It wasn’t until she reached the first taverna that Skye saw another person, and while the elderly woman sweeping the terrace returned her smile, she made no attempt to speak. There were further signs of life outside a small bakery, and she stopped for a moment to inhale the scent of fresh bread. A vast bougainvillea was draped in splendor over the wall, a shower of papery pink petals below it.
Skye shook her head. It was as if she had walked into the pages of a travel brochure, only this was not a two-week vacation, it was her life, the scene in front of her not a picture postcard but her home. She knew it was nothing more complex than luck that had brought her to the island, but it felt more profound than that, more as if someone, or something, had intervened to make sure that it happened.
The road led her onward, past acres of sparse grassland and dust-coated parked cars, until eventually, perched on the very edge of a bend with the sea spread wide far below it, she found the mini-market.
“Kaliméra,” called a voice as she pushed open the door. Skye glanced up to see a slight dark-haired man clutching a basket of figs. For a moment, she was thrown, unsure what to say. The man put the tray on the top of a chest fridge and came toward her.
“You are on holidays?” he asked, and Skye shook her head.
“I’ve just moved into one of the houses at the top of the hill.”
“Ah.” He beamed at her. “The lottery houses.”
“You heard about that?”
“Everybody in Ano Meria heard about that,” he confirmed, beckoning to her. “Come, come. What do you need? I don’t have many English foods, but here there is tea bags. And you will need some milk, perhaps bread also.”
He took a plastic red basket from a stack beside the till and passed it to her.
“Are you Klodi?” she asked, and his smile grew even wider. “I met Andreas,” she went on, and he nodded.
“Andreas is a great man—the best. He has not stopped working on the houses. For many months now, he is there every day, making things ready.”
“He didn’t tell me that,” she said. “I assumed that…well, I don’t know what I assumed. Did the houses need that much work?”
Klodi looked at her as if she’d said something funny.
“Of course,” he exclaimed. “Nobody except the goats had lived in them since the end of the war. Everything had to be done, there had to be power and water”—he ticked each off by tapping his hand—“and there is still a lot of things to finish.”
Skye pictured her cracked floorboards and broken shutters, themound of rubble in her garden, and the holes in her walls and agreed that there were. Klodi ushered her toward a display of fresh fruits and vegetables, pointing out the best grapes, the plumpest peppers, and the shiniest tomatoes.
“We grow a lot of these things ourselves,” he told her with obvious pride, “and we have a lime tree in our garden, the fruits from which are the sweetest in all of Greece. Ah,” he went on as a diminutive woman in a pale yellow dress and apron emerged through an open doorway at the rear of the shop, “and here is my wife, Cora.”
Skye smiled a greeting as the woman came toward them, murmuring a “Kaliméra,” which she followed with a timid “Hello.”
“Geiá sou,” Klodi said to Skye. “ ‘Geiá sou’ is how we say hello in Greek.”
Skye did her best to repeat the words, feeling at once embarrassed to be so inept and encouraged by the Greek couple’s earnest expressions.
“You are living here?” Cora said, making the leap more rapidly than her husband had. “In one of the old houses? Very good.Polý kala. They have been empty for too long, ever since I was a girl.”
“Did you both grow up on the island?” Skye asked, helping herself to several eggplants. Klodi shook his head.
“I was born in Thessaloniki, but I came here, to Folegandros, one summer with my family. We went for swimming one day at the beach in Livadaki. I have seen Cora there, and”—he smiled warmly—“I was a lost man from that moment. I knew that she was the one for me.”
“Just like that?” Skye said, looking at each of them in turn.
Cora glanced at her husband.
“It was the same for me,” she said, pressing a hand to her chest. “I felt it inside. And you?”
“Me?” Skye feigned a laugh.
“You are married?”
“No,” she said, readjusting her grip on the handle of the basket. “Not married.”
Cora and Klodi exchanged a look.
