One More Summer (The Aegean Escapes #1)

Chapter 1 The Postcard

Ihad been carrying the island in my wallet for six years — since I found it in a box of my grandmother's things, the winter I was twenty-five, and moved it there without quite deciding to keep it.

Not metaphorically — though yes, also metaphorically — but physically, tucked behind my Oyster card and a loyalty stamp thing from a coffee shop that had since closed.

A postcard. Slightly dog-eared at one corner where I'd handled it too much in my early twenties, back when I was the kind of person who took things out and looked at them.

A photograph of a whitewashed harbour at golden hour, bougainvillea running riot over a low wall, the sea doing that thing the Aegean apparently does where it looks less like water and more like someone has emptied a tin of blue paint and called it a geographical feature.

On the back, in my grandmother's handwriting: A place to be found when you're ready. Love, Gran.

She'd sent it when I was eight. Posted it from an island I couldn't pronounce. By the time I was old enough to wonder, she wasn't there to ask.

I had been meaning to look it up for six years.

Or rather: I had looked it up, in the frantic half-hour at Heathrow after my flight was delayed and I'd stood at a newsagent's rack hyperventilating quietly, Googling Kaliroi island Greece ferry on my phone with my one good bag and my one rubbish bag (more on that in a moment), and I had found a timetable that was partly in Greek and partly aspirational, and I had thought: fine. Fine. I'm going.

Which was how I ended up on the afternoon ferry from Chios with the wrong bag.

On the crossing, at some point between Chios and a smudge on the horizon that was either Kaliroi or a very optimistic cloud, I'd taken the postcard out of my jacket pocket and held it.

Not consciously. Or not consciously-consciously.

I was standing at the rail looking at the island appear, and I'd had the postcard in my hand without quite deciding to, the way you sometimes find yourself holding something that matters before you've worked out that you needed it.

I'd put it away before we docked. Or I'd thought I had.

* * *

Not my wrong bag, to be clear. My bag was correct — the small navy wheeled thing I'd packed in the seventy-two hours between "Greenpath Advisory is dissolved effective immediately" and "Dominic, I need you to leave.

" My bag had my summer dresses and my good sandals and my grandmother's postcard and all the evidence that I was, if not entirely fine, at least extremely intentional about what I was doing.

The bag I was currently wrestling off the ferry's overhead rack was not my bag.

It was a bag. Superficially similar. Same navy-ish shade, same approximate dimensions, same brand of hope that a wheeled case would make the overhead rack tractable.

But it wasn't mine, a fact I realised approximately fifteen seconds after the ferry nudged the dock at Kaliroi, when the zip that I'd always had to sort of jiggle-and-yank opened on my first attempt, and I thought: that's odd. And then I looked inside.

There were icons. A lot of icons. Small painted saints arranged in what seemed to be careful order, each wrapped in cloth, nestled against what appeared to be preserved lemons in sealed jars and a tin labelled, I would later have someone translate for me, Elena — for the wedding.

I stood on the dock with this tin in my hand and the afternoon light hitting the water so hard I had to squint, and I thought: right. This is fine. I can work with this.

(I could not immediately work with this. But I was in the stage of my life where I was projecting competence at all times, even at bag mix-ups, because competence was the only personality trait I still trusted myself to have.)

* * *

The ferry dock at Kaliroi turned out to consist of: one concrete quay, one ancient crane doing nothing in particular, the smell of diesel and something frying in olive oil, and a man called Derek who had apparently come to meet me.

I hadn't asked anyone to meet me. I hadn't actually told anyone I was coming.

I had told my best friend Priya, via voice note, that I was "taking a break," which she'd decoded correctly as "leaving the country before I do something I can't undo," and she'd said "send me the ferry schedule and I'll make sure someone knows where you are.

" I had assumed she meant a human person.

I had not assumed she meant a ruddy, cheerful man in a linen shirt who materialised at my elbow saying, "Margot?

I'm Derek. Priya rang. Don't worry, the island's very small — nothing bad can happen to you here that everyone won't know about immediately, which is either reassuring or terrifying depending. "

"Both," I said. "Definitely both."

He looked at the tin in my hand. "That's not your bag."

"No."

"Shall we sort that out, then?" He said it with such unconcerned practicality, like bag mix-ups were simply a feature of arriving on Kaliroi, not a sign that I was catastrophically bad at the simplest tasks. I found this immensely comforting.

"Please," I said.

He took the bag from me and glanced around the dock.

"Stavros," he called — at what, I had no idea, because I couldn't see anyone — and then a slow, considered figure unfolded from a bench I'd entirely failed to notice, because I'd been too busy processing the bougainvillea and the icons and the existential implications of being on an island I'd only visited via a postcard.

The figure on the bench was a very old man with a white moustache and a shirt that had seen better decades and an expression of absolute, armoured serenity. He was doing, as far as I could tell, nothing at all. Just sitting there, being present on the dock, like a geological feature.

"Konstantinos," Derek said, in the tone of someone correcting a navigation error. "Not this one."

The old man — Barba-Nikos, Derek would tell me later; he ran the kafeneion; don't expect him to acknowledge you for at least a week — looked at me with the specific thoroughness of a person who has assessed everyone who has ever come off that ferry and found most of them wanting.

He didn't say anything. He looked at the tin.

Then he looked away.

"Right," Derek said cheerfully. "He'll be fine.

Now, the man you actually need is probably already at the taverna — his granddaughter's wedding is next Thursday — so if we move fairly smartly, we can swap the bags before anyone has to involve a lost-and-found.

" He picked up my correct bag — which had materialised from the ferry's hold with a label that said K.

STAVROS, KALIROI, and a phone number, and which weighed significantly more than mine and was therefore definitely not mine — and set off across the dock with the confidence of a man who owned the geography.

I followed him.

The island smelled of thyme and sea and that frying thing, whatever it was.

The bougainvillea was, if anything, more aggressively pink than in the postcard.

There was a small white church on the headland with a bell that swung slightly in the breeze without quite making sound, and a row of blue-painted chairs in front of a taverna with string lights that weren't lit yet because it was only four o'clock, and approximately three cats on various walls, judging everything.

I looked back at the ferry, still rocking gently at the dock. Michalis — that was the captain, Derek had mentioned him, ran the ferry, very reliable — was doing something nautical and ignoring all of us.

I had not booked a return ticket. I kept telling myself this was a logistical oversight.

It was not a logistical oversight.

It was not the welcome she'd imagined from the postcard, I thought — and I don't know why I thought it in the third person, something about arriving on a Greek island slightly frantic with a bag full of religious icons will do that — but then, she'd had the island in her wallet for six years, and it had been doing fine without being imagined.

I put my hand in my pocket. The postcard was there.

I took a breath.

* * *

The man whose bag I'd accidentally stolen was called Konstantinos Stavros — Derek clarified this as we climbed a short slope toward The Blue Door, which was either a B&B or Derek's house with aspirations, and was in fact both.

"No relation to the taverna Stavros," Derek said. "Different family entirely. Common enough name. Konstantinos is Elena's husband's brother's — actually, I'll write you a chart. The island's all cousins and in-laws and one family that everyone's somehow related to. You'll need the chart."

"Is Barba-Nikos on the chart?"

"Barba-Nikos is adjacent to the chart. He predates most of the charts. He was here before the ferry schedule." Derek said this with great affection. "He'll give you coffee eventually. When he decides he likes you."

"How does he decide?"

"No one's entirely sure. He just does, one morning, and after that you're in. Apostolos — my late husband — he waited eleven weeks. I waited four. He was insufferably smug about it."

He said this lightly, and I liked him immediately for it — the insufferably smug instead of I miss him terribly, even though both things were obviously true.

We found Konstantinos Stavros at the taverna, as Derek had predicted, sitting at an outdoor table with a small woman introduced to me as his wife, Kyria Panagiota, who looked at me with the warm equanimity of a person who has heard worse news than "a British woman accidentally stole your saints.

" The tin and the icons were received without drama.

My actual bag was returned. Kyria Panagiota pressed one of the jars of preserved lemons into my hands anyway, because apparently this was what happened when you accidentally stole someone's religious icons on Kaliroi: you received fruit as compensation.

"Elena made them," Kyria Panagiota said, nodding toward the taverna interior.

I looked. Through a doorway propped open to the afternoon, I could see what I assumed was the kitchen: a steel counter, the edge of something on a stovetop, and a man's forearms doing something swift and deliberate with a knife.

Not enough of him visible to form any impression at all, except: competent. And possibly: don't interrupt.

I didn't interrupt.

* * *

Derek walked me up to The Blue Door, showed me to a room with a white-painted ceiling and a window that opened onto rooftops and a sliver of harbour, and left me with the jar of preserved lemons and the gentle suggestion that the taverna did the best dinner on the island and also the only dinner on the island, so.

I sat on the bed.

I was in Greece. On a non-famous, perfectly real island. With a jar of lemons and no return ticket and my grandmother's postcard in my pocket.

The bougainvillea outside the window was, I had to admit, extraordinary.

I didn't cry. I'd done most of the crying on the Heathrow Express, very quietly, which is the appropriate venue for that kind of crying.

The Heathrow Express is designed for private distress — the seats are mostly forward-facing, everyone is looking at their phones, there's a particular social contract in operation that means you can be having a quietly terrible time and no one will say anything, which I appreciate enormously as an approach to human suffering.

I sat there for a while with the postcard in my hand, thinking about Gran, who had apparently been here, and had thought it was somewhere I should find, and had been right, in the way that grandmothers sometimes are right about things they couldn't possibly have known they'd be right about.

My grandmother had been a person who collected places the way other people collected things.

Postcards, stamps, the small residue of where she'd been.

She'd never talked about this island. I'd found the postcard in my wallet six years ago and it was only now — sitting in a room with a white ceiling and a window full of rooftops and someone else's bougainvillea — that I realised she might have sent it ahead on purpose.

Not to the child I was when I was eight, but to whoever I'd become by the time I needed it.

(This is the kind of thing I'm not supposed to think. I'm a data person. I work in systems. But some things don't fit into systems and I've learned to put them in a different category, labelled possibly true in ways I can't quantify, and leave them there.)

I took a photo of the view and sent it to Priya. No caption. Just the picture.

She sent back: oh. And then: stay.

I hadn't said I was thinking of leaving. But she knew me. That was the problem and also the point.

There are people in your life who know what you need before you've worked it out yourself — who see the shape of the problem when you're still standing inside it.

Priya was mine. She'd been mine since we were twenty and she'd announced, with the total confidence of someone who'd done a thorough assessment, that I was overthinking the article and should just pick an angle and start.

She hadn't been wrong. She'd continued to not be wrong approximately every eighteen months since then, at regular intervals, on matters including: Oliver, the promotion I'd nearly not applied for, the holiday I'd cancelled in favour of a client presentation, and, most recently, April.

Priya had said, in April: go to the island. Your gran wanted you to.

I had said I needed to deal with everything first.

She had said: you can deal with it from the island. You know that.

I had known that. I was currently knowing it, sitting on a ferry in the Aegean with my bag and my notebook and the postcard.

Fine, I thought. Two weeks. I was giving myself two weeks.

I put the postcard back in my wallet, behind the Oyster card and the stamp card and the years I'd already not done this.

Then I went to find dinner.