Chapter 26 What She Wants
The thing about deciding to stay somewhere, I found, is that it is both the most enormous decision you have ever made and also, from the inside, completely unremarkable.
You make the decision and then you go and do the Friday lunch service and the decision just sits there, being a fact, not requiring anything further from you.
I had expected it to feel significant. Instead it felt like taking off a coat you'd been wearing inside a warm room for so long you'd stopped noticing how hot you were.
I would like, I told Lex between tables three and four, to continue to be in this kitchen on this island for the foreseeable future.
He was carrying a tray of glasses at the time.
"The taverna can accommodate this," he said.
"Are you offering me a permanent position?"
"I'm noting that you have been running front-of-house for six weeks without any formal arrangement."
"I dropped an octopus in week three."
"Everyone drops an octopus once."
"That is a very specific claim," I said. "Have you conducted a survey?"
"It is a working assumption," he said, and went to deliver the glasses.
I stood for a moment, between tables three and four, on a Friday in late August on a small Greek island, with the sea visible through the open side of the dining room and the smell of lamb and lemon and the particular warm-salt quality of this particular air, and thought: yes.
That is what I want. That is the answer to the question I've been not asking for eleven weeks.
Theria passed with a bread basket.
"I heard none of that," she said. "I'm delighted for everyone."
"You're insufferable," I said.
"I know," she said, and went to table five, and I could see her trying not to smile and failing entirely.
* * *
The lunch service was, by any measure, a good one.
Every table full. Two reservations that had come in overnight — a family from Athens who'd found us through something someone had posted (Theria said: a food blogger, someone with a following, she hadn't caught the name) and an older couple from Piraeus who said they'd been coming for years, and there was a quality to the way they came in and settled and looked around that told you they were checking whether it was still itself.
Whether the thing they'd loved about it was still there.
It was. It clearly was. They ordered the lamb without looking at the menu and settled into their table with the ease of people returning to somewhere that remembers them.
Father Konstantinos stopped in at half one and had the lamb and told me, in Greek with some English assistance from Theria, that I had much improved since the wine incident, and that his housekeeper had been very interested to hear there was an English girl running the front-of-house at Stavros, and had asked whether I was married, which was apparently relevant to something Father Konstantinos had not explained.
I thanked him for the information. He looked pleased.
(Translation: he has opinions about who should be married to whom and this is his way of letting me know he has opinions. I chose not to examine this further.)
After service I sat in the back courtyard with a glass of water and my phone open.
I had been putting this off for eight months.
There was a whistleblower mechanism — there had always been a whistleblower mechanism, I had known about the whistleblower mechanism when I was sitting in that partner meeting being told this was a misread.
I had not used it then because I'd believed them.
I had not used it in the months after because I was — I turned the phone over once and looked at the courtyard wall, which was the warm yellow of old stucco in late-afternoon sun — I was waiting until I was somewhere I could look at it clearly.
Somewhere that wasn't the specific city where a thing had happened to me and where the thing still had weight. Where it was still loud.
Here, it was quiet.
I filled in the form. Reference number, dates, names, the nature of the discrepancy, the documentation I'd preserved (I'd saved everything, because I am, professionally speaking, constitutionally incapable of not saving everything, which was either a flaw or a virtue depending on which part of this story you were looking at).
I had the postcard on the wall of my room at the Blue Door by then — I'd framed it yesterday morning, before service, using the small frame I'd bought from Maria's shop two weeks earlier and had been intending to use for something for the rest of the summer.
My grandmother's handwriting behind glass. The harbour in faded colour.
I submitted the form.
The reference number arrived in my email approximately forty-five seconds later, which is not long enough to feel significant but is, it turns out, long enough to feel something.
I sat with it for a moment. The courtyard wall.
The light. The faint sound of the harbour — boats, water, the ambient noise of a place going about its afternoon.
I had spent eight months waiting until I was in a place where I could look at the Greenpath thing clearly, and I had found the place, and I had looked at it clearly, and it turned out that the looking was not as difficult as I'd feared.
The thing had lost some of its loudness.
It had not gone away — these things don't go away — but it had become something I could see the shape of from a comfortable distance, rather than something I was standing inside.
I put my phone face-down on the table. Then I picked it up and looked at the reference number again, because that's the sort of thing you do when something is finished and you need to confirm to yourself that it's actually finished. Then I put it away.
I had told Lex before I did it. After service, briefly, standing at the kitchen door while he was finishing the accounts.
He'd said: "Good." And then, after a pause: "You should have been able to do that from the start.
" And I'd said: "I wasn't ready from the start.
" And he'd said: "No. You had to arrive first."
I had thought, at the time, that he was talking about the island.
Sitting in the courtyard with the reference number in my email and the late-August light doing the thing it does — that golden, slanted, entirely unreasonable beauty of it — I was fairly certain he'd been talking about more than that.
* * *
Elena found me there at half four.
She sat down across from me with two small cups of the good coffee, placed on the table with the same deliberate quality she brings to everything, and she said: "The supply brief."
I looked at her.
She produced it from somewhere — the brief I'd compiled over the past three weeks, the expanded version, the one that had started as a napkin and become a nine-page document with supplier contacts and seasonal pricing and three alternative routes for the fresh fish delivery that would save approximately two hundred euros a month and also remove the dependency on a single supplier who had twice, in the past six months, been delayed by weather conditions Lex had described as "not exceptional. " She put it on the table between us.
There was a line at the bottom of the last page that hadn't been there when I'd last seen it. A single line, handwritten, in Greek.
"Lex?" I said.
"Me," Elena said.
I looked at the line. "I don't—"
"He will translate," she said, with the expression she gets when she has decided something and is simply waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.
"Kostas came yesterday. While you were off.
He has made a new offer — more money, investors behind him this time, a proper consortium.
" She looked at me with the level expression I have been decoding for eleven weeks. "We declined."
"You declined."
"The brief showed we could." She tapped the document once, the same way she taps the carbon copy pad when she's recording something she considers settled.
"We can demonstrate the taverna is financially strong enough to say no.
That is what it showed. We showed it to him, in front of his investors.
" She picked up her coffee. "He was not pleased. "
"No," I said. "I imagine not."
"He will not ask again," Elena said, with the certainty of a woman who has known Kostas since he was a child and has calculated him completely. "The island knows how to wait."
I looked at the line of Greek at the bottom of the brief.
"What does it say?" I asked. "The line."
Elena looked at me with the expression she has worn, I now realised, since the ferry — since she saw the postcard, since she made Theria the better coffee, since she watched me figure out the herb names in the prep kitchen and decline to point out that I was deciphering them from the wrong wall.
"Ask him," she said. "He will like to tell you."
* * *
I asked him on the walk back to the Blue Door that evening.
He was going the same direction — his flat was on the upper lane, past the church — and it had started to happen naturally, the walking the same direction, the same way that several other things had started to happen naturally over the past eleven weeks without either of us having formally agreed to them.
I showed him the line.
He looked at it. Then he said: "She knows what the island is for."
I looked at the brief.
"Word for word," he said. "That is what it says."
I was quiet for a moment.
"She said that about me?"
"Before you started. When you showed her the napkin, she went into the kitchen and said to me: she knows what the island is for." He glanced at me sideways, in the way he glances at things he finds slightly amusing and isn't going to announce. "I didn't know what she meant at the time."
"Do you now?"
He considered this with his usual unhurried care.
"The island is for people who know what a place can be when it is still itself," he said.
"When it is not trying to become something that will photograph well for people passing through.
Most people who come here in the summer are looking for a version of a Greek island. You were looking for the island."
"I had a postcard," I said.
"Yes. But you recognised what the postcard was showing."
I thought about this.
"Elena knew that," I said. "From the ferry."
"Elena knows most things," he said. "It is very annoying."
"Is it annoying?" I said. "Or is it useful?"
"Both," he said. "Equally."
"She knew about Priya and Michalis too," I said. "Before Priya did."
He glanced at me. "Michalis."
"She mentioned coming back. For fact-checking. Very much unrelated to Michalis."
"Michalis," he said again, in the tone of someone filing something away.
"It's nothing," I said.
"Yes," he said, with the expression that means: it is something and we both know it is something and we are going to allow Priya to discover it herself because that is the correct approach.
"She's going to be furious when she works it out," I said.
"Probably."
"She's going to blame me."
"Also probably."
"I'm very much looking forward to it," I said.
He made the sound again. I had now confirmed, in multiple contexts, that it was laughter.
I was keeping a private record of the occasions on which it occurred.
The record was, objectively, longer than I'd expected from a man who had spent the first six weeks of our acquaintance communicating primarily through precisely timed silences and laminated cards.
We reached the Blue Door gate. He stopped.
"The supply brief," he said.
"I know. I'll send you the updated version tomorrow."
"The Kostas projections were — accurate," he said, which was as close as he was likely to get to that was excellent work without a direct provocation, and I had learned to translate accordingly.
"Thank you," I said.
A small pause. The lane behind us, the harbour lights below, the particular September evening doing its particular September thing.
"Good night, Margot," he said.
"Good night," I said.
He walked up the lane toward the church. I stood at the gate for a moment, watching the harbour lights, and thought: yes. All of this. Exactly this.
That evening I texted Priya from my terrace: I'm staying.
She replied within thirty seconds: Obviously.
Then three dots. Then: The ferry thing was—
I know, I typed.
Three more dots. Then: I might need to come back. For fact-checking. The Priya-in-Chios feature might require a follow-up visit. Regional. Very much not about Michalis.
Obviously, I typed.
I meant: obviously. I meant: I will be here when you come back. I meant: this is what it is when a word becomes a fact rather than a reflex. When obviously stops being a thing you say because you haven't decided anything else and becomes a thing you say because you have.
The sea was doing the evening thing. The lights were coming on in the kafeneion and in the houses up the hill and in the taverna, which I could see from my terrace.
I sat there for a while, with my good coffee and the framed postcard visible through my open door, and thought: yes. This. Exactly this.
I had a missed call from my mother. I texted her back: all fine, will ring Sunday.
She sent three question marks and then a photo of the roses in her garden, which is her way of saying she knows more than I'm telling her and she is choosing to be patient about it.
My mother is very good at patient. She had kept a postcard for thirty-four years.
The lights in the taverna went off at half ten, which I knew because I watched for it.
I noted this, and then noted that I had noted it, and then decided that the noting was fine and entirely reasonable and not at all the kind of thing a person who has been paying close attention for eleven weeks would do, which it was.