Chapter 19 - Zara
Greece is beautiful like nothing else I’ve ever seen before.
The Aegean is a gorgeous blue, the coastline composed of white stone and olive and sunbaked terracotta.
Even with how extraordinary it is, I am not looking at it, my attention stolen by the photographs in my hand.
The twelve prints in front of me have the clearest background detail, the strongest environmental indicators, the most reliable information of wherever my parents have been detained.
I have laid them across the small table in the room I booked in a coastal town on Naxos because the light angle in the photographs, along with the stone in the background, pointed here before anywhere else.
Since four in the morning, my notebook and these pictures are all I’ve stared at. The cup of coffee at my elbow has gone cold.
Gathering all this information alone took me six hours on the plane.
The stone is volcanic in nature—the texture in the high-resolution prints, the darker inclusions running through the lighter matrix horizontally says so.
The window placement in the images my mother appears near is south-facing, the light belonging to that of a Mediterranean winter sun even in the warmer-month photographs—meaning the hideout is somewhere near the coast.
What little vegetation is visible at the edges of the frames is a particular flowering shrub somewhere over the Atlantic whose identification took me forty minutes. This means the location must be the Cyclades.
Naxos. South-facing coast. Volcanic stone. Isolated.
The sun isn’t even up before my first step out of the hideout.
The coastal road south of the town is quiet in the early morning, the road running along the cliff edge with the sea appearing and disappearing in the gaps.
I drive the rental car with the photographs on the passenger seat, my eyes darting between the road and the landscape like my life depends on it.
Which it kind of does.
It’s half past seven when I finally see a house that sits back from the coastal path behind a low stone wall and an overgrowth of the same flowering shrub from the photographs.
My car jolts to a stop with how hard I press down on the brakes. The roofline, the color of the stone, the way it stands relative to the water. A current zaps through my chest nauseatingly, like something that’s been falling for a very long time and has just encountered solid ground.
My body is frozen for two minutes before I push it to move, which is the longest two minutes I have spent recently.
My fingers curl around the photographs before I slam the door shut behind me, making my way toward the building through the coastal path rather than the road.
The road would make me visible from the front of the property, which is not something I can risk, not until I’m sure.
Slithering along the perimeter of the wall, the photographs complain mutely as my fists tighten around them.
The stone is right. The roofline is the right height. I rub the leaf of the shrub between my finger and thumb—also right.
This is it. Just one thing left.
I am so close to letting myself believe it that I have already written the next sentence of my own story in my head—pushing through the gate in this wall, walking up to the door of this house and finally—
A stone appears in my throat.
No. It can’t be.
The window in the photograph is set twelve, perhaps fifteen inches higher on the wall than the window in front of me. When I bring the photograph up against the south-facing wall and align the window position with the image, the angles do not match.
I lower the photograph.
Raise it again.
No, no, no.
The stone texture, from a closer look, reveals different stripes than what I had recognized them to be. The wall I am standing beside has a large stain in mortar line near the base that is present in none of the images.
It is not the same place.
Standing at the wall of the wrong house on the wrong stretch of Naxos coastline with the photographs in my hand, my legs tremble as all the pressure inside of my chest whooshes out. A bird lands on the wall three feet from me, head cocking as it looks at me.
Then it cocks it head away, pretending I don’t exist.
And maybe it’s right.
Maybe I don’t.
Who can really say that I am a woman standing outside a stranger’s house in Greece at half past seven in the morning holding photographs of her lost parents—work she spent sixteen hours on, work she has been building toward for three months that has brought her to the wrong wall?
No one is here to receive me, after all.
A sob builds in my chest, dry and painful.
I walked away from Mikhail for this.
I got on a plane, alone, for this.
My legs finally give up on me down the stone of the coastal path, my back sliding down the wrong wall. The photographs spread across my knees in the morning light of the Aegean, an ache spreading all over my body.
Breathing through it is all I can do. The water, reflects the sun back at me, cruelly shining light on everything that has fallen apart.
I don’t remember how I get to my feet and walk back, but by eight o’clock, I am back in the rental car with the photographs on the passenger seat. My phone’s screen shows me the schedule of all the flights back to New York.
There is nothing in Greece for me. I am done chasing after ghosts and buildings that don’t exist.
I close the search and stare at the dashboard.
Something at the peripheral edge of the coastal road, a movement of kind alerts me.
I go still.
A feeling curdles at the base of my spine, the same as the one that arrived on the streets of Dubai before those men materialized from doorways.
There are two of them.
The first is at the far end of the coastal road, standing at the juncture where the path meets a wider street.
His back is partially turned but I know his eyes in his skull are focused on his peripheral vision doing the actual work.
He does not move at all, standing in the same position for the full four minutes I have been sitting in this car.
The second is closer, on the coastal path itself, doing considerably better at assimilating. He’s walking, except his stride is too relaxed, and he has covered the same fifty-meter stretch twice in the time I’ve been watching him.
You can’t say they are together. The distance between them is too strategic for proximity and too coordinated for coincidence.
I’m under watch.
The package in the warehouse, the modulated voice, the coordinates pointing me here—maybe it was all a ploy to get me somewhere without letting me know the true cause.
My fingers hesitate around the ignition. I don’t start the car.
It’s the most obvious possible response and the coastal road offers me exactly one direction of escape. I won’t even be fifteen meters from either of the men, which means that whoever positioned them already knew that.
The morning market is three hundred meters back toward the town center; I passed the cluster of canopied stalls stationed along a widened section of the harbor road when I drove past. It’s the kind of small, local market that exists in coastal towns for the residents instead of tourists, occupied by the women who come early for the produce.
I slip out of the car carefully and slowly, acting like I am searching for something I misplaced.
Taking my jacket off the back seat and my bag from the passenger seat, I leave the photographs inside and out of sight. I walk casually toward the market like I belong here.
The man on the coastal path halts and changes direction.
I do not look at him.
The smell of fresh tomatoes, briny olives in large containers, and something sweet being fried somewhere at the far end of the stalls permeates the air.
Three women of roughly similar age stand near the vegetable display, their baskets at their elbows, attention moving between the produce and each other.
I step towards the older one, with a deep blue headscarf, basket containing enough for a household. Her eyes, when I approach, are open and kind. Trusting.
She’s safe.
“Excuse me,” I say softly, switching to slow, careful English with my phone held out showing a translation. “I’m sorry to ask—could I borrow your scarf? Just for a few minutes. I’ll pay you for it, please.”
I hold up the amount in euros that I had in my jacket pocket, which is probably more than the scarf cost. I look at her beseechingly, a woman asking another woman for help.
She looks at my face, down to the money in my hand. Then her eyes refocus on something in the distance, no doubt looking at the two men who must have followed me into the market, pretending to examine fruit so badly that an old woman can tell.
Her hand covers mine as she takes the money, unwinding her scarf to hand it to me.
I quickly wrap it around my head and shoulders the way I have seen women here do, hiding my brown waves messily.
I buy tomatoes I do not need from the stall directly in front of me, accepting the paper bag from the vendor naturally. I tuck it under my arm, turning to disappear into the interior of the market where the canopies overlap.
My pulse is an unpleasant beat in my throat until I come out the other side on a different street.
The morning market sits between two harbor roads and exits onto the eastern one through a gap between stalls not visible from the coastal path. I move along the harbor wall at a natural pace.
Only then do I raise my thumb up to hail a taxi; I’m finally at the harbor, with my bag and my borrowed blue scarf.
“To the airport, please,” I type into my phone, translating it into Greek to show the it to the driver. He nods, and off we go.
Until the plane lifts from Naxos airport, I don’t relax. It’s only when the seatbelt icon has lost its coloring do I press my back into the seat, closing my eyes to let the last twelve hours wash over me.
Wrong location. Tracked. This means it was a possible misdirection from the beginning.
The scarf is still around my shoulders as Greece becomes a receding coastline below the ascending plane. Why does it still feel like the walls around me have been moving while I thought I stood still?
I have been running out of safe places since Dubai.
It’s a sobering realization.
It’s been more than just the Irish syndicate pressing from the outside, not just the warnings in the messages, but the far more alarming possibility that the information I have been following has not been leading me toward my parents at all.
It has been leading me somewhere else entirely, doing the walk of terror for someone else.
The Aegean disappears beneath the cloud cover. I pull my notebook from my bag and open it to the next clean page, scribbling slower than I’m thinking, but faster than my hand wants to go.
Whatever comes next cannot be the same thing that lands me stranded outside the wrong stone wall in the morning light of an island.
I may not be broken yet.