Chapter 24 The Postcard
Priya arrived on the Thursday ferry looking exactly like someone who hadn't slept, had filed a feature from three different locations in two days, and had eaten something suspicious on the Chios waterfront that she was refusing to acknowledge.
"Don't," she said, before I could say anything. "I've had a week."
"You've been gone forty-eight hours."
"I contain multitudes."
She had a new tote bag from a shop in Chios that said something in Greek that she said meant welcome and the shopkeeper had looked at for a slightly too long moment before accepting her money.
She'd bought it anyway. She had, she said, a journalist's relationship with embarrassment: she recorded it and moved on.
We walked up from the harbour to the Blue Door. Barba-Nikos was on his bench. He looked at Priya.
"He acknowledged me," Priya said, delighted, when we were past. "He looked directly at me."
"He does that. It means nothing."
"It means I've been here before. I'm a return visitor. I'm a regular."
"You are categorically not a regular."
"I'm going to be a regular," Priya said with the confidence of someone who has decided something and will simply make it true through force of personality, which is, I've observed, how Priya does most things.
(She's been my best friend for eleven years.
In that time, she has: got herself a column in a magazine she'd been rejected from four times, adopted two cats she was allegedly only fostering, and convinced a property developer to repurpose a listed building by writing about it so persuasively that the planning board reversed their decision.
She does not accept that things are how they are.
It's extremely useful in a best friend and occasionally exhausting in a person you share problems with.)
* * *
We sat on my terrace with the good coffee — Elena had sent some with me after my shift, as she occasionally did now without either of us commenting on it — and Priya put her feet up on the railing and looked at the sea.
She was quiet for a moment, which with Priya usually means she is making a decision about something.
She had her journalist face on: attentive, receptive, not yet filing anything.
"Right," she said. "Tell me."
"Where would you like to start?"
"The beginning. No, actually — the bit that's been keeping you up at night. Start there. We can do chronology later."
(This is one of the things I love most about Priya. She goes straight to the point. She does not require you to build up to the thing slowly and in the correct order. She knows that the thing is the thing, and everything else is context, and you can do context after.)
I told her.
I told her about the phone call — Lex's voice in the back garden of the taverna, my name and problem and not staying, the inference I'd drawn, the certainty I'd felt.
I told her about Dominic, the actual full version, not the edited one: the evidence I'd seen, the way I'd documented it, the way I'd brought it to the partners and been told it was a misread and then watched as nine months later it turned out to not have been a misread, except by then I'd already signed the references and accepted the generous settlement and agreed to be grateful that no one was treating this as a formal departure.
I told her about the particular quality of that experience — the way it had recalibrated my confidence in my own conclusions.
The way it had trained me to distrust the moments when something felt certain, because the certainty at Greenpath had been so complete and so consequential and so wrong.
Priya was very still through all of this, which is unusual for Priya. Priya is professionally still when she is deciding something. (The rest of the time she talks with her hands, films things on her phone for her newsletter, and eats at a rate that would alarm a sports dietitian.)
"And then," I said, "I heard Lex on the phone, and it felt certain.
And I know that I can't trust that feeling.
I've known for eleven weeks that I can't trust that feeling.
But I ran the Dominic calculation anyway because apparently that is a thing my brain does now, and I—" I stopped.
"I pulled back. And I've been sitting with it for sixteen days and not asking because asking felt like I was risking something, and the thing I've learned about risking things since Greenpath is that the cost of being wrong is very high. "
"Margot," Priya said.
"Yes."
"Do you know what he was actually saying on that phone call?"
I looked at her. "No. I didn't ask."
Priya set down her coffee. She had the expression she gets when she has information that she's been holding and is now deciding it's time.
(I know this expression very well. It is the same expression she had when she told me that my ex-flatmate had been subletting my room to a retired quantity surveyor while I was on a work trip, and the same expression she had when she told me that the Greenpath story had finally made the FT.
She produces information the way a good editor produces a headline: when it will have the most effect.)
"Theria told me," she said. "Last week, before I left. I should have told you immediately and I didn't, and I'm telling you now."
"What was he saying?"
"He was talking to Theria. About the Athens job offer."
I was quiet.
"She'd had a second conversation with the hotel group by then — the proper one, with numbers.
She'd called him to talk through whether she should take it.
And she was saying—" Priya looked at me.
"She was saying she didn't know if she could leave, because she'd be leaving the taverna short-staffed.
That she didn't know if it would be manageable with things as they were.
And Lex said—" A pause. "He said it was manageable now.
That the front-of-house situation had stabilised. "
I said nothing.
"You're not a problem," Priya said. "He was telling Theria that you had made it not a problem. That was the conversation."
The afternoon light was doing something to the sea. I watched it.
"You heard your name," Priya said. "And problem. And not staying."
"And ran the Dominic calculation."
"Yes."
"He was talking about Theria."
"Yes."
"I know that now." I was quiet for a moment. "I knew it when you texted me about the meltemi. I'd already worked out the shape of it. But knowing the shape isn't the same as knowing."
"No," Priya said. "It isn't."
* * *
She stayed very quiet while I told her the rest of it. The waterfront in the rain. The umbrella apology. Theria passing it along. Lex at the pass-through, looking like he was going to say something and then not saying it. The headland this morning.
When I'd finished, she said: "You've been here eleven weeks."
"Yes."
"And you haven't booked a return ticket."
"No."
"Margot." She said it in a particular way, the way she says my name when she thinks I'm being deliberately obtuse about something obvious. "What do you think that means?"
I reached into my jacket pocket. I'd put the postcard there this morning, on the headland — moved it from my wallet, which I'd been meaning to do for six years and never had. It was warm from being in my pocket all day.
I put it on the table between us.
Priya looked at it. My grandmother's handwriting on one side, the Kaliroi harbour — this harbour, this specific view — on the other. The postmark was thirty-four years old.
"My grandmother sent this to my mother," I said.
"She came here on holiday, the summer before my mother met my father.
She sent this postcard. My mother kept it.
She gave it to me when I was eight because I'd asked about where Nana had gone — Nana had died the year before, and I was eight and I didn't understand very well where people went when they died, and my mother said, well, she went to beautiful places and here's one of them, and she kept it with some of Nana's other things.
" I paused. "I found it six years ago, in a box of those things, and I moved it to my wallet and I didn't really think about why.
I thought it was just — a thing I had. And then I got Priya'd into coming somewhere for the summer and I picked this island and I didn't think about why I picked this island until I was already on the ferry. "
Priya was looking at the postcard with an expression I couldn't read.
"You knew," she said. "You knew before you arrived."
"That's embarrassing."
"It's the opposite of embarrassing." She turned the postcard over carefully. My grandmother's voice in faded ink: A place to be found when you're ready. Priya looked at it for a long moment. "What did she say on the ferry? Elena."
I looked at her. "What do you mean?"
"She texted me from Chios," Priya said. "Theria.
On the Wednesday." She said it simply, as though I'd asked.
I hadn't asked. "Theria told me this too.
" Priya put the postcard down. "She said — when Elena saw you on the ferry, she recognised the postcard.
She'd seen it when you were getting your bag down from the rack.
And she asked Theria, after you'd arrived and started work: is she staying?
And Theria said I don't know. And Elena said—" Priya met my eyes.
"She said: she's already staying. She just needs to write it down somewhere she can find it. "
I looked at the postcard.
My grandmother's handwriting. The harbour, visible from my terrace, the exact angle of the view reproduced in faded colour on a card that had been in my wallet for six years and on Kaliroi for thirty-four.
A place to be found when you're ready.
I picked the postcard up. Put it back in my jacket pocket, closer than my wallet. Then took it out again. Turned it over once. Put it back. (I was doing the postcard equivalent of checking whether I'd locked the front door. I don't know what I thought was going to happen to it.)