He looked older, she thought. Not in a bad way. The angles of his face had settled into something more deliberate, the way buildings do when the scaffolding finally comes down. There were faint lines at the corners of his eyes. He was wearing a faded blue shirt she almost recognized, then decided she was imagining it.
She looked the same, he thought. That was unfair. Not the same — different, in ways he couldn’t immediately catalogue, but continuous. Like the same sentence rewritten in a more confident hand.
“Are you staying through the festival?” he asked.
“A few more days. You?”
“The whole summer, probably.”
She absorbed this. “Well,” she said, and almost smiled. “The island’s big enough.”
It wasn’t, and they both knew it.
The evening unfolded around them the way festival evenings do — generously, without asking permission. Hakim’s aunt found him within the hour and pulled him into the taverna’s orbit of tasks: carrying crates, arranging chairs, arguing cheerfully with the supplier about the wine. Estelle drifted through the square, bought a small embroidered handkerchief she didn’t need, ate a paper cone of fried cheese standing at the edge of the dancing, which had begun near the church steps with the older couples first, as it always did.
She watched the dancers without watching them. Her attention kept sliding, involuntarily, to wherever Hakim happened to be.
This was the thing she had not accounted for in her careful arithmetic of facts. She had factored in his presence as a variable — one she could manage, neutralize, move past. She had not factored in the specific quality of watching him hand a chair to an elderly man with the same unhurried care he used to give to everything, or the way he laughed at something his aunt said and the laugh was exactly the one she remembered, nothing performed in it, nothing held back.
She had not factored in that she would still know his laugh.
The thing between them, ten years ago, had not ended badly. That was the complication. If it had ended badly — a betrayal, a cruelty, a clean rupture — she would have had something solid to stand on. Instead it had ended the way a tide goes out: gradually, and then completely, and with no particular drama. She had taken the fellowship in Lyon. He had stayed. They had agreed, with enormous maturity and very little honesty, that it was the right thing. They had said they would stay in touch. They had, for about a year, and then less, and then not at all.
She had told herself, many times, that it was simply what happened. That it was nobody’s fault. That the timing had been wrong.
All of this was true. None of it had ever been enough.
Around nine o’clock the dancing opened up to everyone, and the square filled with bodies and noise and the smell of candle wax from the church steps where someone had lit a row of votives. Hakim found a moment to step away from the taverna and stood at the edge of the square with a glass of wine, watching the festival do what festivals do: make everyone briefly believe that joy is the natural state of things.
He spotted Estelle near the church.
She was sitting on the low wall beside the votives, not dancing, watching the crowd with an expression he recognized — that particular look of hers that was not sadness exactly, but a kind of attentive solitude, as if she were taking notes on the world from a slight distance. He had always wanted, when he saw that look, to close the distance. He had not always let himself.
He went over.
She looked up when he sat down beside her on the wall, and she didn’t look surprised. The votives between them and the church steps threw a warm, unsteady light across the cobblestones.
“Do you still not dance?” she asked.
“I dance,” he said. “Badly.”
“You always said that.”
“It was always true.”
A pause. Not uncomfortable — or not only uncomfortable. The kind of pause that has weight in it, the kind you have to decide what to do with.
“How is Lyon?” he asked.
“Good. The work is good. The winters are long.” She turned the stem of her own glass slowly between her fingers. “How is Thessaloniki?”
“Good. The work is good.” He almost smiled. “The winters are long.”
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