The ferry leaves Tallinn harbour in forty minutes.
I know this because Gunnar told me so, three times in the last hour, each repetition carrying a slightly sharper edge, the way a knife sounds different when someone is actually considering using it. He is sitting across from me in this small Estonian café near the Old Town square, nursing a coffee he stopped pretending to enjoy twenty minutes ago, watching me with the particular expression of a man who has run out of patience but refuses to admit it.
Forty minutes. And Kateryna still hasn’t come.
I should explain how I ended up here — in a city that smells of sea salt and old stone, waiting for a woman I have spent the better part of six years pretending to hate.
Six years ago, I was a junior architect at a firm in Helsinki. Kateryna Melnyk arrived from Kyiv on a fellowship, all sharp opinions and sharper pencils, and she walked into the open-plan office like she already owned the load-bearing walls. Within a week, she had reorganized the project filing system that I had spent two months building. Within two weeks, she had presented a counter-proposal to a design I had stayed up four nights perfecting, and the partners had loved hers more.
I told myself it was professional rivalry. Clean. Reasonable. The kind of friction that sharpens everyone involved.
But then came the night of the Midsummer party, out on Elin’s rooftop overlooking the water, when the sky never quite got dark and the whole city felt suspended between one thing and another. Kateryna and I had argued about cantilever ratios over warm wine, and then somehow we had stopped arguing, and she had looked at me with those grey eyes that always seemed to be measuring something, and she had said, “You are actually very good, you know. It annoys me enormously.”
And I had said something equally graceless back. Something like, “You are the most infuriating person I have ever admired.”
Then Elin had appeared between us with a bottle and a knowing smile, and Kateryna had laughed — really laughed, not her professional courtesy laugh — and the sound had done something to the inside of my chest that I did not examine closely.
We made a promise that night. Ridiculous, wine-warm, Midsummer-stupid. If we were both still unattached in five years, we would meet in Tallinn — neutral ground, halfway between Helsinki and Kyiv — and have one honest dinner. No rivalry. No professional armour. Just two people who had spent years circling each other, finally standing still.
Five years became six because I moved the date. Twice.
I am not proud of this.
Gunnar sets down his cup with a small, deliberate click. “She confirmed she was on the morning bus from Riga,” he says. “She is coming, Marina.”
“I know she is coming.”
“Then why do you look like you are calculating the fastest route to the ferry terminal?”
I wrap both hands around my own cup. The coffee here is strong and slightly bitter, the way I like it, and I focus on that — on the ceramic warmth, the smell, the small reliable truth of it — because Gunnar is not wrong. Part of me has been quietly mapping the exit since I sat down.
He leans forward. Gunnar has been my closest friend since university, which means he has no remaining instinct for tact. “You moved the date twice,” he says, not unkindly. “You flew to Tallinn a day early and booked a hotel room you keep calling a ‘contingency.’ You are wearing the blue coat.”
“What does the coat have to do with anything?”
“You only wear the blue coat when you want someone to notice you.”
I open my mouth. I close it.
Outside the café window, the cobblestones of the Old Town are damp from an earlier rain. The medieval towers of the city wall rise at the end of the street, pale and solid against an October sky that can’t decide between grey and silver. A few tourists move past with umbrellas. A cat sits on a doorstep with the absolute dignity of a creature that has made its peace with the weather.
I have not made my peace with anything.
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