Chapter 14 What Elena Knows #2
"He told me about the fish supplier."
"I know," he said. "He told me he'd told you."
"Was that—" I wasn't sure how to frame this. "Is it all right? That I asked him?"
He looked at me with the flat assessment. "You asked someone who knows, and they answered. Yes. That's how it works."
"I wasn't sure if — he's supposed to be resting."
"He is resting. He rested and talked to you about fish for twenty minutes. This is, for him, a gentle afternoon." He folded the cloth. "He enjoyed it. He'll talk about it for three days."
I thought about Nikos's face when I'd sat down. The particular pleasure of being asked something you know.
"Thank you," I said. "For — I don't know. The whole thing. The island being what it is."
He looked at me. "The island isn't a thing I did."
"No," I said. "I know. Thank you anyway."
He held my gaze for a moment. Then: "Good night, Margot."
"Good night," I said.
I walked home. Priya's full stop was still in my phone. My grandmother's postcard was still in my wallet, between my Oyster card and a receipt from a coffee shop in Shoreditch that I had apparently never cleared out and which now had the quality of an archaeological artifact from a previous era.
I took the postcard out and looked at it in the light of the harbour.
Elena had seen me holding it when the ferry came in. She had made me better coffee before I'd said a word.
I put it back in my wallet. Then I thought about it and put it in my jacket pocket instead, closer.
* * *
I walked slowly.
This was a new development. I had, in the first weeks on Kaliroi, walked with the purposeful efficiency of someone who was Getting Somewhere and Doing Things, because doing things was what I did, what I'd built my career on, what I'd been when Greenpath was running and the impact assessments were real and the man I lived with was who I thought he was.
Walking fast was a way of being someone who knew where she was going.
The island had, gradually and without drama, cured me of this.
You couldn't walk fast on Kaliroi's harbour promenade at ten o'clock at night without walking past things worth noticing — the way Barba-Nikos's kafeneion light fell across the old painted table out front, still and warm and the same every night; the cats arranging themselves with their evening purposefulness; the boats knocking quietly; the stars doing their unreasonable thing.
Walking fast would have meant walking past all of it, and I had started, without deciding to, to find this wasteful.
I stopped at the low wall near the dock.
My grandmother had stood somewhere on this island.
Twenty-three years ago, or thereabouts — the postcard hadn't been dated, just the familiar handwriting on the back, the message she'd sent when I was eight.
She'd been here and she'd looked at this harbour or one very like it (the island wasn't large; there was essentially one harbour, one waterfront, one dock) and she'd thought of me.
Had decided, in that moment, that this was a place worth sending someone toward.
She'd died when I was young. She didn't know about Greenpath.
She didn't know about Dominic, who I hadn't met until I was twenty-six, who I'd thought for three years was the safest bet I'd ever made, who had turned out to be — well.
She hadn't known about any of that. She'd sent me a postcard from a Greek island when I was eight, because she'd thought I should know this place existed.
I took the postcard out of my jacket pocket and looked at it in the harbour light.
The photograph on the front was faded now — twenty-three years of wallet and coat pocket and moving box and wallet again — but you could still see what it was: the harbour, the white buildings, the particular angle of the Aegean light.
It looked, in the photograph, exactly like what it looked like right now.
As though nothing had changed. As though the light had simply been waiting.
A place to be found when you're ready, she'd written.
Not: you should visit this. Not: what a lovely island.
She'd been very specific about the verb.
Found. As though she knew, or thought she knew, that I wouldn't come here as a tourist. That when I came, I'd come because I needed to arrive rather than just visit.
I hadn't understood that when I was eight. I'd kept the postcard because the photograph was beautiful and because she'd sent it and those were the two things you needed to know about why you kept something from someone you loved.
I understood it better now.
Elena had looked at me on the dock and seen someone holding something important and made me the better coffee before I'd done a thing to earn it.
Barba-Nikos had adjusted my coffee without comment.
Nikos had looked at me across the lunch table and asked careful questions.
Lex had corrected my errors in a precise, considered order, always starting with the things that mattered most, always giving me room to be learning rather than failing.
This was not how I'd been known in London. In London I'd been known by my job title and my fiancé and my opinions about sustainability frameworks. The island was knowing me differently. By what I carried in my pockets. By how I walked. By whether I asked for help.
The postcard stayed in my jacket pocket.
I went inside and lay in the dark, listening to the island being quiet, and felt something I hadn't felt since April — not certainty, nothing as declared as certainty, just the quiet absence of the particular dread that had been sitting in my chest since the dissolution letter.
I thought: I am allowed to be here.
Then: I think I might have known that for a few weeks now.
Then: This is going to complicate things considerably.
I looked at the ceiling. The crack in the corner. The familiar dark.
Good, I thought, and meant it.