Chapter 21 The Octopus, Again
He came on a Friday.
This was, probably, the worst possible day, in that it was peak service — Friday lunch ran until three, table turnover high, kitchen at full capacity — but it was also, I'd found, the day I was most myself in this job, the day where eleven weeks had compounded into something reliable.
I'd told myself this mattered. I'd told myself I was ready for whatever came off the ferry.
Dominic had, apparently, also told himself he was ready for Kaliroi.
He looked slightly surprised by it. Kaliroi had a way of surprising people who arrived expecting Greek-island-holidays and found something quieter and more specific, and I watched his face do the same small recalibration I'd seen on almost every tourist who came off the ferry in June and had to readjust from the Santorini they'd been imagining to the actual island, with its non-Instagram-filtered whitewash and its genuine fishing boats and its total indifference to their expectations.
I knew he saw me because I saw him see me. He was at the harbour end of the street and I was at the terrace gate doing the lunch-service setup, and there was a moment — a very clean, very specific moment — where we both registered the other and had to decide what to do next.
What I did was: I went back inside and told Theria there would be a solo diner she should seat at table eleven. Theria, who had a gift for understanding the operational significance of which table someone was seated at, seated him at table eleven.
* * *
He ordered the octopus.
I would have given quite a lot for him to have ordered something else.
The octopus had been my first great catastrophe at Taverna Stavros — the bucket, the cat, the contained British scream — and it had become, in the kitchen vocabulary, a kind of shorthand for the period before I knew what I was doing.
Lex had retrieved the octopus. Lex had explained post-mortem nerve activity with the air of someone who found this information useful and therefore worth conveying.
The octopus, for me, existed in a specific web of associations that was precisely the wrong web to be navigating while taking an order from my ex-fiancé.
I wrote it down. I wrote it down cleanly, on the correct layer of the carbon copy pad, in the handwriting I'd had to train into legibility for service, and I said "About twenty minutes" and I went to the pass-through and I gave the ticket to Giorgi and I said "Table eleven, octopus."
Lex was at the counter behind Giorgi.
He looked at me. I looked at him.
"Table eleven wants the octopus," I said.
"All right," he said.
That was all.
He took the ticket and he went to work, and I turned around and went back to service, and I ran the rest of Friday lunch in the way I'd learned to run it — present, specific, useful — around the existence of Dominic Harker at table eleven ordering the thing that had, indirectly, introduced me to the island cat.
* * *
He tried to talk to me twice.
The first time was when I brought the bread, which was unavoidable.
He said "Margot" in the way that meant I have things prepared, and I said "I'll be back with water in a moment" and I was, and the water required a specific conversation about whether the sparkling was from the island supply or shipped from Athens, which took long enough that the kitchen had his starter ready and I could make a graceful exit.
The second time was when I cleared the main. He said "Margot, I just want — " and at that precise moment table three needed menus, which was the most useful thing table three had ever done for me, and I was already moving.
This is the thing about running a good service: there is always something that needs doing. You are never, in a busy lunch, without an urgent elsewhere. I had, over eleven weeks, become a person who was very good at elsewhere.
* * *
At two-thirty, the service wound down.
Lex came out for the reset. He came out from the kitchen end, through the terrace door, and he stopped.
He was carrying a cloth — he always carried the cloth, folded at his apron — and he looked at the outdoor section and then at the interior, where Dominic was still sitting at table eleven, his coffee mostly finished, with the specific patience of a man who has decided to wait.
Lex looked at me.
I looked at him.
He said, quietly, so only I could hear it: "You have someone waiting."
"I know," I said.
He absorbed this. He looked at Dominic with the expression I'd learned was his assessment face — complete, fast, settling into a conclusion without showing the working.
Then he looked at me again, and whatever the conclusion was, it lived in the fraction of a second before he said: "I'll finish the chairs. "
I looked at him. He said this in exactly the tone he used for practical things — the steady, no-extra-meaning register he used when he was managing the service.
Except that his assessment face hadn't fully cleared, and the word thank you was sitting in my mouth for a reason that had nothing to do with chairs.
"Thank you," I said.
He went to the terrace. I went inside, and I did not look back, because I was being sensible, and also because if I looked back I would lose approximately four minutes of the twenty-two I was about to spend, and I didn't have them to spare.
* * *
I talked to Dominic for twenty-two minutes.
I know it was twenty-two minutes because I was acutely aware of time, the way you were when you were in a situation that needed to be over and you couldn't make it be over any faster than it was going to be.
He had come, as his message had promised, to explain.
The explanation was thorough. It was also — and this I noted clinically, the way you noted things that had lost the power to hurt in the expected way — primarily about him.
About the pressure of building a company, about the gradual nature of the adjustments, about the fact that he'd always intended to correct course and then the independent review had moved faster than he'd anticipated.
He used the word misjudged four times and the word sorry twice, in that order, which said something.
He did not say I should not have done it.
He said I handled it badly, which is a different thing.
He said: "I always thought you knew more than you were letting on. You're so perceptive — "
"I didn't know," I said.
"I know that now," he said. "I thought — "
"I didn't know," I said again. This was the cleanest sentence in the conversation. "You adjusted the reports after I'd seen the data. I signed off on what I was given. I didn't know."
He was quiet for a moment.
This was a thing I had been carrying since April — the part about not checking.
Not the fraud: that was Dominic's, start to finish, and I'd known this rationally since the investigator's report.
But the part where I hadn't checked, where I'd trusted without verifying, where I'd assumed the data was clean because the person handing it to me had always handed me clean data before — that part was mine, and I'd been sitting with it.
Sitting with it, I had come to understand over eleven weeks, was different from having it define me.
"I know that now," he said again. More subdued.
"Thank you for coming," I said. "I mean that — I think. I don't need you to, but I think it was the right thing to do and so thank you." I picked up my order pad. "I have to get back to service."
He looked around the taverna. He looked at me, standing at the table with my order pad and my apron and eleven weeks of Kaliroi visible in whatever my face was doing.
He looked like someone encountering a version of a familiar person that didn't match his stored files and wasn't sure how to update them.
"You seem — " he started.
"Yes," I said. "I am."
I walked him to the door. I said goodbye with the handshake-adjacent warmth of someone who has decided to be dignified about something and is finding it easier than expected. He left.
I watched him walk toward the harbour. I watched him take the street that led to the dock. The evening ferry left at six.
I went back inside. I sat down at table eleven, which was empty, in the particular quiet of a closed Friday afternoon when the kitchen is doing its end-of-day work and the light is coming in long and amber through the harbour-side windows.
Lex did not come back.
I sat for a long time. Not thinking, specifically. The kind of not-thinking that is something else — a body registering something it hasn't been told to process yet, sitting with a weight that hasn't been named.
The light moved. The kitchen sounds continued behind the pass-through. He was still there. He just wasn't coming out.
The octopus order had been excellent, according to table eleven's cleared plate. I noted this with something that was, obscurely, satisfaction.
* * *
I had thought, going into this, that seeing Dominic would clarify the phone call.
That having him here, physically, in the same island, would tip the balance of the insufficient data column in one direction or the other — would either confirm that I was right to be cautious or prove to me that I'd been overcorrecting, that the patterns I kept seeing were just patterns I was projecting.
What I found, sitting alone at table eleven while the kitchen ran its closing sounds, was that the phone call had nothing to do with Dominic.
He'd arrived and said his version of things and eaten Lex's octopus (the octopus being, I was aware, a choice that felt like the universe had opinions) and left.
He hadn't made me doubt myself. He'd made me remember exactly why I'd left, and there was nothing clarifying about that because I'd already known.
The phone call wasn't his.
The pattern I kept running — the two-day cooling, the insufficient data column, the catastrophizing that looked, from the outside, like caution — that was mine.
The specific way that being badly wrong once had rewritten my calibration so that my first response to anything I didn't fully understand was to construct the worst possible version of it and then wait to be proved wrong.
I had been a sustainability consultant for seven years. I knew what you called it when the error had been there before the incident that revealed it.
Pre-existing condition.
Not Dominic's fault. Just mine.
The kitchen sounds behind me were the closing sounds — the particular sequence of them, which I now knew by pattern if not by name.
A clatter of something metal. The hiss of the cleaning spray.
The soft thud of the walk-in closing. Then Giorgi's voice, very brief, saying something in Greek, and Lex's voice answering, equally brief.
I thought: he's still there.
I thought: that is not a useful thing to think.
I had spent eleven weeks in the insufficient data column, exercising what I'd characterised as appropriate caution, and this was what I'd discovered on the other side of it: the caution was not about the data.
The caution was about the calibration error.
And the calibration error could not be corrected by waiting.
It could only be corrected by noticing it, which I had now done, and deciding what to do next, which I had not.
What I wanted to do next was — not relevant to this moment.
What was relevant to this moment was: I was sitting at table eleven in a closed Friday afternoon taverna, and I'd sorted out Dominic, and the pre-existing condition was named now, and the kitchen sounds had gone quiet.
I picked up my pad. I straightened my apron. I was a person with a functioning calibration instrument who had just recalibrated it.
This was progress. I was choosing to call it progress.
I got up from table eleven.
I walked to the kitchen door — the one that pushed open, with the handle, the one he came through when he brought the chairs out. Not the pass-through window. The actual door.
I pushed it.
The kitchen was empty. End-of-service clean: counter wiped, pots stacked, walk-in door pulled shut. The recycling card in its place by the prep station. Giorgi must have gone. Lex must have taken the back gate.
I stood in the doorway for a moment.
The octopus pot was clean and upside down on the rack.
I looked at it for longer than made sense.
I had been a person with a functioning calibration instrument who had just had exactly the right moment to use it.
I was not going to call it a missed moment — I was going to call it a next moment, because the alternative was not bearable — but I stood in the doorway for four seconds and felt the particular weight of a kitchen when no one who mattered was in it.
Four seconds. Then I went to find Theria.