Book excerpt: As Pamela sits heartbroken in her favorite chair following the death of her beloved husband, Takis, she attempts to unravel the layers of her existence whose very first memory could have been her last. We follow her through her cinematic reality, rewinding time and space, to the orange groves of Kalamata, Greece, when Nazis bombed the harbor forcing her family to flee across the Taygetos Mountain Range to a small Spartan village for safety. As fate would have it, they came face to face with Nazi atrocities instead. Their survival in an underground cave was threatened when German soldiers were heard standing at the roof of the opening, laughing at the occupiers’ successful conflagration of Soustianous the night before. Desperate to flee the danger, her family searched for new shelter and a new beginning which came at a price, not all the family survived. As World War II ended and Greece rebuilt, the family moved back to Kalamata where Pamela lived the monotony of a poor teenager until a soccer-playing banker named Takis crossed her path. The Andriopoulos family’s American Dream interrupted the couple’s love affair when they were separated for years by the Atlantic Ocean, their only connection was their love letters. Pamela returned to Kalamata to marry her soulmate who followed the love of his life back to Chicago for a taste of the American Pie. Their fairytale was not laid in a bed of roses, but rather thorns and weeds and unconditional love, all of God’s will. Pamela and Takis’ family thrived in the States, but Kalamata, and its people, continued to tug at their hearts, calling them back to their Greek Dream. But the vision for their family was shattered with broken memories that could not be recovered, so it seemed.