She studies me for an age. Then she inclines her head.
And the world shifts a hair toward peace.
After dinner, we walk along the harbor with the soft hiss of little waves licking stone.
Teenagers dangle their legs from the jetty and flirt in a language older than Greek.
Vasso buys me lemon sorbet; I share it with him mostly because I want to watch his mouth. He watches me watching and presses the empty cup to my palm with a look that says he’s aware of every secret in my face.
“You’re quiet,” he says when we’re done eating the sweet. “Are you okay? Did something happen?”
“I’m just tired.” The lie is clean and wrong. I swallow the rest. I’ll fix it. I will.
Back in the room, he climbs behind me into the small bed and tucks himself around me as if my body were a harbor and not a coastline dotted with wrecks.
I lie awake listening to the pulse of the sea through the shutters and draft a courier pickup in my head—no, on my phone, thumb hovering, then moving, then hovering again. When the screen lights my face, he stirs, murmurs something low and Greek that sounds like sleep has relaxed the little boy inside the man, and I put the phone face-down and close my eyes and choose nothing, not yet.
Morning brings coffee on the balcony.
Eleni sets two cups down and says, “Drink, Naomi,” as if testing the fit. It fits. We drink quietly and let the day peel open. My phone buzzes as I reach for the honey and dread the text that pings into the calm.
Address to send the necklace. Tick-tock. —H
All the good sky in the world can’t make a message like that look like anything but a storm. I slide the phone under my thigh and pick up my cup.
Vasso turns with a slice of watermelon for me, sees something flicker across my face, files it behind his eyes where he keeps ledgers and knives.
He doesn’t ask. Not yet.
We spend the morning doing almost nothing.
He helps his mother fix a loose shutter; I sew a loose button onto a shirt, purely to be useful. After lunch, while they read the paper and argue about football, I step into the bedroom, open the wardrobe, and take the velvet box from where I placed it under my folded shawl. It is breathtaking, the line of diamondshe clasped at my throat; the one that made me feel, stupidly, like I was both beloved and bought.
I hold it in my palm until my fingers ache.
We’re leaving today, next stop is Athens before we head for the Amalfi Coast.
I locate the courier and make arrangements with a voice that never once trembles because I’m saving something worthy.
Something…someone I lo...
I clamp my eyes shut and stifle a moan as a truth I’m not wiling to face, or rediscover, whistles like a steam engine through me.
Temporary. Temporary. Temporary.
Remember that.
A year from now, you’ll be back living with Grandpa and Vasso Dillinger having run you off his driveway the way you did to him ten years ago.
When I return to the balcony, his mother glances up once, then back down at her crossword. She says, without looking at me, “The sea returns what does not belong to it.”
“I know,” I whisper.
“Do you?” she asks, still writing, and the kindness in it is a small, lethal thing.
That evening the island turns its lamps on one by one, gold coins falling into the dark. The courier message pings—collected.I feel the click in my bones, as if a safe has been shut on a secret that will either save us or blow our house apart.
We eat octopus and drink ouzo in the loud and rowdy little restaurant by the harbor.
