The house was built with just one bedroom. The four-poster bed was carved by the grandson of the man who built the house. He built the kitchen table as well; a long, trestled work of art with knots in the sides and a shine on the top from so many years of food and wine and love and laughter. And when he was done, he made a new front door from the same wood and hung it proudly in the frame.

The family who lives in this house is a humble one. The man of the house is a builder; his wife, a seamstress. The man has lived in the house his whole life. In fact, the house has been in the man’s family for over two hundred years, built by the first of the family to set foot on Santorini, rearing generation after generation of builders who have lovingly cared for and maintained the house, which has remained largely unchanged.

That is, until the man had a son. And that son became a builder, too, and he wanted to add onto the house. But his father wouldn’t let him alter it, so he started building in the garden. He had dreams of entertaining guests from all over the world; strangers who would become friends simply by sitting across the knotted table and eating a meal plucked from the garden and sleeping nestled in the hills of the most beautiful island in the world. “The summer house,” he called it; the thing that would bring new people and new adventures to their tiny little corner of Exo Gonia on the island of Santorini. He decorated it with yellow paint and his hopes of a more exciting life.

Only one person would come to stay in the summer house as long as the man’s son lived, but she would change their world forever.

Anna had always thought that Manhattan summer was the closest one could get to hell, as least as far as temperature was concerned. But as she stepped off the plane and onto the tarmac in Thira, she realized there was a whole other level to that particular inferno, and it was in Greece. Santorini, to be specific.