What if the Virgin Mary was a Greek mother? Despina lost her son – a thirty-three-year-old young man, due to a recklessness, a slap in the face of the Junta – and she has turned her back on the legend that emerged from his death: what good is the adoration of the world, the followers and the believers, when her child is in the ground?
And so she returns in her mind to the only refuge – to the past – and relives her passions and mistakes: the remote village and her elderly parents, the baby in her womb, with the unacknowledged father, the departure to Athens, to the mansion of Dexamenis.
From being a servant to a mistress and lady, the wife of the kind-hearted Sifis, a companion and support during the dark years of occupied Crete – but above all, the mother of Christos. Yet no matter how much love she gave him, her only son was always unruly, elusive like a wild animal, fearless in danger and recklessly devoted to friendship and love, as if he could even trample on death itself.
And so he was swept away, by the fanaticism of his entourage and the eyes of Magda, and lost his head. But all those years, the nights of anxiety and bitterness, Despina had a secret companion, visible only to the eyes of her soul: the daughter she never had, the daughter who would grow up by her side and become her refuge and support.
Perhaps even the Virgin Mary would have wanted a little girl, to sweeten the turmoil that her son brought her, to lighten the pain of his departure? Until one day, a lost friend of Christos – Giannakis, devoted like a disciple and sweet like an apprentice – comes to disturb Despina's loneliness with his revelations, with the truth that lurks in the most unlikely hiding place. A story about what even God envied, the love of a mother.
