Alexandra

Alexandra is Christos Papastergiadis’s wife and the mother of his infant daughter, Evangeline; to Sofia Papastergiadis, she is both a stepmother and an unexpected connection to the family Sofia has long been separated from. Her story joins intimate acts of welcome and care to the harder realities of adoption, austerity, lost work, and financial dependence. As Sofia comes to know her, Alexandra moves from being part of Christos’s new household to addressing Sofia as one of her own daughters.

Identity and Background

Christos introduces Alexandra to Sofia as his wife and Evangeline’s mother. She is twenty-nine, four years older than Sofia, while Christos is sixty-nine. When Sofia first meets her, Alexandra has short, straight black hair, spectacles, and a steel brace across her front teeth. Her denim shirt is damp with breast milk; she looks tired and sallow, but appears open and friendly, if a little wary. Sofia sees unashamed love in the way Alexandra and Christos look at their baby.

Alexandra tells Sofia that she was adopted and grew up in Italy. Her elderly adoptive parents live in Rome and find it difficult to travel to Athens to see their granddaughter. Alexandra worries about their pensions, especially amid austerity in Italy. When she was working, she regularly sent them money; now, she says, it is harder because Christos has other plans. Her account establishes an important tension in her life: she has a family she cares for across generations, but her ability to support them is constrained by her marriage and finances.

Her education and early career are substantial. She attended school in Rome and university in Athens, then worked as a research assistant to a former chief economist, to the director of economic policy at the World Bank, and to a vice-president at another large institution. Later, in an email to Sofia, she reveals that she has lost her job at a bank in Brussels. The contrast between this professional history and her new financial uncertainty gives weight to her concerns about Christos’s decisions.

Joining Christos’s Household

Sofia meets Alexandra and Evangeline after travelling to Athens to see Christos. Alexandra’s welcome is not effortless: she is watchful as well as friendly, and the meeting places Sofia beside a family whose shared language and routines she does not fully possess. When Evangeline makes a choking noise in the car, Christos and Alexandra speak to each other in Greek, which Sofia cannot understand. Alexandra later asks why Sofia does not speak Greek. The moment makes Sofia’s distance from her father’s household tangible, even as Alexandra’s question recognizes that distance.

The narrative gives Alexandra’s new motherhood physical detail. She holds Evangeline while Christos arranges the seat belt and encourages her to sleep; later, she feeds the baby, whose toes wave as she suckles. When she asks Sofia to bring her water because she has no free hand, Sofia adds ice, lemon, and a strawberry. The exchange is small but consequential: Alexandra’s dependence on another person’s help is visible, and Sofia responds with care rather than remaining only an outsider observing the household.

Sofia interprets Alexandra’s affection for Evangeline through the fact of her adoption. Seeing Alexandra hold her daughter, Sofia imagines that Alexandra may have longed for a father who could also be a husband, and reads the household’s childlike details—the Donald Duck posters, lamb slippers, and jellied candies—as possible efforts to make a childhood she did not have. This is Sofia’s conjecture, not a confirmed account of Alexandra’s motives. It nevertheless shows how Sofia tries to understand her stepmother by connecting Alexandra’s history of adoption with the tenderness she gives her own child.

Austerity, Work, and Financial Anxiety

Alexandra presents herself as politically conservative and argues in favour of economic reforms. She describes reform as necessary medicine for remaining in the eurozone, while Sofia identifies as anti-austerity. Their disagreement is sharpened by the precariousness of the family’s position: Alexandra says Christos has moved most of his money out of the bank and into a British bank, and that they do not know what will happen. She warns that if they fail to meet obligations and miss payments, creditors may take even the clothes they wear.

Her professional experience informs the metaphors she uses. Alexandra describes economic crisis as a serious, contagious illness and debt as an epidemic spreading through Europe, an infection requiring a vaccine. She had worked monitoring the behaviour and movements of this economic infection. The language gives her position both expertise and urgency: she understands economic instability through the tools of her former work, but is now personally exposed to the consequences of lost employment and uncertain investments.

Sofia’s first impression of Alexandra’s circumstances is later complicated by what Alexandra writes about Christos’s intentions. In her email, she tells Sofia that Christos plans to leave all their money to the church when he dies. Alexandra says that, although she too has faith, she needs to provide for Evangeline. She fears that she, Sofia, and Evangeline could be sacrificed to Christos’s religious commitments and lose their investments and home. The email makes plain that Alexandra’s position within the household does not give her control over its wealth or future.

Relationship with Sofia and Narrative Significance

Alexandra’s relationship with Sofia changes most clearly through the language of kinship. When a friend tells Alexandra that she has two daughters, Alexandra initially corrects her: she has one. She then recognizes that the friend meant Sofia, and writes that she regards Sofia as a sister because Evangeline is Sofia’s sister. The correction and reconsideration record a shift from a formal family category to a chosen, if complicated, bond. Alexandra does not erase the distinction between Sofia and her biological daughter; she finds a way to include Sofia within the family nonetheless.

Her email also joins that declaration of kinship to practical concern. She hopes Rose Papastergiadis’s health is improving and asks after her legs, then signs her message as Sofia’s sister. Alexandra’s care extends beyond her immediate household: she acknowledges Sofia’s mother even though the two women have not been shown developing a direct relationship. For Sofia, the message offers a connection that is neither a replacement for her estranged relationship with Christos nor a simple reconciliation with his household.

Alexandra’s characterization is shaped by this double position. She is a trained economic researcher who argues for reform, yet she is also a new mother whose job has disappeared and whose family’s security seems vulnerable to Christos’s decisions. She welcomes Sofia, asks her questions, accepts her practical help, and eventually names her as a sister, while remaining part of a household in which Sofia encounters unfamiliar language and unequal access to family resources. Through Alexandra, the reunion with Christos becomes more than a return to a father: it opens the possibility of another relationship, built through small acts of attention and a deliberately extended idea of sisterhood.