The string lights come on just as Odette Corrie decides she is absolutely, categorically, not going to enjoy this wedding.
She stands at the edge of the village square in Santorini, the whitewashed walls of the taverna glowing amber behind her, the Aegean somewhere below in the dark making that low, patient sound it makes. Paper lanterns sway above the cobblestones. Someone has strung jasmine along the archway where Cousin Petra and her new husband are still greeting guests, and the scent of it drifts over in warm, insistent waves. It is, objectively, beautiful. Odette crosses her arms anyway.
She had not planned to come. She had told her mother three times — once in January, once in April, once in a very clear text message sent from the departure lounge of Heathrow — that she and Delroy were no longer together, that attending a wedding as a “casual pair” was a form of emotional self-harm she had specifically sworn off, and that surely Petra would understand. Petra had not understood. Petra had sent a voice note that lasted four minutes and forty seconds, deployed the phrase “you’re basically family” twice, and ended with the information that Delroy had already confirmed he was coming. As if that settled it. As if that were a reason to go rather than a reason to flee in the opposite direction.
And yet here she is. Here is the square, and here are the lanterns, and there — there, across the cobblestones, talking to Petra’s uncle Stavros with an expression of polite, concentrated attention — is Delroy Forde.
He looks the same. That is the first, unwelcome thought. Tall, unhurried, dressed in a white linen shirt that has already picked up a wrinkle at the left shoulder, the one he always gets when he carries his jacket over that arm instead of putting it on. She knows that wrinkle. She spent two years cataloguing the small grammar of him — the way he drums a single finger when he’s thinking, the way he always orders one more round than anyone expects, the way his laugh, when it finally arrives, is always a little startled, as though it surprises him too. She had thought distance would blur those details. It has not.
She turns toward the bar.
—
Delroy had almost not come either.
He had drafted the apology email to Petra in February, deleted it, drafted it again in March, and then made the mistake of calling his sister Yeon Lin, who had listened to his entire argument with the focused silence of someone waiting for a gap in traffic, and then said, simply: “You’re going, Del. You’re going because you’ve been using ‘not ready’ as a personality for eight months and it’s starting to bore me.” Yeon Lin has always had this quality. She says things that sound brutal and turn out to be true about three days later, when he is alone and quiet enough to hear them properly.
So he had booked the flight. He had packed the linen shirt — the one Odette had once said made him look like he was “trying to be a yacht,” which she had meant as a gentle tease and which had made him laugh for a full minute — and he had arrived on the island yesterday afternoon, checked into the small hotel two streets from the square, and spent the evening telling himself that it was fine, that they were adults, that seeing her would be straightforward and calm and would prove, finally, that he had moved on.
And then he had seen her standing at the edge of the square with her arms crossed and her chin slightly lifted, wearing that expression she gets when she is trying very hard not to feel something, and every careful, reasonable thing he had told himself had simply left the building.
He excuses himself from Stavros, who is still explaining something complicated about ferry schedules, and moves toward the bar.
—
Odette is holding a glass of something cold and white when she hears his voice beside her — not directed at her, not yet, just there, ordering water from the bartender in that careful, slightly over-enunciated way he uses when he’s in a place where English isn’t the first language. She does not turn. She stares at the paper lanterns above the square and breathes the jasmine and tells herself she is fine, she is fine, she is completely —
“Odette.”
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