As soon as Nikolas had gone, Dr. Vassili Tsipras knew that he had to get to Athens. Melpomeni Bouras would not be happy to hear that Nikolas had recovered his memory and was looking for Anna, but she would be even unhappier if her husband found out first. They both would be.
If Stavros Bouras found out that his wife had plotted to alienate him from his beloved daughter and that his adopted "nephew" was really his grandchild, there was no telling what he would do, but it would most likely not be pretty.
Leaving his mother to fend for herself, the good doctor told her, "You are on your own, you old witch," and then the doctor hurriedly packed his things and caught the first plane to Athens, where Mrs. Bouras took the news even worse than he expected. After all these years, she still seemed to have a deep, overriding hatred for Nikolas Theophilos―and for her daughter―that blocked her rational judgment.
In this case, she flew into such a sustained hysterical rage that it led to a confrontation with her husband. She impetuously told him everything, threw it in his face like a dirty rag, and then stormed out to meet one of her many lovers. Later, when the doctor learned of this and then heard about her "accident" soon after, he decided that he must get out of Athens immediately and that he could never go back to Samos.
There was only one place he could go now, only one possible advantage he had over both Nikolas Theophilos and Stavros Bouras. The one thing that he knew, the one thing that he had not told Nikolas Theophilos and he hoped against God that Melpomeni had not told her husband, was where to find Anna.
Dr. Vassili Tsipras knew that his only hope, the only hope he had left, was to get to her first and then count on the fact that surely Stavros Bouras would not harm his new son-inlaw, the one who had reunited him with his precious daughter. On his way to the airport, he stopped at the harbor, where he found a foreign-looking sailor sitting drinking by himself.
"Do you speak Greek?" he asked. The sailor nodded yes. "Good. I will pay you to drop this package off at a ship for a friend of mine. I am leaving town and do not have time to do it myself. He handed over the package and a handful of drachmas and walked out.
* * *
For the rest of the day, Nikolas wandered around town in a daze, trying to absorb all he had learned from visiting Dr. Tsipras and to get his rage and his joy all under control. He had a son! And Anna was alive, but she thought that he was dead, all because of that evil doctor and her equally evil mother. It was nightfall when he finally made his way back to the boat.