Epilogue
The folder had been ridiculous.
That was my first thought when Callum slid it across the kitchen table three weeks before our anniversary, looking simultaneously proud of himself and faintly braced for commentary. It was surprisingly thick, and all the tabs coming from the pages even seemed colour-coded.
One thought popped through my brain: What the hell is this?
I stared at it.
“What is this?” I asked.
“Open it,” he said.
“That is not an answer.”
“Trust me.”
“That has historically been a dangerous sentence.”
He just nodded toward it again, calm, patient, completely unwilling to explain himself.
Giving in, I picked it up. It had weight to it, which felt almost aggressive.
Inside: flight details, hotel confirmations, a printed map of the Dalmatian coast with small handwritten annotations, a list of restaurants with a column marked Ginny will want this, and a subsection titled Island Day Trips that had been further divided by ferry schedule and travel time.
“You prepared documents… for a vacation,” I said slowly.
Callum leaned back in his chair, lacing his fingers together like a man presenting a case to a jury.
“I prefer the phrase well-researched travel packet. Plus, it is for our anniversary trip,” he said, with the particular gravity of someone reading from a legal document. “We deserve it. You deserve it.”
I looked up at him.
“You have subsections,” I said.
“The islands have different ferry schedules,” he said patiently. “It would have been irresponsible not to.”
“Callum.”
“Ginny.”
I put the folder down and looked at him for a long moment. He looked back, very calm, very pleased with himself, in the way he got when he knew he'd done something well and was waiting for me to confirm it.
“You remembered,” I said, because that was the actual thing. Croatia had come up once, years ago, half-asleep on the couch during a travel documentary I wasn't really watching. I had said, mostly to the ceiling, that I wanted to swim in water that blue someday. I hadn't thought he'd heard me.
He tapped the folder. “I have an excellent memory,” he said. “Selectively.”
“You forget where you put your keys every single morning.”
“Keys are not important,” he said. “You are.”
I stared at him. “That was almost unbearably sweet and I refuse to reward it.”
He grinned. “Too late. You're already smiling.”
He was right. I was.
· · ─ ·?· ─ · ·
The first thing I noticed about Split was the smell.
Salt and warm stone and something frying nearby, all of it hitting at once the moment we stepped out of the airport transfer and into air that had clearly never heard of moderation.
The old city sat along the waterfront like it had been there forever and intended to stay, pale stone and Roman walls and the general atmosphere of a place that had outlasted several empires and was not particularly impressed by tourists.
Callum stood beside me with both our bags on his shoulders, which I had stopped arguing about two years ago, squinting slightly in the sun with the expression of a man who was already composing his first observation about the place.
“It smells like salt and bread,” he said.
“That is the correct smell for a place to have,” I said.
“Best two smells,” he agreed. “Possibly top one, depending on the bread.”
We walked through a narrow stone gate into the old city and emerged into a square full of tourists and market stalls and, most importantly, a gelato window with a handwritten sign and a woman behind the counter who told us, before we had said a single word, that the pistachio was the finest she had ever made and that not trying it would be a mistake we would carry for years.
She said this the way someone states a geological fact.
I had the pistachio. She was absolutely right.
Callum had the lemon and ate it in silence for a moment before saying, “I think this has changed me as a person.”
“Lemon gelato changed you.”
“Fundamentally,” he said.
“You are so dramatic.”
“I'm serious. I feel different. I think I understand things now that I didn't before.”
“What things?”
He considered it. “I'll let you know when it becomes clear,” he said. “I'm still in the early stages of the transformation.”
I laughed and leaned into his side, and he put his arm around me briefly, easy and familiar, before we kept walking.
The square moved around us, old men playing cards outside a bar that looked like it had existed since the fourteenth century, children chasing pigeons, a cat crossing the cobblestones with the particular authority of someone who owned the city and was considering subletting.
“We're coming back to that gelato place every day,” I said.
“Already added to the folder,” he said.
“Of course it is.”
“Section four,” he said. “Daily non-negotiables.”
I looked at him. “You have a section called daily non-negotiables?”
“You're welcome,” he said pleasantly.
We spent the afternoon wandering with no particular agenda, which was my contribution to the trip planning and one I stood behind completely.
Callum had handled the logistics; I had handled the philosophy of not over-scheduling, which I maintained was equally important and which he maintained was just me not doing anything. Both things were true.
The old city was the kind of place that rewarded not having a plan.
We found a side street that led to a terrace overlooking the harbour and sat there with cold drinks while the afternoon stretched out.
We talked to a man named Davor who ran the bar and had opinions about everything, the tourists, the ferry schedules, the best island, the worst island, the correct way to eat peka, and the deeply incorrect decisions made by the local government regarding parking.
Callum asked him questions with genuine interest and Davor responded by bringing us something from the kitchen that wasn't on the menu and refusing to explain what was in it.
It was extraordinary.
Life was good in Split. It was hard to complain about the views, the sea, the people or the food.
Sitting here, with the city going gold around us as the light dropped and the harbour below us turning soft and copper-colored, I sat with my chin in my hand thinking that this was what five years was supposed to feel like. Not perfect. Just full of amazing things.
Callum was watching the water when I pulled out the two postcards I'd bought earlier from a stall.
“We should write these,” I said.
He looked at them. “Now?”
“Before I lose them in my bag and find them six months from now in a coat pocket.”
He accepted this as reasonable and held out his hand for a pen, which I produced from my bag along with the particular expression of someone who was very organized and knew it.
We wrote his parents' card together, or rather I wrote and he dictated and then crossed out two of my sentences and replaced them with better ones, which I allowed because they were in fact better.
The card said that Split was beautiful, that we had eaten something life-altering, that we wished they were here, that we were going to the islands tomorrow, and that we loved them.
Callum added a small drawing of what was either a boat or a very ambitious hat. I did not ask.
Thalia's card took longer.
“What do I say?” I said, staring at the small white rectangle.
“The truth,” Callum said.
“Well… The truth is that I'm so happy I keep forgetting to check my phone and she's going to take that personally.”
“That's perfect,” he said. “Write that.”
I wrote: Split is perfect, the water is absurd, I've had gelato every day, and I keep forgetting to check my phone which you will take personally but please don't. We are disgustingly happy. It's your fault for encouraging this. Love you, don't do anything chaotic while we're gone.
He leaned over to read it and laughed, low and warm, and I felt the sound more than heard it, the familiar frequency of it, the one that still made something in my chest settle in the same way it always had.
“Five years, huh,” he said, not particularly to me, just aloud.
“Five years,” I agreed.
He was quiet for a moment. Then: “I know we don't have to do the whole reflecting thing.”
“We don't,” I agreed.
“But if we were going to...”
“If we were going to,” I said.
He turned to look at me directly, the way he did when he was going to say something real and wanted me to know it was real before he said it. “I love you,” he said. “More than I did last year. More than the year before that. You are my everything. You are the love of my life, my home, my universe.”
I leaned over and kissed him once, slow and certain, the way we'd learned to do things, without rush, without the old anxiety of not knowing if it would last. He kissed me back the same way.
“I love you,” I said, when we pulled back. “Five years and counting. You're stuck.”
“Best thing that ever happened to me. I love you too,” he said, which after five years still had the power to undo me slightly.
· · ─ ·?· ─ · ·
Next on our travel journey was Hvar, which Callum had described as having clear water, good restaurants, and “the place Ginny mentioned from that documentary in 2021”.
I had, apparently, mentioned a specific island during that half-asleep conversation on the couch, which I had no memory of at all, and which meant Callum had been holding onto it for four years waiting for the right moment.
I told him this was unhinged. He said he preferred the word thorough.
The ferry crossing was an hour of open sea and good wind, and we stood at the railing for most of it because the view made sitting inside feel like a waste. Callum had his hand resting on top of mine on the rail.
The water around Hvar was exactly as blue as the documentary had promised, the wind pushing my hair back from my face.
I pointed toward the shoreline.
“Look at that,” I said.
Callum followed my hand, squinting a little in the sun.
“I am,” he said.