THERE was a lot to be said for spending a day sitting beneath a striped blue and white beach umbrella on a little Greek island. Serena Comino, however, had been sitting beneath this particular beach umbrella every day for five months now—renting fifty cc motorbikes to tourists—and there wasn’t a lot to be said about it any more. The view never changed, as glorious as it was. The faces of the tourists changed with each docking ferry but their desires stayed the same. Get wet, lie on a beach, rent a Vespa, eat… Nothing ever changed. Five months. Only one more month to go until she returned to Australia and the Greek-Australian arm of the family, or better yet didn’t return home to the family bosom at all. Serena leaned back in the rickety director’s chair until the front two legs left the ground, her eyes shaded by sunglasses, her head tilted towards the vivid blue sky beyond the umbrella. Maybe it had grown somewhat more interesting in the last five minutes. A passing cloud, a bird, a plane. Superman. Nope. ‘Who suggested this?’she muttered. ‘Your father,’said an amused voice from the direction of the goat track behind her. The track started at the edge of the village and meandered up the hillside, past her grandparents’ rambling whitewashed cottage, and on to the road above, where Serena and the Vespas spent the better part of the day. ‘Sad, but true.’ She turned her head, a minimal movement, and offered up a smile for Nico, her cousin on her father’s side, which meant the Greek side. The details weren’t important, they were related. And it was their turn to pull carer duty for their eighty-two-year-old grandparents, not that they needed nursing care, for they were in remarkably good health. No, truth was, she and Nico were here to run the business enterprises Pappou refused to surrender. Nico’s working day started at four a.m. on the fishing trawler and finished around lunchtime.