The Maidens

One evening in October, a year after her husband’s death, 36-year-old Mariana sits on the floor of her house with his personal effects. She knows that by holding on to his things and her memories, she risks falling into “pathological mourning”—depression—but life has felt colorless and painful since his death. She prefers to remain cocooned in her home and pain.

The following night, Mariana receives a phone call from her niece, Zoe, who is studying at Cambridge.

Mariana grew up in Athens in the shadow of both the Parthenon and her dictatorial father, a self-made man. Her mother died shortly after Mariana was born, and she and her much older sister were never close. Wary of groups, Mariana frequently found herself isolated and lonely, but this has benefited her work as a group therapist because she is good at being “invisible.”

Zoe’s call arrives on an unseasonably warm evening after Mariana has held a group therapy session in her London home. Henry, an especially troubled patient, had disrupted the meeting.

Mariana had been unsure whether to admit Henry to the group. His history of childhood trauma, self-harm, addiction, and repeated hospitalization was more severe than Mariana’s other patients’ profiles. On this day, he arrived late to the meeting, possibly under the influence, with coffee. An argument erupted among the patients since Mariana does not allow them to bring anything to group sessions. Henry lost his composure, prompting Mariana to remind him about boundaries—a recurring struggle of his that she finds “increasingly hard to handle” (15).

Henry remained after group therapy to confront Mariana. Instead, she confronted him with the fact that he has been stalking her. When Mariana dismissed his denials and rebuffed his attempts to get physically closer to her, Henry lifted his shirt to show Mariana that he has been cutting himself. Compassion tugged at Mariana against her common sense. As she fetched a first aid kit, the phone rang. It was a tense and frightened Zoe instructing her to turn on the news. Mariana sent an angry Henry away.

Mariana watches the news report: an interview with a man who stumbled on a young woman’s body while walking his dog at a Cambridge nature preserve. The woman had been stabbed repeatedly in an apparently “frenzied knife attack” (21). Zoe tells Mariana that she fears the woman is her friend and classmate Tara, whom no one has seen since the previous day. Mariana urges Zoe to contact the dean and promises to come to Cambridge.

After hanging up the phone, Mariana is shaking from fear and distress; she berates herself for being “a coward” and wishing Sebastian were there. Her last thoughts as she falls asleep are about the killer. 

The point of view shifts to first person, as a murderer narrates that he feels like “two people in one mind” (26). Sometimes he feels calm and at other times “blood-thirsty, mad, and seeking revenge” (26). The killer wonders how he ended up “so twisted inside” by hate (26). 

Mariana leaves for Cambridge the following day. She thinks she sees Henry waiting outside her house but decides she is imagining it.

Aboard the train, Mariana reflects on how her niece overcame a difficult childhood to earn a place at Cambridge. She remembers how Sebastian gazed at Zoe with “such fondness, such love, […] as if he were gazing at his own child” (30). Mariana met Sebastian at 19—a love-at-first-sight chance encounter. She had moved to England at 18, carrying idealized images gleaned from reading her English mother’s books. Cambridge fulfilled her fantasy of “an enchanted city from a poem by Tennyson” (31), but she struggled to make friends, lacked confidence, and sought refuge from her isolation at the library. Despite their different backgrounds (hers privileged, his financially unstable with divorced parents whom he was not close to), she and Sebastian immediately became inseparable. As she wonders if their confidence in the future was hubris, she notices a man staring at her.

The man introduces himself as Fred, a PhD student in mathematics, and offers Mariana some of his fruit, which she declines. She is nonplussed that he seems to be flirting with her. When they arrive, he asks to accompany Mariana to Cambridge. She declines, and he asks for her number, blushing. After she again turns him down, he tells her that he is sure they will meet again.

Walking to campus, Mariana grows increasingly anxious. She worries she is being followed and then dismisses her fear as paranoia. Seeing the fresh-faced young students reminds her of her own youth. She recalls her father and Sebastian’s disastrous first meeting, when her father accused him of being a gold-digger. Despite threats to disown her if she married Sebastian, her father left her his large fortune, which she and Sebastian used to buy their London home. The only thing missing from their life was children, but they struggled to conceive.

After a fertility doctor recommended a relaxing getaway, Mariana insisted on a trip to Naxos, the Greek island where her family had a home. Initially reticent, Sebastian finally agreed. They visited an ancient temple of Demeter and enjoyed a picnic, affirming their love for each other. Mariana experienced a moment of foreboding but dismissed it. The following morning, Sebastian went out early for a run on the beach. Three days later, his body washed up on the shore. After his death, Mariana learned his businesses were struggling, but she had been too preoccupied at the time to notice.