Chapter 25 Before Service
Iframed the postcard before I left.
I'd bought a small frame at Maria's shop two weeks earlier — it had been sitting on my windowsill in the Blue Door ever since, in its paper bag, because I wasn't ready and I didn't have a particularly clear framework for what I was waiting to be ready for.
Friday morning at six-fifteen, I was apparently ready.
I took the postcard out of my jacket pocket and put it in the frame.
My grandmother's handwriting behind glass.
The harbour in faded colour. A place to be found when you're ready.
I left the frame on the windowsill. Then I put my jacket on and went to find Lex.
I was in the kitchen at half seven.
This was earlier than I needed to be. Service didn't start until noon on Fridays.
Prep didn't begin until nine. Half seven was not a time at which anyone needed to be in the Stavros kitchen except Lex, who was always there first and who I had been tracking, without examining the tracking, for eleven weeks, and who I knew arrived at half seven on service days and not later.
(I had not examined this knowledge. I was examining it now, walking down through the village in the early light, and the examination was not comfortable. I had memorised his schedule the way you memorise something you keep telling yourself you're not paying attention to.)
I had rehearsed this on the walk down.
I was going to say: I heard you on the phone in the corridor three weeks ago and I drew a conclusion and the conclusion was wrong and I need to tell you why I drew it, because the why is the part that explains the last sixteen days and the last sixteen days need explaining.
I had rehearsed this approximately forty-seven times between leaving the Blue Door and reaching the taverna gate.
By the forty-seventh rehearsal it had become very calm and sequential and sensible, the kind of rehearsal you do before a difficult meeting when you want to sound professional and not like you've been lying awake worrying about it for over two weeks.
(Spoiler: I had been lying awake worrying about it for over two weeks.
I am an excellent liar. To myself, primarily.)
Lex was at the prep counter doing something to a large quantity of tomatoes. He looked up when I came in.
"You're early," he said.
"Yes," I said.
All forty-seven rehearsals left my head entirely, in the way rehearsals always do when the actual moment arrives and turns out to be slightly different from every version of itself you've planned.
(In the rehearsals, I'd been calm. Standing here, I was doing something with my hands that I can only describe as fidgeting with the conviction of someone trying very hard not to fidget.)
He waited. He does this — the particular quality of attention he gives things, the same attention he gives the produce in the morning and the accounts in the evening and, I had begun to notice, me: full, quiet, unhurried.
He waited, and he didn't fill the space, and the space filled up with everything I needed to say.
"I heard you on the phone," I said. "Three weeks ago. In the corridor. I heard my name and I heard problem and I heard not staying and I drew a conclusion."
He was still. The tomatoes stopped.
"I drew the wrong conclusion," I said. "Priya told me last night what the actual conversation was.
I know you were talking to Theria about the Athens job.
I know what not staying meant and it wasn't me.
" I looked at him. "But I want to tell you why I drew the conclusion I drew, because I've been behaving as though something was confirmed that wasn't confirmed, and you deserve to know what the calculation was. "
I told him about Dominic.
Not the summary I'd given people at the time, or the careful version I'd offered in reference conversations, or the one where I said it wasn't a good fit in the end and people accepted that because it was easier.
The actual version. The evidence I'd seen.
The reports that didn't match. The numbers filed with the regulator that didn't correspond to the numbers in the internal system.
The conversation I'd had with the partners, carefully, with documentation, and the response I'd received — this is a misread, Margot, this is you not understanding the full picture — and the particular experience of being told that with such complete authority that I'd believed it.
For nine months. Until someone else found the same thing and the regulator asked different questions and the conversation moved very quickly into territory that meant everyone needed to go away quietly.
"I trusted my own judgment completely," I said, "and I was wrong.
Or I was told I was wrong with enough certainty that it came to the same thing.
And so when I heard your voice and the words and felt certain about what they meant—" I paused.
"I didn't trust the certainty. I've been not trusting the certainty for eleven weeks, in various directions, and three weeks ago I ran the Dominic calculation when I should have just asked you. "
The kitchen was very quiet. Outside, the first cicadas had started, which meant it was already warmer than I'd thought.
A fishing boat moved across the far edge of the harbour view.
Somewhere behind the taverna, a cat — not the Aegean Overlord, a different cat, one without his level of entitlement — knocked something over and departed with the complete moral confidence of an animal that has never apologised for anything.
I was aware that I had just told him something I hadn't told most people in its true form.
Not even my family, who had received the version you give family: careful, with the sharpest edges filed down, presented in the manner of someone who is fine and would prefer not to discuss how fine they are.
Lex had received the actual version. Standing in this kitchen, with tomatoes and the smell of herbs and the early morning light coming in low across the stone, I had given him the actual version, and I could feel the lightness of it — the lightness of something you don't notice you've been carrying until you've put it down.
He hadn't said anything yet. He was still. Not the uncomfortable still of someone who doesn't know what to say, but the considered still of someone who is deciding how to say what needs to be said, because what needs to be said matters.
"I'm sorry," I said. "For the last sixteen days. You looked like you were going to say something at the pass-through, after Theria told you about the umbrella, and I should have given you the space to say it instead of making myself very busy with the menu boards."
He looked at me for a long moment. (He does this. He looks at things properly, with the same attention he gives the prep, the accounts, the morning produce. It is unnerving in a way that I have learned to stand still inside.)
Then he said: "I'll tell you why I came back."
I hadn't expected that.
"I had an offer in Thessaloniki," he said.
"A good position. A restaurant that was doing serious work — the kind of work I trained for, the kind that gets written about.
" He said this without any particular pride or regret, as a fact, the way he says most things.
"I turned it down. I came back here before my father's episode — before I knew there was going to be an episode.
I came back because—" He picked up a tomato, turned it over once, set it down.
"I could make excellent food in Thessaloniki.
I would go home after every shift and I would think: what I made tonight will not exist in ten years.
The restaurant will change, the menu will change, the people who ate there will not remember the specific dish.
And I would think: the island is different.
What I make here is part of something that will exist in ten years because it is part of a place.
It matters in a different way." He looked at me.
"That is why I came back. Not the episode.
Not the obligation. I had decided before any of that. "
I looked at him. He said this plainly, without drama or apology, the way he says everything — and it was, I realised, the most devastating thing he could have done, because it meant that what I'd read in him for eleven weeks — the steadiness, the commitment, the settledness of someone who has chosen something deliberately and is at peace with the choice — was exactly what I thought it was.
I hadn't misread him. I'd just spent three weeks persuading myself I had.
"Oh," I said. (Very articulate. Very poised. The forty-seven rehearsals really paid off.)
"The phone call," he said. "I was not talking about you."
"I know."
"You are—" He stopped. Recalibrated. The tomato was still there.
He'd forgotten about the tomato. "You made the front-of-house stable.
You found the supplier problem. You rewrote the system in the first three weeks in ways I'd been intending to address for a year.
" A pause. "You are not a problem. The opposite of a problem. "
"You said that to Theria."
"I say it to you now."
I was aware, in the way you become aware of things in the exact moment before they happen, that we were standing very close to each other.
That there had been a prep counter between us and now there wasn't, because I'd moved, or he had, or we both had — it was genuinely unclear from the inside — and then he was looking at me at the distance at which you look at someone when something is about to be decided.
I had the postcard in my jacket pocket. I'd carried it there since yesterday afternoon and it was warm from being close.