Chapter 3 #2
"And don't assume that not being readable means not feeling anything." She looks at the water again. "Some people are very still precisely because the feeling is very large. The stillness is the management, not the absence."
This lands somewhere I don't have a category for yet.
"Don't show your hand until you know what game you're playing," Arielle adds. "But watch for his tells. Everyone has them. The stillest people often have the most legible ones if you know what you're looking for."
"And don't lose yourself in it," Emilia says, quietly. "Whatever he asks you to be — remember what you actually are."
I think about a swallow tattoo in an Ubud parlour in the rain.
For freedom.
"I won't," I say.
Later, when the sun is going down, I walk the cliff path to the private beach alone.
My security detail stays at the top — two men who have followed me across eleven countries and have learned, in that time, to read the difference between alone-and-safe and alone-and-afraid. I'm the former. They give me the beach.
The water at the edge of Santorini at dusk is a specific shade of blue that I have not encountered anywhere else in a year of chasing water. Not deep, not bright — something in between, the blue of a thing that has been the same color for a very long time and is not performing it.
I wade in to my ankles.
The cold bites and then settles into acceptable, the way cold always does if you give it time.
Above me the sky is going violet at the edges, the last of the gold pulling back from the horizon, and it occurs to me that I have been watching skies for a year — every sky, in every city, the specific color of light at the hour I happened to be paying attention — and that I've been trying to store them.
That I've been building a private archive of things nobody can take.
The swallow is below my ribs.
The sky is above me.
Three weeks, and then I deliver myself to a gate.
I think about Luca.
He called this morning, before the pool, before the women and the wine and the planned conversation.
He called and I picked up in the first ring and he said Sofia the way he says my name when he's not performing anything — the older brother register, the one from childhood, the one I don't hear often enough.
We talked for nineteen minutes. Luca told me about Arielle's parents, about a dinner coming up, about the lemon tree in the Hamptons garden that he's been trying to convince Grace to let him dig out for two years and Grace keeps refusing.
He told me nothing and everything at the same time — the ordinary fabric of a life that is continuing to exist normally while mine does something else entirely.
He didn't mention what's coming. I didn't either.
At the end of the call he said: you'll be fine. Not cheerfully — not the performative optimism of someone who doesn't believe it. Quietly. The specific way people say things they mean because there's nothing else to say.
I know, I told him.
Standing in the water now I think: I don't know. But I'm going to make it true.
The thing I couldn't say on the call was the thing I've been trying to find language for since the night Dante came to my room: that I'm going to lose easy access to all of them.
Not permanently — the contract doesn't specify isolation — but proximity is its own kind of presence and distance is its own kind of loss.
I won't be in the same city. I won't hear about the lemon tree in real time.
I won't be reachable in the ordinary way, the casual way, the way that assumes you can find each other without organizing a visit.
I miss him already and I haven't left yet.
I note this. I file it where I keep the other things that are real and can't be fixed — next to the rose beds, next to the gap year arithmetic, next to the pen in the drawer that Dante left behind. Real. Filed. Kept but not looked at too often.
I think about Arielle's word: architecture. I think about Grace's: information. I think about Emilia's: remember what you actually are.
I know what I am. I'm Sofia Conti, youngest child, the hidden one, the one they kept out of the commission registers and the family photographs and the rooms where the real decisions were made.
I'm the one they protected — in the specific, suffocating, ultimately useless way of men who protect the people they love by controlling everything around them and then discover the controlling was the problem.
I'm also the one who spent a year filling the circumference of that protection with herself: languages, maps, routes, plans. The one who signed the contract with one hand and drafted an addendum with the other.
I'm still assembling the vocabulary for what I've decided. I don't have the sentence yet. But I have the principle.
I stand in the shallows with the Santorini blue going to grey around my feet.
Freedom was only ever borrowed, I think.
And then, for the first time, I push back against that:
Or maybe freedom isn't a state. Maybe it's what you build inside whatever state you're in.
The cold reaches my shins. The first star appears, low over the water, in the precise direction of wherever I'm going next.
I watch it for a while.
Then I turn back up the path.
Three weeks.
Let's go.