The Festival We Almost Missed

Odette is quiet for a moment. The Aegean is very dark and very present below them, and the festival music is a warm blur from up the hill, and there is jasmine again, carried on the same slow breeze that moves her hair across her shoulder. She thinks about the eight months. She thinks about the voice note from Petra and the Heathrow departure lounge and the way she had stood at the edge of the square tonight with her arms crossed, already defending herself against something she hadn’t even encountered yet.
“I think I came here to prove I didn’t need to come,” she says. It is more honest than she intended. She watches the water and does not look at him.
He doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then: “How’s that working out?”
She almost smiles. Almost. “Asking for a report already.”
“Just curious.”
She does smile then, small and sideways, and when she finally turns to look at him he is already looking at her, not with the careful, neutral expression he had been wearing all evening, but with something quieter and more unguarded, the face he used to make when he thought she wasn’t watching — the one that had always looked, to her, like relief.
Up the hill, someone has started singing. A woman’s voice, low and unhurried, something in Greek that Odette doesn’t know the words to but understands the shape of. The lanterns are probably still swaying. Petra is probably still laughing. Yeon Lin is probably eating an unreasonable amount of cheese and pretending not to watch the clock.
Delroy shifts slightly on the wall, just enough that his arm is against hers. Not a gesture. Not a statement. Just warmth, and presence, and the particular weight of someone who already knows you choosing, quietly, to stay close.
Odette doesn’t move away.
Below them, the sea keeps its own slow time, indifferent and enormous and dark, and the singing drifts down from the square like something that was always going to find them here.

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About the Author

Sophie Alderidge — a student of human attachment, for whom friendship always hides something more. Just do not mention about your handsome brother or his friend …

— Sophie Alderidge

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Categories: Contemporary, Romances

Tags: 10min stories, contemporary romance, enemies to lovers, Greek islands, Santorini, second chance, short story, slow burn, Sophie Alderidge, summer romance, wedding

August 31, 2026

10min-stories