Chapter 22 The Withdrawal
On Saturday morning, Lex was careful.
"I hope whatever that was yesterday went well," he said, during the morning prep, without looking up from the peppers he was slicing.
"It did," I said.
"An old colleague," he said. Not a question.
"Someone I used to work with," I said.
"I see," he said. "I'm glad it's resolved."
He went back to work. He had drawn a conclusion about yesterday. He had drawn the wrong one.
* * *
There were things I did not say.
I did not say: I came back after two weeks even though I'd told everyone I was leaving in two weeks.
(Well. Everyone who'd asked. Derek, who hadn't asked but had communicated his expectation that I'd stay through the medium of continuing to make my breakfast every morning without discussion.
Priya, who had said I knew it, when I'd told her I was extending, with the smug affection of a person who had known something before I did.)
I did not say: I named a cat after you.
I say this in brackets because it is only now, standing at the service station on a Saturday morning with the sun coming in off the water and Lex being careful fourteen feet away, that I am realising I named a cat after him.
I named the cat The Aegean Overlord.
I have been calling him The Aegean Overlord in my head since approximately week seven, which is the week things began to be not straightforwardly operational between us, and I named the cat that, and I have only just — this morning, this specific morning, at this service station — understood that I named the cat that because naming the cat was a thing I could do when I couldn't do the other thing.
The other thing being: tell him.
I had, I now saw, done approximately everything available to a person except the most direct action, which was to walk fourteen feet across the kitchen and say: I heard part of a phone call in August and I drew a conclusion and I would like to know if the conclusion was wrong.
Priya had been saying this to me, in various forms, for six weeks.
The cat's actual name was, according to Lex, Apostolos — after Kyria Panagiota's first husband, the late Mr Hollingsworth's late friend, which meant the cat had been named before I arrived and the name I had given him was a firmly unofficial title that everyone used anyway.
I had filed this under the island has layers and moved on.
I was connecting it now.
I say all this internally. In my head. In the service station.
What I said out loud was: "Table three needs menus."
He brought me the menus. He handed them across the pass-through with the efficiency of someone completing a transaction. He went back to work.
That was all.
* * *
The day was busy in the way late August Saturdays were busy, full of the last-gasp-of-summer energy that made people order more wine and linger over desserts and decide this was the year they'd try the stuffed squid.
I ran the service well. I was good at this now — I'd heard this from someone I trusted yesterday and I was trying to simply let it be true, which was harder than it should have been and easier than it would have been in June.
Lex was in the kitchen. He did not come out at the end of lunch.
He sent Giorgi.
This was — fine. Giorgi was competent. There was nothing wrong with Giorgi doing the end-of-service reset.
I was being completely reasonable about this.
The pass-through glass had not gone dark at the end of service in the way it went dark when Lex left the kitchen; Giorgi had just come through the door instead. This was normal. I was fine about this.
(I was not entirely fine about this. But I was managing.)
* * *
That afternoon, Elena called me into the office.
Kostas Xenidis's formal offer was laid out on the table again, this time alongside the supply brief I'd been developing from the account ledgers. I'd stayed up until one in the morning on Thursday to finish the first proper draft, and then Friday had happened, and I had not shown it to anyone.
Elena had the draft in front of her. She'd been through it — I could tell from the two small marks she'd made in the margin, both on the supplier rotation section, with the deliberate pencil of someone who read financial documents the old way, physically, attending.
"You showed Lex," she said.
"Not yet," I said. "I wanted to have the full draft first."
She looked at the marks in the margin. "These two suppliers," she said. "The rotation as you've drawn it would need him to change the Friday prep window."
"I know," I said. "He might have reasons against it I don't have. The brief is a starting point."
She was quiet for a moment. Outside, the harbour was doing its afternoon thing — the small fishing boat that came back mid-afternoon, the particular slant of light that meant it was around four. She looked at the Kostas offer and then at my brief and then at me.
"The brief is better than I expected," she said.
"It's incomplete," I said. "I need to check the refrigeration running costs against the current lease terms to make the electricity comparison. And I don't have the last three years of peak-season margin — if you have those, it would strengthen the counter-argument significantly."
Elena looked at me. She had the expression — the one I'd learned meant she'd already decided something — and she went to the filing cabinet.
* * *
I worked until the kitchen prep started. At six, Theria came by with a question about the table reservations for Sunday, and I answered it, and she stayed for a moment with the look of someone who has something else to say and is deciding whether to say it.
"Lex was in the kitchen early this morning," she said.
"I know," I said. "So was I."
"He was — " she paused, in her direct way, choosing. "He was in a certain mood."
"Yes," I said. "I noticed."
"He had a certain mood on Friday evening as well." She paused again. "After he finished the chairs."
I looked at my papers. "Theria."
"I'm not going to say anything specific," she said. "I just — he's been in the kitchen a lot today."
"He's always in the kitchen," I said.
"Not in the same way," said Theria.
I didn't say anything.
"The Athens offer," she said, after a moment, "is a real offer. I'm thinking about it seriously." She paused. "I wanted you to know that. Because some decisions require other decisions, and I think you should have accurate information when you're making yours."
I looked at her. "Theria."
"I am not saying anything specific," she said. "I am saying: accurate information. That's all."
She left.
I sat very still for a moment.
Theria had been on Kaliroi for three years.
She'd told me this in the second week, matter-of-factly, when I'd asked how long she'd worked at the taverna.
She'd come from Thessaloniki for one summer and then simply stayed, the way people stayed on islands when the staying made more sense than the leaving.
She ran the front of house with the particular efficiency of someone who knows the difference between what's urgent and what's important, and she did not give people information they hadn't earned.
She had not told me anything specific. She had told me something very specific using no specifics at all, and she had delivered it as accurately as anything she'd ever said to me.
I sat with the supply brief.
Afraid is not the same as sensible. I had been calling them the same thing for sixteen days.
I took the postcard out of my jacket pocket. My grandmother's handwriting. A place to be found when you're ready. I put it back.
I worked until the kitchen prep started.
I said goodnight to Theria, who was locking the outdoor chairs, and I walked home across the harbour without going to the kitchen, and I thought about what she'd said for the entire walk back.