TEXT MESSAGE THREAD — recovered from a phone found at the lost property desk, Humberto Delgado Airport, Lisbon. Submitted for archival. Date of recovery: 14 September.
Nanna: I left your jacket on the hook by the door. The grey one. I thought you’d want it before winter.
Nanna: Marcus. I know you’re reading these.
Nanna: I’m not angry anymore. I just thought you should know that.
Nanna: I’m going to Lisbon next month. Ioanna has a flat near the river. I don’t know why I’m telling you this.
Nanna: I suppose I’m telling you because you always said we’d go together. Forget it. Have a good life, Marcus.
[No reply. Thread ends.]
—
I found those messages on my own phone the morning I landed in Lisbon.
I hadn’t planned to come. That was the honest truth, the kind I’d been avoiding for months. My colleague had cancelled our research trip at the last minute—some family emergency I didn’t press him on—and I’d been left with a return ticket, a hotel booking, and a week I hadn’t known what to do with. I’d almost given the ticket away. Instead, I’d packed a bag at midnight and told myself it was just the city I was going to. Just Lisbon. Not her.
But I’d read those messages again on the plane, and by the time the wheels touched the tarmac, I’d stopped lying to myself.
The hotel was near the waterfront. I’d booked it two years ago for the research trip, before everything fell apart, and I’d never changed the reservation. I told myself that was coincidence. It wasn’t.
I dropped my bag, splashed water on my face, and walked down to the seafront promenade before I’d even had coffee.
The Tejo was wide and silver that morning, the kind of silver that makes you feel like you’re standing at the edge of something enormous. Trams rattled somewhere behind me. The air smelled of salt and pastry and warm stone. I stood at the railing and looked at the river and thought: she might not even be here yet. She might have changed her plans. She might have come and gone already.
I thought all of that, and then I turned around and she was there.
—
Nanna Bjornstad, twenty metres away on the promenade, eating a pastel de nata from a paper bag, looking out at the water with that particular expression she got when she was thinking about something she hadn’t decided how to feel about yet.
She was wearing a yellow linen shirt I’d never seen before. Her hair was shorter. She looked, in the way that people you’ve loved always look when you see them after a long time, both exactly the same and entirely different.
I didn’t move.
She turned, and she saw me.
For a moment neither of us said anything. The river moved. A gull called out over the water. Someone’s bicycle bell rang on the path behind us.
“Marcus.” Her voice was careful. Not cold, but careful. The voice of someone who had prepared themselves for a number of possible outcomes and was currently recalibrating.
“Nanna.”
She looked down at the custard tart in her hand, then back at me. “You’re going to make this weird, aren’t you.”
“I haven’t said anything yet.”
“You have that face.”
“What face?”
“The one where you’re about to say something you’ve been rehearsing.” She broke off a piece of the tart and ate it, watching me. “You always rehearsed things. I used to find it endearing. Then I found it exhausting. Now I’m not sure which one I’m feeling.”
I almost smiled. “That’s honest.”
“I’m working on honest.” She offered the bag toward me. “Do you want one?”
I took a tart. We stood side by side at the railing, eating in silence, and the river did what rivers do—it kept moving, indifferent and enormous, making everything else feel very small.
—
I should explain about Ioanna.
Ioanna Fontana had been Nanna’s closest friend since university, which meant she had also been, by extension, a presence in my life for four years. She was sharp and funny and fiercely protective of Nanna in the way that certain friends are, the ones who remember every version of you and hold each one accountable to the best one.
She was also the reason Nanna and I had ended.
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