Chapter 2 Taverna Stavros, 1215pm
The taverna opened at noon.
I know this because I arrived at eleven fifty-five, which I would like to attribute to coincidence, except I'd been awake since seven, had already walked past the harbour twice and the kafeneion once (Barba-Nikos was there; he looked through me with the profound disinterest of a man who has made his feelings about tourists very clear without speaking), had eaten the excellent bread Derek left outside my door, and had spent approximately forty minutes sitting at my window deciding whether I wanted to go to the taverna or whether the taverna wanted to be gone to, which is the kind of internal debate that means you're going to the taverna.
Derek was at his kitchen table eating honey from a jar and reading something on his phone when I came downstairs.
"Taverna for lunch?" he said, without looking up.
"I'm just going for a walk."
"The taverna's the best walk," he said agreeably.
"Elena opens the chairs around noon. You might want to hang about outside until she does, but don't hover — she finds hovering rude.
" He flipped his phone over. "Also the bag business — Konstantinos Stavros, Elena's husband's brother, we'll sort it later, the island's small and everyone already knows. "
I filed this away with the island chart I still hadn't received and went for my walk.
* * *
Elena Stavros opened the chairs at noon exactly.
I watched her do it from across the square, or rather I watched her instruct a young woman — Theria, I'd later learn, Lex's cousin, twenty-six and in the middle of a very severe fringe — to do it, while Elena herself stood in the taverna doorway with a coffee and the expression of a woman who has managed people for fifty years and found the experience broadly confirming of her prior views.
She noticed me immediately.
(She noticed everything immediately. I came to understand this about Elena — she processed arrivals the way a lighthouse processes ships. Automatically, continuously, with total accuracy and no particular effort.)
She didn't say anything. She just looked at me, assessed me with the speed of someone who has been assessing people for seventy-two years, and then gave a very small nod that I interpreted, correctly as it turned out, as you can come in.
I went in.
* * *
It was a proper taverna. Not the tourist-facing kind with laminated menus in six languages and photographs of everything — this had handwritten chalkboards and blue-painted chairs and tablecloths that were white but not aggressively white, and that particular smell of old olive oil and salt air and something oregano-adjacent that I associated with being eight years old and on a package holiday in Rhodes with my parents and finding, for the first time, that food could taste like somewhere.
I sat at a table near the open front and tried to look like a person who was just having lunch and not conducting a one-woman feasibility study on whether she could, in fact, stay.
Elena appeared at my elbow.
"Coffee," she said. It wasn't a question.
"Please. Yes. Thank you. Greek coffee, is that — do you have — sorry." I was doing the thing where I talk more when I'm nervous. I squared my shoulders. "Yes. Coffee, please."
She looked at me with an expression I couldn't immediately read — not unfriendly, but measuring — and then she went away and came back with a coffee that was objectively better than anything I'd had since a particularly memorable espresso in Rome in 2019.
I didn't say this. I just drank it and felt something in my chest unknot, very slightly.
I ordered the catch of the day and some bread and something with aubergine because I couldn't read the rest of the chalkboard.
The young woman — Theria — brought the bread.
She had the air of someone doing this under protest, though not toward me specifically; more toward the general concept of waiting tables when there were presumably better things to be doing.
I was eating the aubergine thing, which was extraordinary, when I first saw him properly.
* * *
I'd seen his forearms the previous evening.
That was the limit of my information. Now I saw the rest of him — and the rest of him was: tall, dark-haired, with the look of a man who had somewhere more important to be and had temporarily agreed to exist in this particular kitchen instead.
He came out through the pass-through at the back and stood for a moment looking at something on a phone, frowning at it with the calm of a person who finds frowning clarifying rather than stressful.
His hands were very good. (I wasn't cataloguing his hands.
I was simply noting that from a craft perspective, as someone who used to present sustainability impact reports, a person's hands tell you a lot about how they engage with the world, and his were clearly hands that — this was absolutely a professional observation and not anything else — did precise work.
Fine. I was cataloguing his hands. I'm sorry.)
He put the phone away and looked up. His eyes met mine for exactly half a second before he looked away toward a table of four who'd come in while I was thinking about hands.
I looked back at my aubergine.
I was thirty-one years old. My company had just collapsed. My fiancé — former fiancé — had turned out to be cooking the impact reports I'd been presenting. I had come to a Greek island with a jar of preserved lemons and a postcard. I was not in any position to be thinking about anyone's hands.
I ordered more bread. This was the mature response to the situation.
* * *
The thing that happened next is slightly embarrassing, which tells you it was inevitable.
Elena had come back to take away my plate — she'd asked if I wanted more, I'd said I was fine, she'd given me a look that said she'd heard I'm fine at least forty times and had yet to find it convincing — when she paused by my table and said something toward the kitchen in Greek.
And then the man I'd been very professionally not thinking about appeared at my elbow.
He was, up close, significantly more present than I'd anticipated. Not in a looming way. Just — there. Taking up space with a certain quiet assurance, like he'd always planned to be standing there and the geometry of the room had adjusted accordingly.
"You want work," he said.
I looked at him. "Sorry?"
"You've been here since noon. You've eaten slowly. You're looking at the island the way people look when they're thinking about staying." He said all of this with no particular emphasis, as if he were reading a weather report. "Elena says she'll talk to you tomorrow. Nine o'clock."
I hadn't said any of this to Elena. I hadn't said it to anyone. I'd been sitting here thinking it very quietly to myself.
"I was just having lunch," I said.
"Yes," he said. He looked at me with a flatness that was not unkind but was entirely unconvinced. "Nine o'clock."
He went back to the kitchen.
I sat very still.
Elena appeared from nowhere — or rather, from the exact spot she'd been standing the whole time, watching this exchange with the serenity of a woman who had arranged it — and set a small dish in front of me. Fava. Yellow split-pea spread, glossy with olive oil, a sprinkle of capers.
"I didn't order this," I said.
"No," she agreed, and walked away.
I tried the fava. It was, obviously, perfect.
Across the room, through the pass-through, I caught the man — I still didn't know his name — handing something to Theria, already back to working, the brief appearance at my table apparently filed somewhere under errand completed.
I looked at my fava.
Elena was watching her with something that might have been approval, I thought, and then immediately stopped thinking in the third person because it was a bad habit I needed to break.
She was watching me. I wasn't entirely sure whether to be comforted or alarmed by this.
I'd been wrong about approval before. I needed to be more careful.
I finished the fava. It was really exceptional fava.
I sat for another moment with my empty aubergine plate and the remainder of my coffee and thought about the phrase you want work delivered with that particular absence of inflection.
Not a question. An observation. I'd been in enough rooms with consultants and analysts to know the difference between someone who noticed things and someone who performed noticing, and this had been — brief and without ceremony — the real thing.
My grandmother had had a phrase for people like that. She'd called them accurate. Not smart, not sharp — accurate. He sees what's there, she'd say. Not what he wants to be there. What's there.
I filed this away and left a proper tip.
I went back to The Blue Door and told Derek about the nine o'clock.
"Ah," he said, with entirely too much satisfaction for a man who'd supposedly only been asked to tell me where to get dinner. "Good. Very good."
"Did you engineer this?"
"I told Elena you were staying for a bit and might be useful," he said, which was not the same as no. "She'll sort you out. Lex will teach you the kitchen rhythm — he's the chef, that's Elena's grandson — and you'll be fine."
"Lex," I said.
"Alexios. He goes by Lex to the family. Don't use it until he lets you." Derek said this with the authority of someone who had learned this lesson personally. "He's not unfriendly. He's just — he processes information before he talks. Most people mistake it for unfriendly."
I thought about the fifteen seconds of that exchange. The certainty of you want work. The absolute absence of preamble.
"He told Elena I was interested in a job before I'd said a word to either of them," I said.
Derek smiled into his tea. "Yes. He does that. Very observant man."
I stared at the ceiling of my room for a while after that.
Elena was watching her with something that might have been approval, my brain supplied again, unhelpfully. She'd been wrong about approval before. She needed to be more careful.
Nine o'clock.
* * *
Fine. Nine o'clock was fine.
I was not, I told myself firmly, making decisions based on the quality of the fava.
That would be absurd. I was making decisions based on a rational assessment of my circumstances, which were: no current employment, no immediate plan, a return flight that could in theory be pushed back, and an offer of work from a man who had noticed I needed it before I'd had to say so.
The fava being exceptional was entirely incidental.
I took out my phone and looked at the last email from the Greenpath administrator, which said as of May 14 you are no longer an active employee and which I had read forty-three times since receiving it, in the same compulsive way you poked a bruise.
I closed the email.
The bougainvillea outside my window was still extraordinary.
I'd been noticing the bougainvillea a lot since I'd arrived, which my mother would say was me doing the thing I did in crisis, which was to find a small manageable beautiful thing and anchor to it.
She called it Margot's lighthouse technique.
I called it paying attention to what's in front of me.
We had agreed, at various junctures in my life, that these were the same thing said differently.
The bougainvillea was a very specific shade of pink — not performative pink, not Instagram pink, but the pink of something that had been that colour for decades and had no particular investment in whether anyone noticed.
It was the colour of a place that was accustomed to being beautiful without having to announce it.
I took out my notebook — the small one, A6, black, which I'd carried for eight years as a kind of external data-processing unit — and wrote: Nine o'clock. Taverna Stavros.
Then, below it: He noticed I wanted work before I'd said a word.
I looked at this for a moment.
I did not underline it. Underlining implied it was significant. It was merely accurate, and I was writing it down because I had a system for accurate observations. The system did not require the thing to be significant. It simply required it to be true.
I closed the notebook.
I had been keeping this notebook since I was twenty-three — since my first consulting job, when my then-manager had said you notice things, but you lose them.
Write them down while they're still there.
I had written things down while they were still there ever since.
Seven years of client assessments, site visits, supply chain observations, things overheard in corridors that turned out to matter.
Things people told me about their own systems that they hadn't yet told themselves.
The notebook now had: He noticed I wanted work before I'd said a word.
I did not know yet what to do with this. The system said: write it down. The system didn't say what came next. The what-comes-next was usually the part I had to work out myself.
I was going to go to the taverna at nine o'clock tomorrow and I was going to see if this was the beginning of something rather than just the end of something else, and I was going to do it without making any more decisions based on the quality of the fava.
(The fava had been genuinely excellent, though. Just to note that. For the record.)