Not because anything had happened between Ioanna and me—it hadn’t, and I want to be clear about that. But Ioanna had seen something I’d been too close to see: that I was making myself smaller to keep Nanna comfortable, and that Nanna, without meaning to, had let me. Ioanna had said so, plainly, at a dinner none of us had recovered from. She’d said it to both of us. She’d said: “You’re not happy. Either of you. And you’re both too in love with the idea of each other to admit it.”
Three weeks later, Nanna and I had ended things. Quietly. Without enough words.
That had been fourteen months ago.
—
Nanna told me Ioanna was back at the flat, sleeping off a late night. We walked without deciding to walk, moving along the promenade in the direction of the old quarter, past vendors setting up their stalls and couples already occupying benches and the slow, easy morning life of a city that had learned not to rush.
“How long are you here?” she asked.
“A week. You?”
“Five days. I fly back Sunday.” She paused. “Did you know I was here?”
There it was. The question with weight behind it.
“I read the messages,” I said. “The ones you sent in July.”
She was quiet for a moment. “I sent those at two in the morning.”
“I know.”
“Two-in-the-morning messages are supposed to dissolve in daylight. That’s the rule.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t reply.”
She stopped walking. We were near a low wall overlooking the river, the kind of spot that existed specifically for difficult conversations and tourist photographs. She leaned against it and crossed her arms, not defensively, just the way she did when she was thinking.
“Why didn’t you?”
I’d rehearsed this. She’d been right about that. But standing here with the salt air in my lungs and the morning light doing something unreasonable to the colour of her hair, all the rehearsed answers felt like costumes for a version of me I didn’t want to perform anymore.
“Because I thought you deserved better than a reply that only told you what I wanted,” I said. “And I hadn’t figured out yet whether what I wanted was something I had any right to want.”
She looked at me for a long moment.
“That’s either very selfless or very cowardly,” she said. “I genuinely can’t tell which.”
“Probably both.”
A small sound left her, not quite a laugh, but something in that direction. The tension in her shoulders shifted.
—
We found a café set back from the promenade, small and dim and tiled in the blue-and-white patterns that seemed to exist everywhere in this city. We ordered coffee and more pastries neither of us needed, and we talked the way you talk when you’ve run out of careful language and have to use the real kind.
She told me she’d been promoted. She told me she’d adopted a cat—grey, imperious, named after a Norwegian poet I’d never heard of. She told me she’d started running again, early mornings before work, because she’d needed something to do with all the things she couldn’t say out loud.
I told her about the research project. About the months I’d spent in archives in Edinburgh, reading other people’s letters and thinking, more than once, about the ones I hadn’t written. I told her I’d moved flats. That the new place had a window that faced east and that I’d started waking up early too, though I didn’t run—I just made coffee and watched the light change and tried to figure out what I was doing with my life.
“And have you?” she asked. “Figured it out?”
“Parts of it.”
She wrapped her hands around her coffee cup. “Ioanna thinks I should hate you, by the way. She’s very committed to the idea.”
“Ioanna has always had strong opinions about me.”
“She cares about me. She’s not wrong to.” Nanna’s voice softened. “But she also wasn’t there for the good parts. The parts I keep thinking about.”
That landed somewhere in my chest and stayed there.
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