31 The Woman Who Refused to Be Quiet

The first thing they heard was my laugh. It ricocheted off the ancient, sun-bleached stone of Hvar’s loggia, sliced through the polite murmur of espresso cups, and tumbled down the harbour like a rogue wave. It was a laugh that refused to be folded, spindled, or mutilated into something dainty. In a town where history was a weight and reputation a cage, my laughter was a crowbar.

I, Dara, was a scandal in a sundress.

I’d returned not as the quiet girl who’d left, but as a graphic novelist with ink-stained fingers and a Marseille-acquired disregard for whispering. My mother wrung her hands. My aunts crossed themselves when I passed. The men in the square, creatures of routine and ritual, would pause their backgammon games, their eyes following me with a mixture of fascination and affront.

And then there was Miro.

He was a silhouette against the dazzling Adriatic light, a stain of shadow in perpetual shade. He owned the second-best bookstore in town (the best was a tourist trap selling thrillers and maps). His shop, “Sloga,” smelled of damp paper, salt, and indifference. He was rarely seen, but often quoted—his verbal eviscerations of pretentious customers were local legend. A man of razor-blade silence and, when broken, a razor-sharp tongue.

Our first dialogue was a duel.

I burst into Sloga, chasing a breeze that was smuggling the scent of jasmine inside. “Do you have anything by Dubravka Ugrešić that isn’t The Museum of Unconditional Surrender?” I called out to the empty counter.

A voice, dry as the bura wind, came from behind a fortress of books. “Do you have any questions that aren’t a performance?”

I peered over the stack. He was all angles: sharp cheekbones, a jaw tense enough to crack walnuts, eyes the colour of old espresso grounds, observing me like a misplaced comma in a perfect sentence. He wore a faded black shirt, sleeves rolled precisely to the elbow.

“The performance is free. The books aren’t. So, do you?”

“Top shelf. Left. Behind the Slovenian existentialists no one ever buys.” He didn’t move.

I got the book myself, my sundress brushing against volumes of Croatian poetry. At the counter, I placed it before him. “You’re Miro. The man who told the mayor’s wife her taste in literature was ‘decorative, like a tea cozy.’”

“And you’re Dara. The woman whose laugh causes old ladies to miss a stitch in their lace.”

“Progress,” I said. “Better a dropped stitch than a stifled soul.”

His eyes flickered. A tiny crack in the facade. He took my money, his fingers not touching mine. “Your change. Try to spend it quietly.”

The war was on. I made Sloga my daily battleground. I’d bring him a krafna from the bakery, absurdly powdered. “Sugar for the sour,” I’d declare.

“It looks like a ghost exploded,” he’d retour, but one day, I saw a fleck of sugar on his lower lip.

I’d read passages of my graphic novel aloud—a surreal tale of a Dalmatian siren who ran a punk radio station from a cave. “The dialogue is stilted,” he’d say, not looking up from his ledger. “No one in Croatia says ‘perchance’.”

“They do if they’re a siren with a classical education! You have no imagination!”

“I imagine you leaving. Often.”

But I kept coming. Our banter was a frantic, beautiful tango. He’d parry my flamboyance with precision. “Your dress is the colour of a traffic cone. Are you directing ships into the harbour?”

“Better to be seen than to be a grey smudge on a grey wall, Miro.”

One afternoon, a German tourist demanded a “beach read with profundity.” Miro, without a word, handed him a dense philosophical tome in German. The man left, baffled. I snorted, then choked on my own laughter. Miro’s lips—that severe, beautiful line—twitched. It wasn’t a smile. It was the ghost of a smile, a seismic event.

The attraction wasn’t a spark; it was a constant, low-voltage hum, a live wire between our every glance and barb. The town watched, buzzing. Dara and the Hermit. The Sun and the Shadow.

The first kiss happened in the labyrinth of his stockroom. I’d followed him in, arguing about the merits of Marko Marulić versus modern satire. He turned, suddenly, crowding me against a cardboard fortress of unsold books.

“You talk too much,” he whispered, his breath on my neck.

“You don’t talk enough,” I breathed back.

And then his mouth was on mine, and it was nothing like his words. It was hungry, deep, a confession. He tasted of coffee and quiet despair. His hands, those precise, scholarly hands, fisted in my traffic-cone dress, pulling me closer as if trying to absorb my noise, my light, my heat. We broke apart, panting, surrounded by the silent stories of others.

“Well,” I gasped, my voice uncharacteristically shaky. “That was a… compelling counter-argument.”

Our affair became my greatest work of rebellion. Not in my parents’ house, with its crucifix-covered walls and watchful saints, but in his apartment above the shop. It was a monk’s cell, all exposed stone and books, with a single window gazing over red rooftops to the sea.

There, Miro was unmade. His sharp tongue found new purposes—whispering devastatingly filthy, perfectly grammatical Croatian into my ear, making me moan and laugh simultaneously. He worshipped my body with a scholar’s intensity, mapping every freckle, every curve, as if committing me to memory. He’d peel away my bright clothes with reverent slowness, then push me onto his narrow bed with a guttural urgency that belied his controlled exterior.

“You are so loud,” he’d groan into my skin as I cried out, the sound echoing off the ancient stones.

“You make me loud,” I’d gasp. “Silence is your language, not mine.”

He’d answer by making me louder.

We were fire and flint. He’d draw me in the lamplight, not with pencils, but with words. “The curve of your hip is a rebellion against Euclidean geometry,” he’d say, his finger tracing it. “Your laugh is a chromatic scale in a world of greyscale.”

In public, we were a barely contained storm. At a village fešta, I dragged him to dance the linđo. He moved with a stiff, tragic elegance that had me wheezing with laughter until he spun me, pulled me close, and murmured, “Your joy is a weapon. And I am disarmed.” The old women clutched their pearls. The men shook their heads. We were a spectacle.

The crazy, funny moments were our oxygen. He once read my graphic novel in one sitting, then presented me with a page of meticulously typed notes: “Page 42: Sirens would not use AM radio. The static would interfere with their hypnotic frequencies. Suggest FM.” I tackled him, and we rolled on the floor of Sloga, laughing until we cried, surrounded by the silent, judging books.

I called him my “Brooding Bookkeep.” He called me his “Cacophonous Calamity.”

But Hvar is an island, and islands have ears. Whispers became warnings. My father, a man of few words and many scowls, confronted me. “You disgrace us. That man… he is ćorav, dark. He has a past. He does not speak of it. You play with fire, Dara.”

I, of course, only burned brighter. “Good. I’m cold.”

The tragedy, when it came, was not from the town, but from the past Miro had buried.

I found the letters, accidentally, in a hollowed-out copy of The Divine Comedy. Not love letters, but official ones, from a hospital in Zagreb. Pages of clinical language detailing a severe depressive episode, a voluntary commitment, years prior. And a photo of a woman, with kind eyes and a soft smile—his wife, Ana. Lost not to death, but to a different, quieter tragedy. She had left, unable to bear the weight of his silence after his release. He had never spoken of her.

That night, in his bed, I faced him. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

The wall that had crumbled for me slammed back into place, higher and harder than ever. His eyes went from soft to shuttered in a heartbeat. “It is not a story. It is a fact. It belongs to me.”

“We belong to each other!” I cried, the volume feeling hollow now. “You let me shout at the world, but you hide this? You’re a hypocrite, Miro. The quietest, loudest hypocrite.”

His voice was a blade of ice. “You think your rebellion is real? It is a costume. You can take off your loudness and go back to your safe, sunny life. My silence is my bones. My past is my marrow. You wanted to crack me open? Well, here I am. Is it messy enough for you now, Dara? Is it tragic enough to fit your graphic novel?”

The words gutted me. They were designed to. He was pushing me away with the only weapon he had left: the truth, sharpened to a killing point.

I left. The town watched my radiant defiance dim to a confused, red-eyed shuffle. The laughter from the loggia stopped. I was quiet. And in my silence, I heard everything: the pity, the smug satisfaction, the I-told-you-so’s that hummed through the grapevines.

Weeks passed. The island sun felt like an accusation. I packed my things. My rebellion was over, a failed experiment.

The day before I was to leave, a storm rolled in—a proper bura, whipping the sea into a fury, screaming through the pines. Driven by a compulsion I hated, I ran through the stinging rain to Sloga. The CLOSED sign swung wildly.

I went to the back, to the stone staircase leading to his apartment. He was there, on the steps, soaked to the skin, not seeking shelter. He looked utterly shattered, the sharp lines of him blurred by rain and anguish.

He saw me. “She left because I became a void,” he shouted over the wind, his voice raw, stripped of all its cleverness. “I couldn’t speak. The words were ash. I tried to disappear, Dara. And then you… you erupted into my silence with your ridiculous colours and your impossible laugh. You were a volcanic eruption in my cemetery. You demanded a voice from a ghost. And I… I started to feel alive in the rubble.”

I stood still, the rain plastering my own quiet dress to my skin.

“You asked me why I didn’t tell you,” he cried, rainwater and something else on his face. “Because I was terrified that my silence would smother your noise. That my past was a cave that would swallow your sun. I pushed you away to save your sound. It was the only unselfish thing I’ve ever done, and it was the stupidest.”

I walked up the steps until I was toe-to-toe with him. The storm roared around us. I placed my hands on his rain-chilled face.

“You idiot,” I said, my voice low, but clear, a new kind of power in it. “You magnificent, brooding idiot. Did you ever think I wanted the cave? That my noise needed your silence to echo in? That a siren doesn’t just need a radio… she needs a deep, dark sea to broadcast from?”

He stared at me, hope and fear warring in his espresso eyes.

“Your silence isn’t your bones, Miro,” I said, pulling his forehead to mine. “It’s just your voice, waiting. And I am a very, very patient woman.”

And there, on the storm-lashed stairs, he broke. Not into pieces, but open. A sob, raw and ugly, wracked him, and I held him, this sharp-tongued, wounded man, as the bura screamed its approval.

We didn’t live happily ever after in the fairy-tale sense. We lived loudly ever after, in a way that was uniquely ours. He still runs Sloga, though he now stocks graphic novels, including a popular series about a Dalmatian siren. I still laugh from the loggia, a sound that no longer feels like a crowbar, but like an anchor, holding us both fast to this beautiful, stubborn rock.

And sometimes, in the deep of the night, when my ideas are flowing and his critiques are sharp, he’ll look at me over a page of my drawings, that ghost of a smile becoming a full, radiant, quiet sunrise on his face.

“Cacophonous Calamity,” he’ll say. “Brooding Bookkeep,” I’ll reply. And the conversation, like our story, is just beginning.

32 She Drank Wine Like a Challenge

The first time I saw Milena, she was drinking wine like it was a challenge issued by the bottle itself. Not the delicate, savoring sips of the other tourists along the Makarska waterfront, but deep, deliberate gulps, her throat working as if to drain the Adriatic dry. She was sitting alone at a scarred wooden table outside Konoba Didin, a half-empty carafe of Pošip already between her elegant, sun-browned hands. It was her laughter that hooked me first—a sharp, bright sound that cut through the humid dusk, causing the old men playing balote under the plane tree to glance over, half-annoyed, half-intrigued.

I was nursing a beer, pretending to read a waterlogged copy of The Island but really watching the slow, spectacular death of the sun behind Biokovo mountain. Her laughter was a punctuation mark in the languid sentence of the evening. I decided, with the unearned confidence of a man on holiday, to provide the next clause.

“Careful,” I said, sliding into the chair opposite her without invitation. “The Pošip here is deceptively strong. It’s been known to make philosophers weep and accountants confess.”

She didn’t startle. She simply turned her head, her dark eyes—the color of espresso grounds—sweeping over me with the slow, assessing coolness of a pawnbroker. A smirk touched her lips, which were stained a faint, wine-dark purple. “And what does it make of uninvited men who state the obvious?”

“Ah,” I smiled, leaning back. “It usually makes us buy another round. Aleksandar.”

“Milena.” She didn’t offer her hand. Instead, she lifted her glass, drained it, and set it down with a definitive click. “So, Aleksandar-the-Obvious. Are you a weeping philosopher or a confessing accountant?”

“A writer,” I said. It was mostly true. I wrote technical manuals for agricultural machinery. But in Makarska, with the scent of pine and salt in the air, I could be a writer.

“Even worse,” she declared, flagging down the waiter for another carafe. “A fabulist. A teller of pretty, empty lies.”

“And you? A professional critic of strangers?”

“A restorer,” she said, examining the fresh carafe the waiter thumped down. “Of frescoes. I put back together the beautiful, true lies that time has broken.”

Our first contest had begun. It was a duel of definitions, of quick parries and thrusts wrapped in the velvet of a smile. I found myself grinning like an idiot, answering every jab not with a counter-punch, but with a wider smile. It disarmed her, just a fraction. Her barbs, I saw, were a fortress. My refusal to raise my own walls seemed, to her, a novel and suspicious tactic.

That night, the banter was a lively, frenetic dance. She told me about the chapel of St. Peter in a village up the coast, how she’d spent six months gently coaxing a martyred saint’s face from centuries of grime. “He had the eyes of a man who regretted everything, especially the martyrdom part,” she said, pouring more wine.

“I regret nothing tonight,” I replied, clinking my beer to her glass.

“Spoken like a man who hasn’t finished his first carafe.”

The conversation spiraled from art to archaeology, to the absurdities of our childhoods—her in a stubborn Zagreb suburb, me in chaotic Belgrade. We debated the merits of rakija versus travarica, the best way to curse in both our languages, and whether the stars over Makarska were brighter than anywhere else. She insisted they were, because they were reflected in a sea so clear it acted as a second, amplifying sky. “Science,” I countered. “Lower light pollution.”

“Romantic bankruptcy,” she shot back, but she was smiling.

We closed down the konoba. The challenge of the wine seemed to have been met, if not defeated. She was steady on her feet, but her eyes held a new, liquid warmth. As we walked along the Riva, the stone still holding the day’s heat, our hands brushed. A spark, literal and figurative. She didn’t pull away.

“Your place or mine?” I asked, the question hanging in the balmy air.

“Yours,” she said, her voice a low challenge. “I want to see what lies a technical writer for tractors calls home.”

She’d caught me out. I laughed, a real, startled burst of sound. “You investigated.”

“I pay attention. It’s my job.”

My rented apartment was a small, whitewashed cave above a bakery, filled with the scent of rising dough and jasmine from the balcony. The door had barely shut before she pushed me against it, her mouth finding mine with a hunger that was all the more potent for the hours of verbal sparring. It was not a tender kiss. It was a continuation, a physical manifestation of our contest—a claiming. Her tongue was sharp, demanding, tasting of salt and Pošip.

“You talk too much,” she breathed against my lips, her hands pulling my shirt from my waistband.

“You haven’t heard me be quiet yet,” I managed, flipping us so her back was against the door.

What followed was not love-making as a gentle merger, but as a glorious, sweaty, laughing wrestle. It was a battle for dominance where surrender was the ultimate victory. She’d dig her nails into my back with a curse, and I’d answer by tracing the curve of her hip with maddening slowness. She mocked the posters on my wall; I silenced her by discovering the spot just below her ear that made her gasp. We fell onto the narrow bed in a tangle of limbs and discarded clothes, the roar of the pebbled beach below our open window the only soundtrack we needed. It was fierce, playful, and profoundly intimate. In the exhausted, moonlit silence afterward, her body curled against mine, she traced a finger over my chest.

“You’re surprisingly competent for a fabulist,” she murmured.

“And you’re surprisingly soft for a harpy.”

She pinched me, hard, but then let her head rest on my shoulder. I felt her smile against my skin.

That was how it began. A summer spun from gold and sharpened steel. Our days took on a rhythm. She would return from the chapel, hair dusted with ancient plaster, fingertips stained with pigment. I would pretend to have written epic chapters while secretly watching football highlights. Our evenings were a ritual of combat and communion.

We’d meet at Didin’s. The opening salvo was always hers.

“You have the posture of a man whose greatest ambition is to become a particularly comfortable deck chair,” she’d announce, arriving at our table.

“And you have the grace of a Byzantine empress who’s just found a scorpion in her sandal,” I’d return, standing to pull out her chair.

The wine would flow. Our conversations were epic, ridiculous, and profound. She once described the process of fresco restoration as “emotional archaeology,” trying to intuit the artist’s joy or despair from the stroke of a brush a millennium old. “It’s like falling in love with a ghost,” she said, her gaze distant for a rare, unguarded moment.

“Is that what we’re doing?” I asked, softly. “Falling in love with ghosts?”

Her eyes snapped back to me, the fortress walls slamming up. “Don’t be sentimental, Aleksandar. It doesn’t suit you. We’re two cats sharpening our claws on each other. It’s pleasantly distracting.”

But the distractions grew deeper. There was the day we rented a scooter and got hopelessly lost in the olive groves above Tučepi, arguing viciously over the map until we stumbled upon a hidden konoba run by a one-eyed man who fed us lamb peka and told us stories of sea monsters. We laughed until we cried, our earlier anger forgotten, feeding each other pieces of succulent meat under the table.

There was the night swim at a secluded cove, where she dared me to swim to a distant rock. I did, and when I turned back, she was a silvery silhouette in the moonlight, having shed her swimsuit on the shore. “Catching up requires initiative, not just stamina!” she called, her laughter echoing off the cliffs. The water was cold, the chase hot, and the reward on the sandy shore was a moment of such piercing tenderness that afterward, she was quiet for a full hour, her head on my chest, listening to my heart.

The cracks in her fortress became fault lines. She began to share fragments of her past—a cold, brilliant father who valued art over people, a love affair that ended in a betrayal so profound it had cauterized something in her. “He said my work was technically perfect but soul-less,” she confessed one star-drenched night on my balcony. “Can you imagine? Telling a restorer of sacred art she has no soul?”

“He was an idiot,” I said, simply. “Your soul is a fierce, brilliant, complicated thing. It’s just well-defended. Like Dubrovnik.”

She looked at me then, her eyes searching mine in the dim light. For a second, I saw not the cruel humor, not the challenger, but a woman profoundly afraid. She leaned in and kissed me, a kiss so different from all the others—soft, seeking, almost grateful.

The unexpected twist was not a sudden catastrophe, but a slow, chilling turn. It began with a cough she couldn’t shake, a fatigue she blamed on the dust and summer heat. Then came the nosebleeds, brief but alarming. She dismissed them with characteristic ferocity. “It’s the dry air in the chapel. My body’s rebelling against all that sanctity.”

But the pallor beneath her tan persisted. The sharpness of her tongue began to feel less like play and more like a genuine effort to push me away, as if she sensed a vulnerability she couldn’t control. The contest became lopsided. My smiles in response to her jabs were now efforts to cover a creeping dread.

The tragedy was not a secret illness she hid. She was too pragmatic for that. The tragedy was the day she finally saw a doctor in Split, and returned to my apartment holding the results like a condemned letter.

She didn’t cry. She sat on the edge of my bed, the paper trembling in her hands. “Leukemia,” she said, the word flat and final in the quiet room. “A particularly aggressive, dramatic little fucker. It seems my blood is as rebellious as I am.”

The world stopped. The sound of the sea, the scent of jasmine, it all receded into a silent, white noise. I reached for her, but she held up a hand.

“Don’t. Don’t be kind. I can’t… I can’t bear your kindness right now, Aleksandar.”

So I did the only thing I could think of. I went to the kitchen, poured two generous glasses of the strongest travarica I could find, and brought them back. I handed her one.

“What’s this?” she asked, her voice hollow.

“A new challenge,” I said, forcing my lips into the smile she loved, the one that answered all her barbs. “This one’s from me. Drink it. Then insult me. Tell me my haircut is terrible. Tell me I’m a mediocre lover and a worse writer. Do your worst.”

A flicker of the old Milena sparked in her exhausted eyes. She took the glass, knocked it back in one go, shuddered, and fixed me with a look. “Your haircut is terrible. You look like a confused sheep. And your dialogue in that story you showed me? Wooden. Like a marionette version of Hemingway.” Her voice broke on the last word.

I drank my shot, the herbal fire a welcome pain. “See? Now we’re even. Now we fight.”

And we did. We fought the disease with the same ferocity we’d fought each other. The hospital in Zagreb became our new arena. The playful banter turned into gallows humor so dark the nurses didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

“If I have to eat another bowl of this pathetic broth,” she muttered, pale against the white sheets, an IV in her arm, “I’m going to restore a fresco of the nurses as harpies right on this ceiling.”

“I’ll smuggle in ćevapi,” I whispered. “We’ll get banned together. It’ll be our greatest achievement.”

The treatments were brutal. They stripped her of her strength, her hair, her sharp edges. But never her spirit. On her good days, we’d sit by the window and she’d describe the fresco she was working on in her mind—a magnificent, defiant angel with the face of a one-eyed konoba owner, wrestling a sea monster made of cancer cells.

“The angel is winning, of course,” she’d say, her hand, now so thin, in mine.

“Of course,” I’d agree, kissing her knuckles. “It has your eyes.”

The final, unexpected twist was not her death. She fought too hard for that to be a twist. It was a letter. She gave it to me a week before she died, her voice a papery whisper. “Don’t open it until after. Consider it my last move in our game.”

She died at dawn on a Tuesday. The fierce, bright laugh silenced. The fortress, at last, still.

I waited a month. I returned to Makarska, to our apartment above the bakery. The scent of jasmine was gone. One evening, with a carafe of Pošip and a heart of lead, I opened the letter.

Aleksandar,

If you’re reading this, I’ve finally lost a contest. A cheap shot, really, to leave the field like this. Don’t you dare be noble and say it was a draw.

I need you to know something. You with your infuriating smiles. You were wrong. We weren’t two cats sharpening claws. And I wasn’t restoring a ghost.

You walked into my crumbling chapel with your light and your stubborn joy, and you restored me. You put back together the beautiful, true lies I had told myself—that I was better alone, that love was a vulnerability for fools, that my heart was a relic best left in fragments.

You were the most beautiful, unexpected twist of all.

So, my love, my final jab: you won. You absolutely won. And the prize is this… this god-awful, magnificent, heartbreaking memory of a woman who drank wine like a challenge, and loved you, despite all her best intentions, like a victory.

Now have a drink for me. And for God’s sake, get a better haircut.

Yours, in this life and any other,Milena

I read it once, then again. Then I poured a glass of Pošip, my vision blurring. I walked to the balcony, overlooking the Riva where it all began. I raised the glass to the stars, which, damn her, were brighter over Makarska.

“You’re wrong,” I said aloud to the night, to her ghost, my voice thick but smiling. “It was a draw.”

And for the first time since she left, the smile felt real. It was my answer, my final parry in the endless, wonderful duel that was ours. The challenge had been met. The wine, like the love, was finally, fully drunk.

33 The Olive Grove Agreement

The first time I saw Luka Božić after ten years, he was standing in the lawyer’s office, smelling of diesel fuel and arrogance, and all the air was sucked out of the room. Not in a good way. In a ‘I’m-going-to-need-a-second-bottle-of-rakija-tonight’ way.

“Antonia,” he said, not smiling. His voice was deeper than I remembered, scarred by smoke and years of shouting over boat engines.

“Luka,” I replied, my tone sweeter than baklava, and just as sticky with venom. “Still haven’t learned to stand up straight, I see.”

A flicker in those glacier-blue eyes. The lawyer, a nervous little man named Mr. Fabris, cleared his throat. “Yes, well. As the last living descendants of Grga Vidak, you are the joint inheritors of his asset: the olive grove on the hill north of Šibenik. Ten hectares. Approximately two hundred trees, some believed to be over five centuries old.”

We both stared. The olive grove. Baka’s olive grove. The place of my sun-drenched, sticky-fingered childhood summers, which ended abruptly the summer I turned seventeen, when the old feud between the Vidaks and the Božićs—a stupid argument over a missing fishing net that curdled into a blood feud—boiled over again. My father and Luka’s uncle had come to blows at the village festival. After that, the grove, which bordered both families’ lands, was left to Grga, the childless hermit who wanted no part of the drama. And we were forbidden from going near it, or each other.

“Sell it,” Luka and I said in unison, then glared at each other for having the same thought.

“Excellent!” Mr. Fabris beamed. “The market is favourable. I have a developer from Zagreb who is very interested. He envisions a boutique resort. ‘Dalmatian Zen,’ he calls it.”

A vision flashed: concrete poured over the gnarled roots, a yoga studio where the old stone press stood. My chest tightened inexplicably.

“But,” Luka said, his voice gruff, “the harvest. It’s going to be a heavy year. Look at the trees.” We both turned to the window, as if we could see the grove from here. He was right. Even from a distance, you could sense the weight of the fruit. “Grga let it go. The branches are weeping. It’s… it’s a waste.”

I turned back, surprised. “Since when do you care about waste? You who dump your fishing nets in the bay?”

He leaned forward, his forearms, corded with muscle and mapped with scars, resting on the polished wood. “Since it’s half my waste, priležnica.”

The old insult—‘lazybones’—hung in the air. Mr. Fabris looked faint.

“Fine,” I snapped, an idea forming, reckless and ripe. “We sell. But we harvest first. One last summer. We split the profit from the oil along with the sale. A final tribute to the old man.”

Luka’s eyes narrowed. He was calculating. The extra money would be significant. And maybe, just maybe, he wanted to see the grove one more time, too. “One summer. We start tomorrow. And I’m not carrying you.”

“The day I need you to carry me, Božić, is the day I throw myself into the Kornati sea.”

---

The next morning, at 5 AM, the world was the colour of a dove’s breast. The grove was more beautiful than I remembered, a silent kingdom on a slope overlooking the Adriatic. The ancient trees were sculptures of suffering and resilience, their trunks hollowed by time, their silver-green leaves whispering secrets. The air smelled of sage, rosemary, and ripe, pungent olives.

Luka arrived on a puttering Vespa, looking ridiculous. He handed me a cup of coffee from the village bar, black and scalding. No words.

We started with the nets. Spreading the vast green nets under the first tree was a battle of wills.

“You’re doing it wrong, city girl,” he grunted. I’d moved to Split for university, stayed for a job in a chic gallery. He’d stayed, becoming a fisherman like all Božić men.

“And you’re spreading it like a drunk octopus. Here.” I yanked my corner, he stumbled, and for a moment, we were tangled in the net and each other. His body was hard and warm against mine, his breath a sharp intake. I pushed away, my heart hammering a ridiculous rhythm. “Watch it.”

“You watch it.”

The work was brutal. The late July sun was a tyrant. We used long, flexible rakes to comb the branches, a gentle rain of purple-black olives pattering onto the nets. Sweat plastered my t-shirt to my back, ran in rivulets between my breasts. Luka had stripped to the waist by 8 AM, and it was an unfair distraction. The man was built like the hills themselves—broad shoulders, a torso etched with muscle from hauling nets, a tan that spoke of years under this same sun. A scar, pale and raised, cut across his lower abdomen. I found my eyes tracing it, wondering.

The arguments were constant, a form of punctuation to our labour.

“You’re raking too hard, you’ll bruise the fruit!” “Better than leaving half of it up there like you’re doing, afraid of heights?” “I’m not afraid, I’m strategic!” “Your strategy is as weak as your coffee!”

But between the barbs, there were moments. He’d wordlessly hand me his water bottle when mine was empty. I’d point out a tree he’d missed. Once, when a hornet buzzed too close to my face, his hand shot out and batted it away, his movement so fast it was just a blur.

One blisteringly hot afternoon, we broke for lunch in the shade of the giant lisinka, the oldest tree. I’d brought bread, cheese, tomatoes. He produced a string of dried figs and a bottle of sharp, home-made wine.

“So, city girl. Any man brave enough to put up with that tongue of yours?” he asked, tearing off a chunk of bread.

“Plenty. They just don’t usually last past the first course. What about you? Still charming the tourists with your ‘brooding fisherman’ routine?”

He smirked. “It’s not a routine. And they don’t usually talk enough to annoy me.”

I snorted, taking a swig of wine directly from the bottle. The warmth spread through my limbs. “A match made in heaven, then.”

The silence that followed was different. Charged. Our eyes met over the bottle, and for a second, I saw the boy I’d secretly watched from these very trees, the one who’d once smiled at me before the world turned sour.

---

As the weeks bled into August, the line blurred. The arguments began to feel like a dance, the insults layered with double meaning. The accidental touches—hands brushing as we gathered the net corners, shoulders bumping as we carried full crates—lingered, sparking like live wires.

One evening, after a particularly long day, we were filthy and exhausted. The sun was a molten coin sinking into the sea.

“I’m not riding back like this,” I groaned, feeling the grit in every pore. “There’s the old cistern. It’s still fed by the spring.”

Without a word, Luka turned and walked towards the stone ruin. My heart began to pound. This was madness. He was the enemy. A Božić.

The cistern was a small, deep pool of clear, cold water under a vaulted stone ceiling. He didn’t look at me as he pulled off his boots, his jeans, until he stood only in his briefs. My mouth went dry. He was all power and grace, a statue of a warrior god. He slipped into the water with a hiss.

“Coming in, or just going to stare?”

I turned my back, stripping to my underwear, feeling his gaze like a physical touch. The water was a shock, a baptism. I surfaced, gasping, pushing my wet hair back. He was on the other side, watching me, his eyes dark in the twilight.

The space between us evaporated. It wasn’t a decision; it was a gravitational pull. He crossed the pool in two strokes. His hand came up to cup my cheek, rough and tender. “Antonia,” he murmured, and it sounded like a curse and a prayer.

Then his mouth was on mine. It wasn’t gentle. It was a claiming, a release of ten years of pent-up fury and fascination. It tasted of salt, wine, and olives. I kissed him back with equal fervour, my hands raking over his shoulders, digging into his hair. He lifted me, my legs wrapping around his waist, my back against the cool stone wall of the cistern. The water lapped around us as he entered me in one smooth, desperate stroke. A cry was torn from my throat, swallowed by his kiss. It was fierce, primal, a culmination of every taunt, every glance, every moment of shared sweat under the sun. We moved together in the ancient rhythm, the only sounds our ragged breaths and the splash of water, until the world shattered into a thousand silver fragments.

Afterwards, we lay on the stone ledge, damp and spent, not speaking. The first stars pricked through the opening above. The line was not just blurred now; it was obliterated.

---

The rest of the harvest was a different kind of fever. We worked by day, a new, electric awareness between us. Our banter turned playful, laced with innuendo.

“You’re slowing down, Božić. Need a nap?” “The only thing I need is you under that tree over there. Again.” I’d blush, a ridiculous reaction for a woman of twenty-seven, and throw an olive at him.

Nights were spent in the old stone hut. We’d cook simple meals on a camp stove, drink too much wine, and talk. I learned about the scar on his stomach—a winch handle on his father’s boat, a storm, fear in his father’s eyes he’d never seen before. He learned about my gallery in Split, the pretentious clients, my secret dream to paint again. We laughed until we cried. We made love on a blanket under the stars, in the hut, against the trunk of the lisinka, slow and deep one moment, frantic and hungry the next.

It was a bubble, a perfect, stolen season. We never spoke of the developer, of the sale, of the world beyond the grove. Here, we were just Antonia and Luka, heirs to a kingdom of silver leaves and ancient peace.

Until the day the letter came.

Mr. Fabris had forwarded the final offer. It was even more generous than we’d dreamed. Life-changing money. For me, freedom from the gallery, a studio of my own, maybe travel. For Luka, a new boat, security for his aging parents, an end to the back-breaking work.

We read it in silence, sitting on the wall of the terrace. The bubble popped.

“We sign next week,” Luka said, his voice flat.

“Yes.”

The air between us grew heavy. The unspoken question hung there: What is this? What happens now?

The tragedy wasn’t a grand event. It was quiet. It was his father, Stipe Božić, finding out.

He came to the grove one evening, his face like thunder. He saw Luka’s Vespa and my little car parked together, saw us emerging from the hut, my hair messy, Luka’s hand on the small of my back. The look of pure, unadulterated betrayal on that old man’s face was worse than any shout.

“My son,” he spat, his voice trembling. “With a Vidak whore. In this place. After everything they did to us.”

“Tata, it’s not—” Luka began, stepping forward.

“Your uncle’s hand never worked right again after her father broke it! Your mother cried for a week from the shame! And you… you roll in the dirt with her.” He looked at me, and his eyes were dead. “You have your mother’s eyes. She was a temptress, too.”

He turned and left, a proud, broken man.

Luka didn’t go after him. He stood utterly still, the conflict tearing him apart. I saw it all: the weight of history, of family loyalty, of a small town’s memory that was longer than any summer love.

“Luka,” I whispered.

He looked at me, and his eyes, usually so full of fire, were hollow. “This was a mistake, Antonia. A beautiful, crazy mistake.”

The words were a physical blow. “What? No. This is real. This is the only real thing that’s ever happened in this stupid, hateful place!”

“This place is us!” he roared, gesturing wildly at the trees. “You can’t prune away generations with a summer fuck! Don’t you see? There is no ‘Antonia and Luka’ out there. There’s only a Božić and a Vidak.”

The vulgarity, the dismissal, lit a cold fury in me. “So that’s all it was? A summer fuck? To pass the time until you got your money?”

His jaw worked. He didn’t deny it. The silence was an abyss.

“Get out,” I said, my voice dangerously calm. “Get out of my grove.”

“It’s half mine.” “Then I’ll buy you out. I don’t care. Just get out of my sight.”

He looked at me for a long, agonizing moment, as if memorizing me. Then he turned, got on his Vespa, and drove down the hill without looking back.

I collapsed against the lisinka, its ancient bark rough against my skin, and wept until I was empty.

---

The signing was set for a Monday. Sunday evening, I went to the grove alone. Our last harvest was in crates, ready for the mill. The nets were folded. The hut was empty. I poured a glass of wine and sat on the wall, watching the sunset paint the sea in colours of fire and blood.

I heard the scuff of a boot. He was there, leaning against the gate, looking as haunted as I felt.

“I came to say I’m sorry,” he said. “For what I said. It wasn’t… it wasn’t just that.”

I didn’t answer. The hurt was a fresh wound.

“My father hasn’t spoken to me since,” he continued, walking closer. “My mother looks at me with such sadness. The whole town knows. They’re laughing at him. At us.”

“So you chose them.” It wasn’t a question.

“I am them, Antonia. This feud… it’s stupid, but it’s in the soil. It’s in the blood. How do we cut that out?”

I looked out at the darkening grove. “We could leave. Take the money and go. Start fresh somewhere with no history.”

He gave a sad, choked laugh. “And do what? You in some foreign city, me… what? I don’t know anything but the sea. You’d grow to resent me for taking you from your life. I’d wither.”

He was right. The terrible, devastating truth was that he was right. Our love was a miracle of the grove, but it couldn’t survive transplantation. It was rooted here, in this very soil of conflict.

“So this is it,” I said, the finality crushing my chest.

He came and stood before me. Gently, he took my hand, his thumb stroking my palm. “We have one choice left, srce moje.” My heart. “We can sell. Take the money and let them pave over this. Let our story be buried under concrete and forgotten. Or…”

“Or?”

“Or we don’t sign.”

I looked up, shocked. “What?”

“We walk away from the offer. We keep the grove. Jointly. We let it be. We come back every harvest, just like this summer. We meet here, on neutral ground, in this place that is ours. For one month a year, we are not Božić and Vidak. We are just us.”

The idea was insane. Beautiful and heartbreakingly insane. To condemn ourselves to a lifetime of stolen summers, of agonizing goodbyes, of living for one month in twelve. Of watching each other grow older, perhaps with other people in the other months, the knowledge of what we had burning a hole in our hearts.

“A lifetime of hellos and goodbyes,” I whispered.

“A lifetime of this,” he said, and he kissed me, a kiss full of despair and desperate, impossible hope.

I thought of the developer’s ‘Dalmatian Zen.’ I thought of my quiet studio in Split, a ghost living inside me. I thought of Luka, ageing alone on his boat, the light in his eyes extinguished.

The choice was devastating. A clean, painful break, or a perpetual, beautiful wound.

I looked into his eyes, those glacial pools now melted with emotion, and I made my choice.

---

The lawyer’s office was tense. Mr. Fabris had the documents ready, gleaming with promise.

“So,” he said, pushing the papers forward. “The offer is as discussed. A signature here, and here, and the funds will be transferred.”

Luka and I stood side by side. We hadn’t spoken since that night. We hadn’t needed to.

I picked up the pen. It felt heavy as an anchor. I saw Luka’s hand, steady and tanned, reach for the other pen.

We looked at each other, one last time. A universe of sweat, arguments, accidental touches, and wine-soaked nights passed between us in that glance. A lifetime of what could be, and what could never be.

Then, in unison, we put the pens down.

“The sale is off,” I said, my voice clear and strong.

Mr. Fabris gaped. “But… why? It’s a fortune!”

Luka slid his hands into his pockets, a faint, sad smile on his lips as he looked at me. “Some things,” he said, “are worth more than fortune.”

We walked out together, into the blinding Šibenik sun. We didn’t know what the future held—the arguments, the complications, the pain of separation, the joy of reunion. We didn’t have a plan.

But we had an agreement. The Olive Grove Agreement. And for now, for one more summer, and perhaps for every summer to come, that was enough. It was a tragedy. It was a romance. It was ours.

34 The Summer I Lied Beautifully

The summer I lied beautifully began with a stolen passport and a desperate, champagne-fueled idea that tasted like salt and recklessness on my tongue. My name is Vanja. Or rather, it was. That summer, on the sun-bleached, cicada-scorched island of Brač, I became Victoria Thorne, a name I plucked from a tattered paperback romance novel I’d found on a bus. It sounded like someone who belonged in a luxury villa with infinity pools that spilled into the Adriatic, someone who wouldn’t flinch at the price of a bottle of Dom Pérignon, someone who was not me—a runaway from a life of quiet, crushing disappointment in Zagreb, with maxed-out credit cards and a heart still bruised from a love that had dissolved like sugar in bad coffee.

The villa, “Villa Seid,” was a masterpiece of stone and light, all clean lines and hidden courtyards, terraced down a cliffside near Bol. I’d bluffed my way into the head housekeeper position with a mixture of stolen elegance, a few well-rehearsed phrases in French, and sheer, unadulterated panic. For two weeks, I maintained the charade, overseeing a small staff with a calm authority I didn’t possess, whispering “Victoria” to myself like a prayer. The villa’s owner, an absent Swedish tycoon, had rented it out for the season to one man.

His name was Julian Ashford. He arrived not on the scheduled yacht, but by helicopter, the rotor wash sending the lavender bushes into a frenzy. I watched from the terrace, my borrowed uniform (crisp, white linen) sticking to my skin. He was tall, with the kind of careless elegance that spoke of old money and zero tolerance for mediocrity. Dark hair, swept back, a jawline that could cut glass, and eyes the colour of the sea before a storm. He moved like he owned the air around him.

Our first interaction set the tone. He found me in the library, re-shelving books I’d been secretly reading.

“You’re the guardian of this gilded cage, I presume?” His voice was a low, British baritone, laced with a sarcasm so dry it was almost aromatic.

“I am the head of household, Mr. Ashford. Victoria Thorne.” I extended a hand, hoping he wouldn’t feel its tremor.

He took it, his gaze holding mine. “Victoria. A name that implies conquest. How… ambitious.” A smirk played on his lips. “The ice in my study is insufficiently cold. It lacks commitment. See to it.”

And so it began. A daily battle of wits disguised as service. He’d demand absurd things—a specific shade of white rose, a playlist consisting solely of 18th-century lute music, his newspapers ironed—just to see if I’d flinch. I never did. Instead, I volleyed back.

“The lute player is ill with a case of existential dread, sir. Would a little Vivaldi suffice, or shall I attempt to strum a dirge myself?”

He’d stare, then a genuine laugh would escape him, a rough, surprised sound. “You’re an odd sort of housekeeper, Victoria. You speak like you’ve swallowed a dictionary and a shot of venom.”

“It’s the Balkan air, Mr. Ashford. It adds spice to everything.”

The days blurred into a rhythm of sparkling surfaces and sharp banter. I’d catch him watching me as I arranged flowers or directed the gardeners, his expression unreadable. The tension wasn’t just professional; it was a live wire strung between us in the sun-drenched silence. I learned he was in “asset management” (which I translated as “making money from thin air”), that he was here escaping something, or perhaps someone, in London, and that his sarcasm was a fortress as meticulously constructed as my own lie.

The first crack in my beautiful lie happened during a storm. A bura wind, fierce and wild, slammed into the island, cutting power. I found him in the dark study, illuminated by a single candle, nursing a glass of whiskey.

“Afraid of the dark, Mr. Ashford?” I asked, setting a lit hurricane lamp on his desk.

“Only of dull conversation in the dark,” he replied, but his usual bite was absent. “Join me. Unless you have more pressing duties, like exorcising the lukewarm ice demons.”

I poured myself a finger of his obscenely expensive whiskey. We sat in the flickering light, the world outside a roaring chaos.

“Why are you really here, Victoria?” he asked quietly. “A woman with your mind doesn’t polish silver for a living.”

My heart hammered against my ribs. “Perhaps I’m a fugitive heiress,” I said, aiming for lightness.

“Perhaps you’re a terrible liar,” he countered, but his eyes were soft. “Your accent… it slips sometimes. Around the ‘r’ sounds. It’s charming.”

That night, the electricity returned, but something else had short-circuited. The playful barbs grew heavier, laden with double meaning. A brush of fingers as I handed him his coffee. A lingering look across the pool. The air grew thick with unsaid things.

The night it finally broke was after a ridiculous, lavish dinner he insisted I share with him—to “critique the chef’s performance.” We’d drunk too much. The banter had reached a fever pitch, sharp and flirty.

“You’re infuriating,” he said, his voice husky, as we stood on the moonlit terrace overlooking the sea.

“You’re entitled and obtuse,” I fired back, breathless.

“Come here.”

It wasn’t a request. It was a command I’d been waiting for. He closed the distance, his hand cupping my jaw, his thumb tracing my bottom lip. “Tell me to stop, Victoria,” he murmured, but his eyes were already consuming me.

I didn’t. The kiss was not gentle. It was conquest and surrender, salt and whiskey, a collision of all the sharp words and stolen glances. It was devastating. He backed me against the cool stone wall, his hands finding the buttons of my stupid, beautiful linen shirt. “I’ve wanted to do this since I saw you pretending not to be terrified of the helicopter,” he growled against my skin.

We didn’t make it to the bedroom. We made love right there on the Persian rug in the study, surrounded by silent books. It was frantic, passionate, a release of weeks of unbearable tension. He was demanding, intense, but in a moment where I gasped, turning my head away, he gently brought my face back to his. “Look at me,” he insisted, and in his stormy eyes, I saw not just desire, but a raw, shocking vulnerability that mirrored my own. Afterwards, he traced the scar on my shoulder—a real one, from a childhood fall in Zagreb—and didn’t ask. He just kissed it.

That was the beginning of the end. Julian Ashford, the sarcastic titan, fell, and he fell hard. He cancelled his trips, sent his staff away. The villa became our private universe. We swam naked in the sea at dawn, had food fights in the kitchen, and he read poetry to me—Byron, bitterly, then Neruda, softly. He told me about his father’s cold empire, his mother’s loneliness, his own fear of becoming a “ghost in a suit.” I, in turn, fed him more of Victoria—stories cobbled from novels and daydreams. The lie grew roots, wrapped around my heart, and choked me.

The sex was a language we mastered. Playful one morning in the pool, him chasing me, catching me, my legs wrapping around his waist as we laughed before the laughter turned to moans. Desperate one afternoon in his walk-in closet, amidst the tailored suits, silk whispering against skin as he took me from behind, both of us watching our frantic reflection in the mirror. Tender and slow one night by the fireplace, where he worshipped every inch of me as if I were the precious thing he’d spent his life overlooking.

“I love you, Victoria,” he said one evening, his head in my lap as I ran fingers through his hair. “You’re the only real thing that’s happened to me in years.”

The words were a dagger to my soul. I cried that night, silent tears into my pillow, while he slept, a peaceful giant beside me.

The tragedy wasn’t a sudden, dramatic reveal. It was a slow, sickening unraveling. A colleague from Zagreb, on a surprise holiday, saw me in Bol market, holding Julian’s hand. “Vanja?” she called, confused.

I froze. Julian felt it. “Friend of yours?” he asked, his eyes narrowing.

“A mistake,” I whispered, dragging him away. But the seed was planted.

He became quieter, watchful. The ghost of my real name lingered between us. Then, the phone call. My mother, worried sick, had finally tracked me “through a friend of a friend.” She called the villa landline. Julian answered.

He found me on the cliff path, his face a mask of cold fury and worse—betrayal. “Vanja,” he said, the name ugly and foreign on his tongue. “Care to explain who that is? And while you’re at it, explain who the hell you are. Because the woman I love seems to be a fictional character.”

The confession tumbled out, broken and pathetic. The debt, the shame, the runaway, the stolen passport, the desperate grab at a better story. I told him everything, except the one true thing—that I loved him, desperately, as Vanja.

He listened, his expression hardening into something impenetrable. When I finished, he laughed, a hollow, terrible sound. “Bravo. What a performance. The best I’ve ever seen. I should have known. Nothing that perfect is real.”

“Julian, what I feel for you is real. That’s the only real part of any of this!”

“Don’t,” he spat. “You don’t get to use that word. You sold me a masterpiece, and it turns out it’s a forgery. The worst part is, I still want it. I still want you. And I despise myself for it.”

He didn’t throw me out. That would have been kinder. He kept me there. The dynamic twisted into something cruel and erotic. The banter turned to blades.

“Do you think Vanja would like this wine, or is her palate more suited to cheap slivovitz?” he’d ask during dinner, his eyes challenging me.

“Vanja has a palate just fine. She just also has a conscience, which is a burden you seem to lack,” I’d retort, my voice shaking.

He’d pull me to him, his kisses punishing, his touch a mixture of possession and contempt. We’d make love with a violent passion, a war we couldn’t stop fighting. It was addictive and destroying us both.

The final twist was not his, but mine. I discovered I was pregnant. In the dizzying whirl of fear and a shameful, fractured hope, I also discovered, via a crumpled letter left in his study, the truth about his escape to Brač. He wasn’t just avoiding boardroom boredom. He was under investigation for financial fraud on a massive scale. His empire was built on quicksand. He was potentially facing ruin, even prison. His sarcasm, his isolation—it wasn’t just arrogance. It was the last stand of a drowning man. I had been his beautiful distraction, his summer lie.

I confronted him. We stood in the same study where our passion had ignited.

“You called me a forgery,” I said, my hand instinctively over my stomach. “But you’re a hollow man in a hollow empire. We’re both fakes, Julian. The only thing that wasn’t fake was this.” I didn’t specify if I meant the emotion or the child.

He looked at me, the storm in his eyes finally breaking into pure anguish. “Don’t you see, Vanja?” he said, my real name now a soft caress, a surrender. “You were the one real thing in my fake life. And I couldn’t even have that. I have to go back. I have to face it. I can’t have you… or anyone… in the crossfire.”

He left the next morning. Not with a helicopter, but quietly, by car. He left me a envelope on the grand piano. Inside was a staggering amount of money in cash, a note that said simply “For Vanja. Be real.”, and the deed to a small, beautiful stone house in a secluded cove on the other side of the island, purchased in my real name.

He’d known who I was for longer than I’d realised. And he’d loved me anyway.

The summer I lied beautifully ended with a truth more shattering than any lie. I stayed in the house on the cove. I raised our daughter, who has his stormy eyes and my stubborn chin. I named her Lara, after no one in any story. Julian Ashford went to trial. His name was splashed across papers, a tale of greed and downfall. I never spoke to him again. Sometimes, when the Adriatic wind blows a certain way, I can still hear his sarcastic baritone, feel the ghost of his touch, and taste the salt of that tragic, beautiful summer where two liars found the one true thing they could never keep.

35 The Night Ferry to Nowhere

The first thing I noticed about her was that she was trying to light a cigarette with hands that were shaking so badly she’d already dropped two matches into the dark Adriatic below. The second thing I noticed was that she was doing this while leaning so far over the railing of the Jadranka, the 11 PM ferry from Split to Vis, that a stiff breeze could have sent her tumbling into the inky, star-speckled sea.

“If you’re going to jump,” I said in Croatian, not moving from my spot a few meters away, “at least leave the pack. They cost a fortune on the islands.”

She didn’t startle. She just slowly straightened up, the unlit cigarette dangling from her lips, and turned her head. The deck light carved harsh shadows on her face—mid-thirties, maybe, with a messy knot of dark hair, eyes so dark they looked like holes punched in parchment. She looked furious. And exhausted.

“I’m not jumping,” she replied in accented, but flawless, Croatian. “I’m contemplating maritime murder. My ex-husband is in the bar. If I could somehow detach this lifeboat and drop it on his head, I would.”

I grinned. I couldn’t help it. “A common fantasy. The hydraulic system for the lifeboats is finicky. I could show you a more reliable method involving a fire extinguisher and a well-placed banana peel.”

She finally got the cigarette lit, the flare illuminating her sharp features. She took a long drag, exhaled towards the Milky Way sprawling above us. “You sound like a man with experience in maritime murder.”

“Ante,” I said, offering a hand. “And no. Just a man who takes this ferry too often and has seen a lot of bad decisions being contemplated on this deck.”

She looked at my hand, then back at my face, and finally shook it. Her grip was cold and firm. “Lea.”

“German?”

“Half. My mother was from Zadar. I live in Berlin.” She leaned back against the railing, studying me. I was used to being studied. At forty-two, with a beard that was more grey than black, a nose that had been broken twice, and the general build of a retired boxer who still enjoyed a good fight, I didn’t exactly blend in. “You look like someone who either fixes problems or is one.”

“I’m a problem that other people try to fix,” I said, pulling out my own cigarettes. “Usually unsuccessfully.”

That earned a ghost of a smile. “A philosopher.”

“A fisherman. From Komiža, on Vis. Philosophers just talk about the abyss. I pull things out of it.”

The ferry’s horn gave a low blast, and the vessel swayed gently on the swells. We smoked in silence for a moment, the churn of the engines beneath us, the muffled laughter from the heated glass-enclosed bar where her ex-husband presumably was.

“He’s getting married again,” Lea said suddenly, as if confessing to the night. “To a woman named Luna. Who names a child Luna? She’s twenty-five. She makes ceramic unicorns. He showed me pictures. They’re terrible unicorns. Lopsided.”

“The crime is not the unicorns,” I said gravely. “It is the lack of artistic integrity. If you’re going to make a mythical beast, commit to its majesty.”

She barked a laugh, sharp and surprising. “Exactly! Thank you! You understand.”

“I understand bad ex-husbands. Mine was a nightmare,” I said, straight-faced.

She blinked. “Yours?”

“Ivana. She had a moustache that could have won awards and the soul of a tax inspector. She left me for a baker from Hvar. Said his dough was more reliable.” I sighed theatrically. “My dough was always… unpredictable.”

Lea was full-on laughing now, a rich, throaty sound that seemed to startle her as much as it did me. She covered her mouth. “You’re terrible.”

“I’ve been told.” I gestured with my head. “You need a drink that isn’t near a unicorn-enthusiast. I have a bottle of loza in my bag. It tastes like petrol and regret, but it’s effective.”

“That’s the most romantic offer I’ve had all year,” she said, pushing off the railing.

We took refuge on a stack of coiled ropes at the stern, away from the wind and the other passengers. The loza, homemade grape brandy from my neighbor, did indeed taste like flammable regret, but it burned a warm path through the chill. And with it, the floodgates opened.

We talked about everything and nothing. Her failed marriage (“He wanted a porcelain doll to place on a shelf. I am more of a rusted, blunt instrument.”), her work as a translator of obscure Slavic poetry (“I bring bleakness to the masses.”), her mother’s recent death that had brought her back to Dalmatia. I told her about the sea, about the strange, quiet life of an islander, about my own failed attempts at being a “normal” man with a “normal” job in Split before the sea called me back.

The conversation was a duel, a dance. She was whip-smart, with a wit so sharp it could fillet a man. I parried with the coarse, grounded humor of a fisherman. We traded barbs and stories, our knees touching on the ropes, the empty space between us crackling with a sudden, electric charge.

“You’re not just a fisherman,” she said at one point, her eyes searching mine in the dim light.

“I am tonight,” I said, holding her gaze. “Tonight, I’m just a man on a boat with a beautiful, sad stranger.”

“I’m not sad,” she fired back. “I’m explosively angry. There’s a difference.”

“Anger is just sad’s bodyguard,” I said, and for a second, the mask slipped. I saw something raw flash in her eyes, an acknowledgment.

The third round of loza was when the touching started. Not deliberate, but incidental—a hand on an arm to emphasize a point, a nudge of a shoulder. The fourth round was when the incidental became deliberate. My thumb brushing a tear of laughter from her cheek. Her fingers, tracing the line of my broken nose.

“How?” she whispered.

“First time, a fish. A seventy-kilo tuna, right in the face. Second time, the fish’s owner. A disagreement over shares.”

She laughed, and her breath was sweet with brandy. “A life of violence.”

“A life of passion,” I corrected, my voice low. “They are often the same thing.”

I don’t know who closed the final distance. It felt inevitable, like the ferry cutting through the waves towards a predetermined point. One moment we were talking, the next, our mouths were fused together in a kiss that tasted of smoke, loza, and desperate, aching loneliness. It wasn’t gentle. It was a collision, all teeth and clashing tongues and grasping hands, a frantic attempt to crawl inside each other’s skin and hide from the world.

She pulled back, breathing heavily. “I don’t do this.”

“Neither do I,” I lied.

“Liar,” she said, but she was pulling me up, leading me by the hand through a maze of corridors, down a metal staircase to the car deck. It was a cavernous, dimly lit space, smelling of oil, diesel, and cold metal. Shadows clung to the parked cars and campers. She pushed me against the cold hull of the ship, next to a dusty van with Austrian plates.

“Here?” I murmured against her neck.

“It’s quiet. And no unicorns.”

What followed was not lovemaking. It was a battle, a release, a exorcism. Against the shuddering metal wall of the ferry, with the thunderous groan of the engines vibrating through our bones, we fucked with a frantic, fully-clothed urgency. Zippers ripped, buttons pinged off into the darkness. Her back was against the van, her legs wrapped around my hips, my hands cupping her face as we moved together in a furious, perfect rhythm. It was messy, awkward, profoundly unromantic, and one of the most devastatingly intimate experiences of my life. We weren’t two bodies seeking pleasure; we were two shipwrecked souls sharing the last life raft, communicating through gasps and touch everything we couldn’t say.

After, slumped together in the front seat of the Austrian van, which she’d somehow unlocked with a hairpin (“a skill from a misspent youth”), we shared my last cigarette. The fury had burned away, replaced by a deep, trembling quiet.

“I haven’t felt real in a year,” she said, her head on my shoulder.

“You feel real to me,” I said, and meant it.

As the sky began to soften from black to indigo, we talked more. The real talk. The dangerous talk. She told me her deepest fear: that she was forever in translation, never the original text. I told her mine: that I was a ghost in my own life, watching it pass by like islands in the dark.

“Stay,” she said suddenly, as the first razor-edge of dawn cut the horizon. “Get off with me in Vis. Don’t go to Komiža. Stay with me for a few days.”

The words hung in the air, more terrifying than any confession. And I wanted to. God, I wanted to. I could see it—a sun-drenched room, her skin warm, the two of us laughing in a way that didn’t feel like a defense.

But the sky was lightening. And with the light came the reality.

I took a long, final drag of the cigarette. “Lea,” I said, my voice gravel. “I need to tell you something.”

“Oh, God,” she said, sitting up, pulling her dress around her. “You’re married.”

“No.”

“You have six children.”

“No.”

“You’re a wanted war criminal.”

A sad smile touched my lips. “Closer.” I turned to face her. The dawn light was cruel, showing every line, every scar, every year on my face. “My name is Ante. But I’m not from Komiža. I’m from a village near Knin. And I’m not getting off this ferry in Vis.”

She frowned, confused. “Then where?”

“The ferry makes a stop at the island of Biševo at 6 AM. Just a few minutes. For the mail and a few supplies. I get off there.”

“So? I’ll get off with you. We can get a coffee, wait for the next boat…”

“Lea,” I interrupted, my heart a cold, hard stone in my chest. “There is no next boat to Biševo today. And there is no village there for me to go to. No family. No house.”

Her confusion was turning into something else. A dawning horror. “I don’t understand.”

“Ten years ago,” I said, each word an effort, “I was a different man. A businessman in Zagreb. Ambitious. Greedy. I cut corners. I lied. I was involved in a construction deal—a complex of apartments. The foundation was faulty. I knew. I signed off on it anyway.”

The air in the van was suddenly frozen. She was staring at me, utterly still.

“The building collapsed. During the day. It was a miracle it wasn’t at night. But a woman was home. A young mother, visiting a friend. She died. Her name was Lora. Lora Vuković.”

Lea’s hand flew to her mouth. Her eyes widened, not with sympathy, but with a shock so profound it was physical.

“My mother’s name,” she whispered, the words barely audible over the engines. “My mother’s maiden name was Vuković.”

The world stopped. The ferry’s groan faded. There was only her horrified face and the echoing, monstrous truth.

“Your… your mother was from Zadar,” I stammered, the pieces crashing together with catastrophic force.

“She moved there after she married!” Lea’s voice was a razor-sharp shard. “Her family… her sister… they were from Zagreb. Oh, my God. Lora. My aunt. My Teta Lora.” She scrambled away from me, fumbling for the door handle. “You. It was you. The man they never caught. The one who vanished. The ‘ghost contractor.’ They said you fled to South America.”

“I went to Biševo,” I said, my voice hollow. “A friend from the army… he had a forgotten shepherd’s hut. No one goes there. I’ve lived there for ten years. I come out only like this, at night, on the ferry, to get supplies from a contact in Split. To feel… connected. To remember what being a person was like. Ante is my name. But the man who did that… he died in the collapse, too.”

She was out of the van now, staring at me as if I were a monster dredged from the deep. The woman I had just held, who had laughed and kissed and clutched at me with such passion, was gone. In her place was a statue of pure, white-hot hatred.

“You killed my aunt,” she said, each word a nail. “You destroyed my family. My mother never recovered from the guilt.”

“Guilt?”

“She was supposed to meet her that day! She cancelled! She lived with that for the rest of her life. And you… you were here. Kissing me. Telling me stories.” A violent, ugly sob tore from her throat. “Was this a game? Some sick, twisted…”

“NO!” The roar burst from me, echoing in the car deck. I got out, but didn’t approach. “Lea, I didn’t know. I swear on the soul I’m not sure I have left. This… tonight… was the first real thing I’ve felt in a decade. You have to believe me.”

The ferry’s horn blasted—the signal for Biševo. The small, rocky island was coming into view, a dark silhouette against the pinkening sky.

She stood there, trembling, tears cutting tracks through her makeup. She was holding herself, small and broken in the cavernous space.

“You have a choice,” I said, the words ash in my mouth. “You can report me. Tell the captain. They will radio the police. I will be waiting on the dock. My ten years of hiding will be over. Justice, of a sort, will be done.”

She said nothing, just stared.

“Or,” I whispered, “you can let me disappear. Again. I will get off this ferry, and I will go back into my hole. You will never see me again. You can go back to your life in Berlin, to your terrible ex-husband and his unicorns, and you can forget this night ever happened. You can tell yourself I was just a ghost.”

The ferry was slowing, turning towards the tiny, rickety dock. A single light shone there.

“Why?” she finally asked, her voice shattered. “Why tell me? You could have just left. Gone.”

“Because you asked me to stay,” I said simply. And it was the truth.

The ferry bumped gently against the dock. A crewman shouted from above.

I looked at her one last time—the fierce, beautiful, broken woman I had found in the dark. I had given her a night of life, and in return, I had thrust a knife into the very heart of her past.

I turned and walked towards the stern ramp that was being lowered.

“Ante.”

I stopped, but didn’t turn.

“Look at me.”

I turned. Her face was a mask of agony, but her eyes were dry now. They held mine across the dim space.

“If I ever see you again,” she said, her voice clear and cold as the dawn sea, “I will destroy you. Not with the police. With my own hands. Do you understand?”

I nodded. It was a promise. A curse. A gift.

“Then disappear,” she said.

I walked down the ramp onto the damp, weather-beaten planks of the Biševo dock. I didn’t look back. I heard the engines rev, the groan of the ramp lifting. I stood there until the Jadranka was just a shrinking silhouette against the blazing sunrise, heading towards Vis, towards the rest of her life.

I turned and walked up the steep, stony path towards the bare hills. Back to my hut. Back to my silence. Back to being a ghost.

The night ferry had taken me to the one place I could never escape: myself. And for a few, fleeting hours in the dark, with a stranger named Lea, it had also taken me to the closest thing to forgiveness I would ever know—the terrible, beautiful chance to be seen, and then, to be told to vanish.

I disappeared into the rocks as the sun rose, carrying the taste of her and the weight of my life. Somewhere, on a boat heading to a new day, a woman carried the same.

36 She Stayed for the Fig Tree

The first thing Iva decided to do when she left Dalmatia was to burn every lace tablecloth in her possession. They smelled of dust, of sea salt, of stagnation, and of her grandmother’s sighing prayers. The second thing was to never, ever eat another fig. They were the taste of this place—cloyingly sweet, seedy, a messy, purple-lipped indulgence that felt too much like surrender.

Her suitcase, a hard-shelled, cosmopolite blue, lay open on one of those very lace cloths, a rebellion in pastel. It was the third of September. Tomorrow, a bus would take her to Split, a train to Zagreb, a plane to Berlin, where a job in a sleek architectural firm—all glass and clean lines—awaited. She had orchestrated her escape with the precision of a military campaign. Everything was accounted for.

Everything except the fig tree.

It was not her fig tree. It belonged to the crumbling stone house next door, a house that seemed to lean on the olive grove for support. And it belonged, she supposed, to the man who tended it. Tomislav. A name as old and stubborn as the hills. She’d seen him over the low wall for years—a quiet, broad-shouldered silhouette moving among the gnarled branches, his hands, even from a distance, looking capable of both great gentleness and crushing force.

On this last afternoon, drawn by a restlessness she refused to name as doubt, Iva walked into her own small, neglected garden. The Adriatic stretched below, a dazzling, deceptive blue plate. And there he was. Tomislav was standing perfectly still, one palm flat against the silver-grey bark of the fig tree’s trunk, his head tilted as if listening.

“Checking its pulse?” she called, her voice sharpened by her own impending flight. “Or confessing your sins?”

He didn’t startle. He turned slowly. His face was all angles and shadow, his eyes the colour of the sea before a storm. He wore a simple, paint-stained shirt, open at the throat.

“Its heartbeat is slow and deep,” he said, his voice a low rumble. “Much more interesting than my sins. Which are few and terribly boring.” A ghost of a smile touched his mouth. “Going somewhere, Iva?”

The suitcase, visible through her open window, was an accusation. “Everywhere,” she said.

“Ah.” He looked back at the tree. “This one is going nowhere. And yet, look.”

He stepped aside. The tree was a masterpiece of chaotic life. Leaves like giant, ragged hands filtered the sun into dizzying patterns. And from its sinewy branches hung hundreds of figs—some still green and hard, others swelling, turning deep purple, split at the necks with ripeness, oozing a drop of golden nectar. It was obscene in its fertility.

“It’s just a tree,” Iva said, but her throat felt tight.

“Just,” he echoed, as if the word were ridiculous. “It remembers the Romans. It survived the Venetians, the Austrians, the… well, everyone. It drinks from a spring deep in the karst. Its roots are probably wrapped around the bones of my great-great-grandfather’s favourite dog.” He plucked a perfect fig, so ripe it was almost black. “It is not ‘just’ anything.”

He held it out to her over the wall. It was a dare.

“I don’t like figs,” she lied.

“You’re a terrible liar. Your nona told me you used to steal them as a child, until your mouth and hands were stained for days.” His smile widened, showing a chipped tooth. “You were a notorious fig bandit.”

Damn her grandmother and her loose lips. Iva snatched the fig from his hand. Their fingers brushed. His were warm, rough with calluses. She bit into the fruit. The flavor exploded—honeyed, rich, earthy, a taste of sun-baked stone and deep, secret water. It was devastating.

“See?” he said softly.

“It’s a fig,” she insisted, juice running down her chin. She wiped it away with an angry swipe. “A temporary pleasure.”

“The only kind there is,” he replied.

That night, Iva dreamed of roots. Thick, pale, searching roots, cracking through the foundations of her house, twining around her ankles. She woke at dawn, the bus schedule blinking like a red eye on her phone. She made coffee. She looked at the suitcase. Then she walked to the window.

Tomislav was already there, gathering the fallen leaves with a rake that whispered secrets to the earth. He moved with an economical grace, a man utterly at home in his own skin and his own patch of dirt. A sudden, wild thought struck her: He has never doubted who he is. He has never wanted to be elsewhere.

It was this, more than the tree, that held her. That first day became a week. She told herself she was recovering from a summer cold. Then, that the autumn light was too good for painting (she dabbled, badly). She told the Berlin firm a family emergency had arisen. She was a strategist without a strategy, a general whose army had deserted.

Their interactions were a slow, silent dance. She would bring her sketchbook to the garden; he would prune or water or simply sit, smoking, watching the clouds. They spoke in pauses and glances. When they did talk, it was a game of verbal chess.

“You’re like a cat who claims to hate the house but never leaves the hearth,” he observed one afternoon, as she scowled at a failed watercolour of the bay.

“And you’re like a particularly handsome barnacle,” she shot back. “Deeply attached, and slightly crusty.”

He laughed, a sound that started deep in his chest. “Barnacles travel the world on the hulls of ships. Maybe I’ve seen more than you think, fig bandit.”

He began leaving a small bowl of perfect figs on her side of the wall each morning. She retaliated by leaving him terrible abstract sketches of the tree, which he would later critique with shocking acuity.

“The anguish here is interesting,” he’d say, pointing to a violent slash of black paint. “But you’ve missed the joy. The tree is happy. It is a glutton for life.”

“Trees don’t have emotions.” “Says the woman painting her existential crisis onto its leaves.”

The shift was as gradual as the turning of the season. One evening, a fierce Bora wind whipped down from the mountains, rattling shutters. Iva, battling a stubborn window, heard a knock. Tomislav stood there, hair wild, holding a bottle of rakija and a blanket.

“The tree is complaining loudly. I need shelter from its complaints.” He didn’t wait for an invitation.

They sat on her floor, wrapped in the blanket, passing the fiery plum brandy back and forth. The wind howled. The lace curtains danced like ghosts.

“Why did you really stay?” he asked, his voice a warm rumble in the dim room.

The honest answer sat on her tongue: Because you are the first real thing I have ever seen. She didn’t say it. Instead, she said, “The bus smelled bad.”

He nodded gravely. “A classic deterrent.”

He was closer now. She could see the flecks of lighter grey in his stubble, the tiny scar through his eyebrow. The silence between them was no longer empty; it was thick, charged, like the air before lightning.

“You talk too much,” she whispered.

“So do you,” he breathed, and then his mouth was on hers.

The first kiss was not gentle. It was a clash of sharp wit and sharper need, a battle for dominance that neither won. It tasted of rakija and the salt on her skin from the wind. His hands, those capable hands, framed her face, then slid into her hair, pulling her closer until there was no space for doubt, for Berlin, for anything but the feel of him.

What followed was not a tender merging, but a glorious, frantic undoing. Clothes were not so much removed as declared irrelevant. He lifted her against the whitewashed wall, her back to the cool plaster, and she wrapped her legs around his waist, anchoring herself to his strength. There was no whispered poetry, only ragged breaths, bitten-off curses in Croatian, and the sublime, shocking rightness of it. He was all heat and solid muscle, and she was all wildfire and grasping need. It was passion rooted in weeks of shared silence, now erupting into a language more ancient than words. When she cried out, it was muffled against his shoulder; when he followed, his groan was a vibration she felt in the very core of her being.

After, tangled on the floor, the wind still screaming outside, he traced the line of her spine. “So,” he said, his voice rough with satisfaction. “The fig bandit steals the farmer, too.”

She snorted, burrowing closer. “You left the gate open.”

Their love affair was conducted in stolen hours and full, glorious days. It was playful and profound. He taught her how to prune the fig tree, his arms around her, guiding her hands. “Not here, you vandal! This branch is a dreamer. It needs to sleep.” She read him passages from the modernist architecture books she’d packed, and he’d scoff, “Why live in a glass box when you can live in the arms of a tree?”

They swam naked in the cold October sea, laughing like fools. They argued fiercely about politics, art, the best way to cook squid. He called her his “furious little exile.” She called him her “stone-age sensualist.”

She met his world: his elderly, deaf aunt who communicated by shouting recipes; his friends, fishermen and stonemasons, who told outrageous, filthy jokes and sang melancholic klapa songs with tears in their eyes. She, the city girl with the sharp tongue and the degree, was disarmed by their uncomplicated acceptance. For the first time, Iva felt not like a visitor in her own homeland, but like someone who belonged to a specific, warm, maddening patch of it.

But the lie she’d told Berlin—and herself—began to curdle. It sat between them, a ghost at the feast. She’d postponed, then declined the job. Her savings were dwindling. The future was a blank page she was too terrified to write upon.

The real emotions, once surfaced, were terrifying. She loved him. She loved the tree. She loved the light on the stones in the late afternoon. It was a devastating, anchoring love. And it felt like a sentence.

The crisis came in November. A letter arrived from Berlin, a final, generous offer from another firm, sparked by a former professor’s recommendation. It was a lifeline thrown back to her old, planned, clean-lined life.

She took the letter to the fig tree. Tomislav was spreading straw around its base for the winter.

“They want me,” she said, her voice flat.

He straightened, wiping his hands on his trousers. He looked at the letter, then at her face. The playful light was gone from his eyes. “And what do you want, Iva?”

“I don’t know!” The words tore out of her. “I want to go. I want to be the person I meant to be. I want to build things that touch the sky, not just… tend to things that are already ancient!”

He flinched as if struck. The silence that followed was the unbearable one. It wasn’t shared; it was a chasm.

“So,” he said finally, his voice dangerously quiet. “This. Us. The tree. It is just ‘tending to ancient things’? A holiday from your real life?”

“No! Yes. I don’t know, Tomislav. It’s not a real life, is it? It’s a beautiful postcard. But I’ll fade here. I’ll become part of the scenery, another lace curtain fluttering in a window.”

His jaw tightened. “And what am I? The picturesque local? Part of the rustic décor?” “You know it’s not like that!” “Do I?” He took a step toward her, his eyes blazing. “You talk of real life. This is real life. The roots, the seasons, the birth, the rot, the love that stays. It is ugly and beautiful and it stays. You are the one living a fantasy. A fantasy of running away.”

They were shouting now, their sharp tongues turned into weapons, hacking at the very roots of what they’d built.

“I have to go,” she sobbed, the truth and the lie now indistinguishable. “Then go,” he roared, pointing toward the road. “Go build your glass towers. See if you can see your soul in the reflections. But don’t you dare call this nothing. Don’t you dare.”

He turned his back on her, his hand going to the trunk of the fig tree, that familiar, listening posture. It was a dismissal. It was agony.

Blind with tears, Iva packed. She did not burn the lace cloths. She folded them, the scent of dust and sea and him clinging to the threads. She left before dawn, the blue suitcase rolling behind her like a traitorous pet. She did not look back.

Berlin was everything she thought she wanted. It was sharp, efficient, fast. She worked on towering structures of steel and glass. She dated a witty graphic designer. She drank excellent wine. She was successful, and she was a ghost.

Three years passed. The ache did not dull; it fossilized, becoming a permanent, heavy shape inside her chest. Then, a forwarded letter came from her grandmother’s solicitor. The old woman had passed peacefully. There were some papers about the house.

Iva returned in a bleak March. Dalmatia was grey, the sea iron-coloured and choppy. Her heart hammered as the taxi rounded the familiar bend. Her house looked smaller. And next door…

The stone house stood. But in the garden, the fig tree was gone.

Not dead. Gone. A raw, gaping hole remained, the earth freshly turned. A stump, sawed flat and low, was all that was left.

She stumbled from the taxi, her legs weak. She went to the hole, as if she could find an answer in the dirt. A piece of paper, sealed in a plastic bag and weighted with a stone, lay on the stump.

In Tomislav’s bold, unruly script, it read:

“Iva,

The tree died this winter. A sudden, hard frost after a warm spell. It confused its sap. It thought it was time to wake, and the cold killed it. The core was rotten.

I could not bear to look at its corpse. It was a lie to see it standing there, lifeless. So I removed it. It is easier to look at an empty space than at a beautiful, dead thing pretending to be alive.

I have gone to Zagreb. My cousin has a construction business. Perhaps I will learn to build glass towers, too. Or perhaps I will just learn how to forget.

The roots, they say, are still deep in the earth. They will take decades to rot. The hole will remain for a long time.

Tomislav.”

The world tilted. Iva sank to her knees in the cold mud beside the hole. She had thought the tragedy was in leaving, in the grand, romantic sacrifice of a love for a life. But she was wrong. The true, unbearable tragedy was in the parallel lie. She had stayed for the living tree and the living man, and then she had left, believing the love would remain, evergreen in memory, a perfect, suspended thing. He had stayed with the dying tree, and when its truth was revealed, he had removed it, unable to live with the false shell.

They had both been clinging to a mirage. She to the mirage of a self that could thrive without its roots. He to the mirage of a love that could survive neglect.

The hole in the ground was the most honest thing she had ever seen. It was the shape of her heart. She knelt there as a cold drizzle began to fall, weeping for the tree, for Tomislav, for the future they’d rotted with their fears. She had come back for answers, and the earth had provided the starkest one of all: sometimes, when you tear something out by the roots, the emptiness left behind is the only thing left to tend.

And she knew, with a certainty that was both cruel and clarifying, that she would stay. Not for a ghost, not for a memory, but to face that emptiness. To sit with the hole, and the lingering roots, and learn, slowly, what might ever grow again in the space where something ancient and true had once lived.

37 The Man Who Knew My Worst Story

The first time I saw Jure, he was singing a filthy sea shanty to a stray cat on the Riva in Orebić, a bottle of Pelješac red in his other hand. The cat looked unimpressed. I was late, sweaty, and my soul felt like a wrung-out dishcloth—the precise condition I came to this sun-bleached, pine-scented spit of land to mend. I’d rented the little stone house with the blue shutters up the hill for the summer, wanting only the Adriatic’s vast, clean silence.

“He doesn’t like your singing,” I said, brushing past him, my Italian sandals clicking on the warm stone.

Jure stopped mid-chorus about a mermaid and a missing sock. He turned. His eyes weren’t the blue of the sea, but the green of the deep channel that separates Orebić from Korčula—changeable, secretive. “Ah, but gospođa,” he said, his Dalmatian accent wrapping around the formal address like a joke. “He’s just jealous because I know the second verse, and he only knows how to yowl at the moon. You’re the writer from Zagreb. Petra.”

It wasn’t a question. A little chill, despite the 35-degree heat. “Do I have a sign?”

“You have a walk,” he said, taking a swig from the bottle. “Like you’re carrying a box of crystal and hoping no one bumps you. I’m Jure. I fix boats. And,” he added, nodding at the cat, “I provide free, terrible concerts for the local wildlife.”

That should have been it. A funny, crazy moment on the waterfront. But as I moved to go, he said, very quietly, almost to the wine bottle, “It’s heavier than a box of crystal, though, isn’t it? What you’re carrying. The silence after the crash.”

My blood stopped. The world—the shimmering sea, the red-roofed houses, the mountain of Sveti Ilija behind us—narrowed to a pinprick. No one knew. Not my ex-husband, not my therapist, not my best friend I’d known since kindergarten. I had never, ever told a living soul about the sound the car made when it hit the patch of black ice, a sound like the world tearing in two, a sound that was the prelude to a silence so absolute it had become my permanent residence. It happened eight years ago on a road outside Karlovac. A deer, a swerve, a skid. I walked away without a scratch. The other car didn’t. A family. I was cleared by the police, it was a tragic accident. But the court of my own mind never adjourned. I sealed it in a lead-lined chamber inside me and moved through life, a ghost with a perfectly convincing human suit.

And this stranger, this boat-fixer with wine on his breath and sea-salt in his hair, had just named its weight.

I stared at him. He didn’t look smug or psychic. He looked… sad. For me.

“You’re drunk,” I managed, my voice a rasp.

“Not nearly enough for that,” he said. Then he smiled, a reckless, brilliant smile that cracked the solemnity. “Come on. Let me buy you a coffee to apologize for my terrible singing and my worse manners. The cat is paying.”

The intimacy didn’t grow; it exploded. It was as if he’d found the secret latch to a door I’d cemented shut, and now it swung wide, inviting him into all the dusty, haunted rooms. We spent that first evening at a konoba overlooking the water, talking about everything except the thing he’d referenced. He was wicked funny, with a sharp tongue that could flay the pretensions of the seasonal yacht owners or the mayor’s new, hideous statue of a dancing grape. He’d grown up here, knew every cove, every family feud going back a century.

“So you fix boats,” I said, over grilled sardines. “I fix what’s broken,” he corrected, sucking a lemon slice. “Boats, engines, sometimes… perspectives. The sea is a great corrector of bullshit. You can’t lie to a storm.”

“And what’s my perspective needing?” I asked, playing with fire.

He leaned in. The lantern light caught the gold in his stubble. “To be at sea in a storm, Petra. To remember you can still feel something that isn’t guilt.”

He kissed me that night, up by the old Franciscan monastery, with the scent of rosemary and the view of the Korčula channel dotted with lights. It wasn’t a gentle kiss. It was a claiming, an answer to a question I’d been too afraid to ask for eight years. My body, which had felt like a museum piece, roared back to life.

The sex was the first true, screaming argument against death I’d ever allowed myself. In the cool, whitewashed bedroom of my rented house, with the shutters banging in the maestral wind, he worshipped and devoured me. There was no tentativeness. He handled my body like he handled the ropes on his sailboat—with confidence, with skill, with a playful, rough affection. He’d whisper filthy, hilarious things in my ear in a mix of Croatian and Italian that made me laugh even as I climaxed. Once, in the throes, he yelled, “More to starboard!” and I laughed so hard I cried, and then I just cried, and he held me through it, saying nothing.

Our days were a sun-drenched dream. He taught me to sail his little dinghy, the Bura. We’d sail to Badija Island, swim naked in the coves, and he’d produce a picnic of bread, olives, and figs from nowhere. We’d have water fights with the deck hose. He’d tell me outrageous stories about the pirates who once haunted these waters. “You see, Petra,” he’d say, gesturing with a piece of bread, “they weren’t bad men. They just had a sharp understanding of redistribution of wealth. And nice tans.”

The playful banter was our love language. “You’re the worst sailor I’ve ever met,” he’d claim, grinning, as I accidentally jibed. “You navigate by gossip and wine stains on old maps,” I’d shoot back. “And yet, I always find my way to the best hidden spots. And to you.”

But the shadow was always there. He’d sometimes look at me with a knowledge that was too deep, too specific. He knew I hated the sound of tires on wet pavement. He’d steer me away from a cafe if a child at a nearby table started crying uncontrollably. Once, during a fierce summer storm, as thunder shook the house, I had a panic attack, seeing not lightning but headlights veering. He didn’t ask. He simply wrapped me in a blanket, put on a stupid old Yugoslav pop album, and danced with me in the kitchen until the terror passed.

“How do you know?” I whispered into his neck that night, as we lay tangled in sheets damp with sweat and rain. “I just see you,” he murmured into my hair. “I see the shape of the hole inside you. The rest I can guess.”

It was enough. It was terrifyingly, wonderfully enough. For the first time, I felt known. Not in spite of my worst story, but through it. He was the shore my wreck had finally washed up on.

The revelation came on the night of the Festival of St. Roko, the patron saint of Orebić. The town was a frenzy of music, fireworks, and wine. We were gloriously drunk, dancing in the main square, eating fried dough. I felt happy. Truly, stupidly, lightheartedly happy. I hadn’t felt that in so long I didn’t even have a name for the sensation anymore.

Back at his apartment above the boatyard, giddy and wine-loosened, I was rummaging in his bedside drawer for a lighter. My fingers brushed against a folded, worn piece of paper. A cold, sober clarity cut through the fog of drink. I pulled it out.

It was a newspaper clipping, yellowed at the edges. A local Karlovac paper. Dated eight years and two months ago.

The headline: Tragic Accident on Icestrewn Road Claims Young Family. Below it, a grainy photo of the wreck. My car was blurred out, but the other car was visible. And below that, the article. And below that, in the “Survived By” section, a list of family members. One name was circled in faint, faded blue ink.

Jure Marić, grandson.

The world didn’t narrow this time. It shattered. It exploded into a million sharp, glittering pieces. I heard myself make a sound, not human.

He came in from the balcony, a smile on his face, holding two glasses of water. The smile died when he saw the clipping in my hand.

All the color drained from his face. “Petra…”

“Your grandparents,” I whispered. “Your mother. Your little sister. Ana.” Her name was in the article. She was seven.

He nodded, slowly, as if his head was made of stone. “Yes.”

The intimacy, which had felt like a miracle, now felt like a surgical violation. Every tender moment, every glance of understanding, every time he’d soothed a fear he “guessed” at—it was all a lie. A directed, deliberate performance.

“You knew,” I said, my voice flat. “From the very first second. My name. The police report. Everything.” “I knew who you were when you rented the house. The agency is run by my cousin,” he said, his voice hollow. “I… I planned to hate you. I came to the Riva that day to… I don’t know. To see the monster.”

“And?” He looked at me, and his eyes were oceans of pain. “You were just a woman. Carrying a box of crystal. Broken in the exact same place I was. I thought…”

“You thought you could what?” I was screaming now. “Fix me? Like one of your fucking boats? This wasn’t intimacy, Jure! This was a… a forensic study! You were the prosecutor and the jury and the… the lover? My God!” The grotesqueness of it hit me, and I doubled over, retching.

“It started that way,” he admitted, tears finally cutting tracks through his stubble. “But it changed. Petra, look at me. It changed. What I feel for you is real. The only real thing that’s happened to me since they died.” “You lied to me every day! You used the worst moment of my life—of your life—as… as foreplay!” The memory of our passion now felt like a desecration.

“I fell in love with you!” he roared, smashing his glass against the wall. “Don’t you understand? I was drowning in hate, and you were drowning in guilt, and we found each other! Does the how matter?”

“YES!” I screamed back. “The how is the only thing that matters! You didn’t ‘see’ me! You had a fucking dossier! You knew my worst story because it was yours first. I wasn’t a person to you. I was a character in your tragedy.”

The silence that fell then was the real silence after the crash. The one I’d been living in. I saw it fill his apartment, cold and final.

He sank to his knees, broken. “What do we do?” he whispered.

There was no ‘we’. Not anymore. The beautiful, dangerous, fast-grown thing was poison at its root. It had to be cut out, or it would kill whatever was left of both of us.

“I leave,” I said, my voice now frighteningly calm. “And you live with the fact that you made the woman who killed your family fall in love with you. And that you fell in love with her. That’s your punishment. And mine.”

I left Orebić before dawn, under a sky the color of a bruise. I didn’t look back at the blue-shuttered house, at the channel, at the mountain. As the car ferry pulled away from the shore, I stood on the deck, the wind tearing at my hair.

I saw a figure standing on the Riva, perfectly still, watching the ferry go. Even at that distance, I knew it was him. He was just a dark shape against the waking light, the man who knew my worst story, who had made me feel alive by weaponizing my death. I felt a loss so profound it was like losing the accident all over again—but this time, I was losing the only person who had ever truly understood it, and the mad, painful, glorious summer that grew from its cursed soil.

The ferry horn blasted, a long, lonely sound over the green water. I turned my face towards Korčula, toward the open sea, and did not look back. But I knew, as sure as I knew the sound of tearing metal, that part of me would forever be anchored in that bay, in that sun, in the eyes of the man who fixed broken things, and broke me in the only way that left any hope of someday being whole.

38 The Night I Locked Him Out

The lock, a solid, unforgiving chunk of Brac limestone, clicked into place with a sound like the devil cracking his knuckles, and it was the most satisfying noise I had ever heard, right up until the moment it became the most terrifying.

The wind off the Adriatic didn’t howl; it screamed, a furious, salt-laced banshee hurling itself against our little stone house in the village of Škrip. Each gust felt like a physical slap against the shutters. Inside, the air was thicker than Dalmatian stew, heavy with the ghost of every venomous word Lovro and I had just spat at each other.

“You are as stubborn as this damned island rock!” he’d roared, his handsome face twisted, a strand of his usually sun-bleached hair stuck to his forehead.

“And you have the sensitivity of a tourist’s flip-flop!” I’d shot back, my voice a scalpel. “All you care about is your boat, your wine, your friends down at Konoba Mate!”

The argument was stupid, born from a misplaced comment about his ex at a village festival and fermented by too much ruby-red Plavac Mali. But it had escalated, touching every tender spot in our five years together—his wanderlust, my insecurity, his loud family, my quiet ambitions to write, the baby we hadn’t had, the wedding we kept postponing.

Now, he stood on the other side of our weathered oak door, pounding. “Nevena! Luda ženo! Open this door! It’s raining sideways!”

I leaned my back against the cool stone, the vibration of his fists traveling through my spine. “Go sleep on your precious boat!” I yelled, my voice cracking. “Maybe it’ll rock you to sleep better than I ever could!”

A silence, more violent than the pounding. Then, his voice, low and dangerously close to the keyhole. “Fine. I hope you enjoy the silence, draga. It’s all you’ll have.”

I heard his boots crunch on the gravel path, the sound swallowed by the gale. The triumph was immediate, a hot, heady rush. I did it. I locked the great Lovro out. He’d come back in an hour, sodden and sorry, and I’d make him beg. I’d make him…

But he didn’t come back in an hour.

The storm intensified. Lightning fractured the sky, illuminating the ancient olive groves in snapshots of skeletal silver. Thunder shook the very foundations of Škrip. My triumph curdled into anxiety. Where would he go? Mate’s tavern would be closed. His parents’ house was on the other side of the island, impassable in this. The boat… his little lav dinghy was moored in Bol, a death trap in these seas.

I paced. I drank a glass of wine he’d made. It tasted like regret. I called his phone. It rang out, then went to voicemail. His cheerful, booming voice—“It’s Lovro! I’m probably fixing something or eating something. Leave a message!”—felt like a relic from a dead civilization.

By midnight, fury had been replaced by cold, clawing fear. I threw on my yellow raincoat, its cheerful color a mockery, and ventured out. The wind tried to steal the door from my hands. The village was a black, streaming beast. No lights. No Lovro.

“Lovro!” I screamed, my voice snatched away. I stumbled towards the old Roman quarry, a place we often went to watch the sunset, to make love under the stars, to talk about maybe, one day, building our own place.

And there he was.

Not on the path. Not sheltering. He was at the very edge of the cliff overlooking the churning sea, shirt plastered to his back, hair a wild dark nest, standing in the lashing rain as if he were part of the storm itself.

“Lovro!” I cried, scrambling towards him. He turned. His face wasn’t angry. It was empty. Hollow. A place where my Lovro had once lived but had now evacuated.

“Go back inside, Nevena,” he said, his voice unnervingly calm. “You wanted me out. I’m out.”

“Don’t be an idiot! It’s a hurricane! Come home!”

“Why?” The word was a simple, devastating weapon. “So we can do this again next week? So I can spend another five years trying to fill a cup that has a hole in the bottom?”

The cruelty of it stole my breath. Before I could retort, a sound tore through the storm that was not wind, not thunder. It was a deep, groaning crack, a sound of the earth breaking its bones. We both turned towards the village.

Through the sheets of rain, we saw it. The old bell tower of St. Helen’s, which had stood for four centuries, was listing. Then, with a weary, grinding sigh, it collapsed in on itself, a cascade of stone and dust momentarily fighting the rain.

We stood, frozen, witnesses to an impossibility. The heart of our skyline was gone.

In that shared, apocalyptic shock, our petty war evaporated. Lovro grabbed my hand, his grip iron-strong. “The village!” he barked, and we ran, slipping and sliding down the path, united by a new, larger tragedy.

What we found was chaos, but not the chaos we expected. The tower had fallen, yes, but strangely, cleanly, into the empty square. No one was hurt. But the collapse had revealed something: a cavity in the foundation, and within it, not treasure, but a sealed, modern metal box.

While the dazed villagers gathered, Lovro, with his fisherman’s strength, pried it open. Inside were not ancient relics, but files. Photographs. Land deeds. Pages of meticulously kept ledgers. Old Mayor Družić, his face ashen, stumbled forward. “No… it can’t be…”

The box contained evidence. Evidence that half the land deals on our side of the island for the past thirty years were fraudulent. That the “heritage protection” fees were a sham. That the beloved Mayor, and his father before him, had been systematically stealing from their own people, from our families.

The shock in the square was deeper than the storm. Neighbors looked at each other with dawning horror and betrayal. In the middle of it all, Lovro’s eyes met mine. They were no longer hollow. They were blazing with a furious, clarifying light. The storm had passed, leaving a different kind of wreckage.

We walked back to our house in stunned silence. The door was still locked. I fumbled with the key, my hands numb. We stumbled inside, dripping pools of seawater and revelation onto the stone floor.

And then, we didn’t speak. We moved. The anger, the fear, the shock—it all transmuted into a raw, desperate physicality. He pushed my sodden raincoat off my shoulders, his mouth finding mine with a hunger that tasted of salt and salvation. It wasn’t tender. It was a reclaiming, a collision. My back was against the same door I’d locked him out of, his hands were under my wet dress, and I was pulling at his shirt, the buttons pinging onto the floor.

“You locked me out,” he growled against my neck, his teeth grazing my skin. “You left,” I gasped, arching into him. “You drive me insane.” “You are insane.” And then we were laughing, a wild, breathless laugh that broke into a sob as he carried me to the bed, to the familiar territory of us that now felt utterly new.

Later, skin cooling in the dark, the only sound the dripping eaves, he traced the line of my jaw. “My father’s vineyard,” he said quietly. “The expansion permit Družić granted… we paid him triple. My mother’s inheritance.”

“My nono’s olive grove,” I whispered back, the pieces slotting into place. “The ‘historical easement’.”

We lay there, allies in the ruins. The world outside was changed. The trusted was treacherous. And the man I’d locked out had come back, not through the door, but through the cataclysm.

The days that followed were a frenzy of meetings, lawyers, and village fury. Lovro, with his volcanic honesty, became an unlikely leader, roaring at council meetings, organizing townsfolk. I wielded my words, writing statements, liaising with journalists from Split. We were a team, a formidable one.

But the old cracks were still there, just filled with new, volatile material. One evening, exhausted, we fell into our old pattern.

“You were flirting with that journalist from Zagreb,” I snapped, tired and insecure. “For God’s sake, Nevena, I was getting her a coffee so she’d write the truth, not a marriage proposal!” “Your version of ‘getting coffee’ involves a lot of smiling!” “And your version of ‘support’ involves a lot of suspicion!”

We were on the brink again. But then Lovro stopped. He ran a hand through his hair, and a slow, exasperated smile spread across his face. “This is ridiculous. We just helped overthrow a corrupt dynasty and we’re arguing about smiles.”

I crossed my arms, trying to hold onto my anger, but a laugh was bubbling up. “You have a very suggestive smile.” “Come here,” he said, his voice dropping to that playful rumble that always disarmed me. “I’ll show you suggestive.”

He pulled me into a waltz around our cramped kitchen, humming a off-key klapa song. We bumped into the table, knocked over a chair, and laughed until our sides hurt. The fight was forgotten, dissolved in the absurdity and the sheer, stubborn force of our joy.

The new reality was a rollercoaster. There was sex against the cold stone of the revealed foundation pit, a frantic, life-affirming celebration of our survival. There was tragedy, too, as old friendships shattered under the weight of the truth. There was the day we found his uncle’s name in the ledgers, a betrayal that sent Lovro out to sea alone for hours.

He always came back. To me.

The final twist came not from the mayor, but from the box. Buried beneath the deeds was a single, yellowed envelope. It was addressed to my grandmother, who had died young. The letter inside was from a man who was not my grandfather. It spoke of a love that was impossible, of a child—my mother—and of a parcel of land gifted in secret. The land our house was built on.

I wasn’t who I thought I was. The roots I’d clung to were false. I showed Lovro the letter, my hands shaking. He read it, then pulled me into a crushing embrace. “So?” he murmured into my hair. “Your Nono loved you. Your mother loved you. I love you. The rest is just… geology.”

The morning after I locked him out, nothing was the same. The town’s skyline was broken, its trust severed. But from the rubble, something stronger was being built. And so were we.

Now, I stand at the same door, watching Lovro argue passionately with a stonemason about the reconstruction of the bell tower. He’s gesturing wildly, his shirt dusty, his laugh booming. He catches my eye and winks.

I think of the lock, that devil’s knuckle crack. I think of the storm, the fall, the hidden truth. I think of the unpredictable, maddening, glorious man currently trying to convince a craftsman that a slightly crooked arch would have “more character.”

I unlock the door and step out into the sun, not to shut him out, but to join him. The cup he spoke of wasn’t broken. It was just being remade, by fire and flood, into something deeper, capable of holding an entire sea.

39 She Swam Naked to the Wrong Boat

The water of the Komiža Bay was liquid obsidian, swallowing the moonlight in greedy, shimmering gulps. It was past two a.m., the cicadas had finally shut up, and the only sound was the gentle slap-slap of the Adriatic against the stone jetty. And my own breathing, steady and purposeful, as I peeled off my sundress, left it in a puddle on the pebbles, and waded naked into the blissful, cool embrace of the sea.

This was my ritual. My secret. Every summer on Vis, the Croatian island time forgot, I’d escape my family’s raucous villa after the wine-drenched dinners and slip into the night sea. It was freedom in its purest form: weightless, silent, and deliciously illicit.

Tonight, however, the currents felt playful, tugging me further out than usual. My target, my beacon, was always the same: the sleek, navy-hulled sailboat, The Moon Maiden, owned by a charming German dentist who’d once given me a tube of premium whitening paste. But the dentist had sailed off to Hvar yesterday. In his place, bobbing gently in the same mooring, was a different boat. A larger, older motor yacht, its varnished wood gleaming under the stars. The Bacchus. I didn’t register the name. I saw a familiar silhouette against the skyline and, with the serene confidence of a slightly drunk, utterly liberated woman, I swam towards it.

My mistake was not just geographical, but cosmic.

I found the swim ladder at the stern, hauled myself up with the quiet efficiency of a Navy SEAL, if Navy SEALs were thirty-year-old graphic designers from London with saltwater in their ears and not a stitch on. I dripped onto the deck, a triumphant, salty Aphrodite, and nearly screamed when a voice cut through the darkness.

“I usually require a boarding pass. But for this spectacle, I’ll waive the fee.”

He was lounging in a plush cockpit chair, shadowed by a canopy. A glass of something amber dangled from his fingers. I couldn’t see his face, but his voice was a low, amused baritone, tinged with an accent I couldn’t place—somewhere between Italian and Slavic, smoothed by years of somewhere else.

Instinct made me cross my arms over my chest. Then, with a defiance that was pure Nika, I dropped them. “You’re not Werner,” I stated, as if accusing him of a grave crime.

“A tragic but true fact. Werner has excellent taste in whitening paste, but poor timing. I’m Luka. And you are… a very bold stowaway.”

The banter began there, sharp, instant, like flint striking steel. “I’m Nika. And this is my swimming route. You’re the one parked illegally in my personal lane.”

He laughed, a rich, warm sound. “Apologies. Shall I move the 20-ton vessel?” He stood then, and the moonlight caught him. He was tall, broad-shouldered, with the kind of relaxed physicality that suggested he could handle ropes, sails, and possibly foolish naked swimmers with equal ease. Dark hair, tousled. A face that was more interesting than classically handsome—strong jaw, a faint scar through one eyebrow, eyes that even in the dark seemed to miss nothing.

“A towel would be a start,” I said, my bravado tinged with a shiver.

He disappeared and returned with a large, fluffy towel. As he handed it to me, his fingers brushed mine. A spark, literal or imagined, fizzed in the salt air. “Would you like a drink? Or are you just here to critique my mooring skills?”

That’s how it started. With a laugh. With rakija that burned a path of fire to my stomach. With stories traded under the stars. He was a documentary filmmaker, he said, from Zagreb, using the boat for a month while researching… something. He was vague. I was voluble, telling him about my overbearing Croatian mother, my bored English father, and my need to escape them both nightly.

The playful banter was a current pulling us closer. Our words were fencing matches, each parry and thrust laced with a growing, electric charge. He called me “more moje,” my sea. I called him a pirate with a suspiciously clean deck.

The first kiss happened against the helm, tasting of rakija and seawater and infinite night. It wasn’t gentle. It was a collision of hungry mouths and laughing lips, a culmination of an hour’s worth of relentless, witty foreplay.

“You’re shivering again,” he murmured against my neck, his hands, warm and sure, sliding under the towel.

“I’m not cold,” I breathed, which was the truth. Every nerve was on fire.

What followed was a scene of breathtaking audacity. There, under the canopy of stars, with the island of Vis a dark hump in the distance, we made love. It was passionate, urgent, but laced with that same playful humor. A stifled laugh as we nearly toppled a deck chair. A gasp that turned into a giggle. His sharp tongue was as skilled in seduction as it was in sarcasm. It was, without doubt, the most erotically charged and funniest sex of my life—a sweaty, joyous, conquering of the awkwardness that should have been there but spectacularly wasn’t.

Dawn was a pink smear on the horizon when I finally swam back, my body humming, a stupid, unstoppable grin on my face.

It became our pattern. My nocturnal swims were no longer solo escapes; they were targeted infiltrations. I’d surface at The Bacchus like a selkie claiming her mate. Our days were separate, but our nights were a private universe of exploration. We’d talk for hours—about art, about stupid childhood memories, about everything and nothing. He was captivating, a whirlwind of stories from war zones and film festivals, but there were gaps, odd moments when his eyes would shutter closed. I chalked it up to creative genius.

The sex was a language of its own. One night, after a particularly vigorous session in his cramped cabin, I sighed, “I think you’ve given me a splinter. In a very undignified place.”

He examined the offending spot with theatrical gravitas. “A trophy,” he declared. “From the oldest timber on the boat. You’re now officially part of The Bacchus.” He then proceeded to “extract it” with his teeth, which led to… well, another round.

The real world intruded in odd ways. My mother complained about the dark circles under my eyes. “You swim too much at night, Nika. You’ll catch a chill, or worse, meet a škrpina!” A bottom-feeding fish. If only she knew.

The twist began, as they often do, with something small. A local newspaper, Viski Glas, left on a café table. A headline, partially obscured by a coffee cup: …STILL NO ANSWERS IN PORT AUTHORITY CORRUPTION SCANDAL. A smaller sub-headline: Missing Funds Linked to Falsified Dock Permits.

Bored, waiting for my espresso, I pulled the paper over. And froze. There, in a grainy group photo of officials at a ribbon-cutting years ago, was a younger, cleaner-shaven Luka. He was standing at the edge of the group, almost out of frame, but it was unmistakably him. The caption read: Luka Varga, then Deputy Port Commissioner, celebrates the new marina expansion.

Luka Varga. Not a documentary filmmaker. A former deputy port commissioner. Connected to a scandal.

The espresso turned to acid in my mouth. That night, my swim to The Bacchus felt different. The water was colder. When I climbed aboard, he was waiting with his usual smile, but I saw the tension in it now.

“You’re quiet tonight, more moje,” he said, handing me a glass of wine.

“I read an interesting article today,” I said, my voice strangely flat. “About the port authority. And missing funds.”

The change in him was instantaneous. The playful light in his eyes extinguished, replaced by a guarded flatness. The charming pirate vanished, and in his place was a man calculating odds. “Ah,” he said simply.

“You’re Luka Varga. You were the deputy commissioner.”

He sighed, a long, weary exhalation. “I was. And I’m not a filmmaker. Not really.”

The story he told was a darker, greyer tale. He had been the fall guy, he claimed. Set up by his superior, a powerful man with political ties. The money was gone, the permits were forged, and all the circumstantial evidence pointed to him. He’d resigned before he could be prosecuted, but the stigma, the threats, the whispers followed him. The boat was his last asset, his floating exile. He was on Vis not to research, but to hide, and to try to piece together evidence to clear his name from a man who was now summering in a villa on the other side of the island.

“Why lie to me?” I asked, hurt cutting through the shock.

“Because ‘Hello, I’m a disgraced bureaucrat hiding from a corruption scandal’ isn’t the best opening line for a beautiful naked woman on your deck,” he said, with a flash of his old sharpness. Then he softened. “And because with you, for a few hours each night, I wasn’t that man. I was just Luka. The one who made you laugh.”

I believed him. Or, I wanted to. The passion that followed that night was different—desperate, clinging, as if we were trying to wash away the newly revealed truth with sweat and sensation.

But the tragedy was already in motion. I became his unlikely accomplice. My daytime wanderings now had purpose: I’d linger near the villa of the former port commissioner, a bloated, suntanned man named Dražen. I’d use my “tourist” cover to ask innocent questions in town. I learned that Dražen had recently acquired a new speedboat, that his wife flaunted a new diamond necklace. I’d report back to Luka, our nighttime trysts now layered with whispered conspiracies.

The drama peaked during Vis’s annual festival, Festa Sv. Jurja. The town was a riot of music, wine, and dancing. Luka, in a hat and sunglasses, risked coming ashore. We danced in the crowded square, our bodies communicating a frantic, fearful love. In a shadowed alley, between bursts of fireworks, he kissed me hard. “I think I have it,” he breathed. “A ledger. Dražen’s man is meeting a courier tomorrow at Stiniva Cove. If I can get it…”

“It’s too dangerous,” I begged.

“It’s my only chance to stop being a ghost,” he said.

The plan was crazy. I would create a diversion. The next afternoon, at the secluded pebble beach of Stiniva, I performed an Oscar-worthy scene: the distressed, clumsy tourist. I “twisted” my ankle spectacularly near the path where Dražen’s thug was waiting, wailing and crying for help, drawing every eye, including his. From my position on the ground, I saw Luka, moving like a shadow from the thug’s parked scooter, extracting a waterproof envelope from the saddlebag.

He got it. He melted into the pine forests. I was helped by kindly Germans, my heart hammering against my ribs.

That night, I swam to The Bacchus in a storm of exhilaration and terror. He was pacing, the ledger open on the table. “It’s all here,” he said, his eyes blazing. “Every payment. It’s enough.”

We celebrated not with laughter, but with a fierce, triumphant passion. It felt like an ending, but also a beginning. We fell asleep in his narrow berth, tangled together, for the first time allowing ourselves to dream of a future after Vis.

I awoke to the sound of engines. Not the putter of a fishing boat, but the deep, threatening rumble of powerful motors. Gray light filtered through the porthole. I shook Luka awake.

We scrambled on deck. Two black RIBs, filled with hard-faced men, were idling beside The Bacchus. And on the shore, next to a black SUV, stood Dražen, a phone to his ear.

Luka’s face went pale. “They’re not police.”

“Give us the package, Varga!” one of the men on the RIB yelled. “And the girl. Dražen wants to talk to his nosy little tourist.”

Panic, cold and absolute, seized me. Luka pushed me towards the swim platform at the stern. “Go. Now. Swim to the caves. Don’t look back.”

“I’m not leaving you!”

“Nika, GO!” His voice was a whip-crack of command, his eyes full of a love so fierce it broke my heart. “This is my fight. You living is mine.”

A man on the RIB raised something—a pistol, a tool, I couldn’t tell. I kissed him, a final, salty, desperate kiss, and rolled backwards into the water.

I dove deep, swimming with a fear-powered strength I never knew I had. I heard shouts, a loud thump, but I didn’t look back. I reached the jagged coastline and hid in a sea cave, shivering for hours, watching from the shadows.

They ransacked The Bacchus. They took Luka. The boats sped away. The yacht, our sanctuary, listed awkwardly, plundered and abandoned.

The aftermath was a blur of numb horror. I told my parents I’d seen a drug deal go wrong from a distance. I told the real police nothing. What could I say? That I’d been sleeping with an alleged corrupt official and helped him steal evidence? The ledger was gone, taken with Luka.

I left Vis a week later, a different woman. The playful night swimmer was gone, drowned in that cave. I carried the passion like a brand, and the tragedy like a stone in my chest.

I never learned what happened to Luka Varga. The official story was that he fled, a guilty man. Dražen continued to bloat in his villa. The Bacchus was sold for scrap.

Sometimes, on the darkest nights, I still swim. In pools, in lakes, in the cold sea off England. And for a moment, when the water is black and the world is silent, I’m back in that liquid obsidian, swimming towards a light, towards a voice that teased, towards a man who was both my greatest mistake and my most unforgettable love. A man who was connected to a scandal, yes, but who was also, irrevocably, connected to me. I swam naked to the wrong boat, and found a story that was too big, too dark, and too beautiful for a simple, sun-drenched island to hold.

40 The National Park Kiss

The first time I stole a kiss from a stranger, I was hiding from a monk.

Not that the monk was chasing me, mind you. I’d simply taken a wrong turn on the path to St. Mary’s Isle, found a twelfth-century Benedictine monastery instead of the salt lakes I was promised, and panicked. My panic, as ever, manifested as a swift, graceless retreat into the nearest foliage. Which is how I found myself crouched behind a fragrant thicket of Aleppo pine, my linen dress snagged on a branch, staring directly into the amused, sea-green eyes of a man who was very much not a monk.

“Are you doing penance,” he asked, his voice a low, melodic rumble that seemed to emanate from the sun-warmed stone itself, “or just very bad at hide-and-seek?”

My dignity, already in tatters, fluttered away on the Adriatic breeze. “I’m communing with nature,” I hissed, attempting to untangle myself. The fabric gave way with a dramatic rip, exposing a generous portion of my thigh. “See? Deeply connected.”

He didn’t look at the rip. He kept his eyes locked on mine, a smile playing on his lips. He was all sun-bleached curls and rugged, weathered skin, dressed in worn cargo shorts and a faded t-shirt that read, in English, ‘I’m with Stupid →’ with an arrow pointing to his own chest. A local, then, or at least someone who didn’t buy his souvenirs at the airport.

“The monks are giving a tour of the wine cellar,” he said, nodding toward the serene stone cloisters. “They’re all down there. You’re hiding from an empty church.”

The heat that flooded my face had nothing to do with the Croatian sun. “I prefer my churches empty. More holy atmosphere.”

He laughed, a sound so unselfconscious and rich it seemed to startle the cicadas into silence for a beat. “I’m Bojan.”

“Sara.” I emerged, brush-strewn and dishevelled. “And before you ask, yes, I know I have a twig in my hair. I’m considering it an accessory.”

“It’s a very fetching twig.” He stood, offering a hand. He was taller than I’d thought, with the easy, powerful grace of someone who spent his life outdoors. “The lakes are this way, Sara-with-a-twig. I’ll show you. Consider it reparations for the trauma of almost encountering a man of God.”

That was the first minute. The first stolen thing wasn’t the kiss, but my composure. I handed it over without a fight.

Bojan wasn’t a guide, but he knew Mljet like the lines on his own palms. He was a marine biologist, working on a conservation project for the lake’s endemic species. As we walked the path dappled with ancient oak and pine, he talked about the melancholic, translucent green of the waters, the playful, endangered monk seals that sometimes graced the coast, and the way the light fractured on the surface like a thousand scattered sapphires. He spoke with a passion that was both intellectual and deeply sensual, his hands painting pictures in the air.

“It’s a world apart,” he said, as we stood on the shore of Veliko Jezero, the larger lake. “Sealed off from the open sea by just a narrow channel. It looks calm, but underneath, it’s a whirl of unique, fragile life. A beautiful secret.”

“Secrets are my favourite,” I said, and it came out far more flirtatious than I’d intended.

He looked at me, the playful glint returning. “Are they? Prove it.”

“How?”

“The ferry to the island leaves in twenty minutes. The tour is forty. There’s a cove, just around that headland. It’s not on the map. A secret.” He raised an eyebrow. “Do you follow strange men to secret coves, Sara?”

“Only ones with self-deprecating t-shirts,” I shot back. “Lead on, Stupid.”

The cove was a crescent of white pebbles embraced by smooth, sun-baked cliffs. The water was so clear it seemed to not exist. We swam, the cool silk of the lake a shock and a relief. We floated on our backs, staring at the impossible blue of the sky, and I told him about my life in London – the meticulous, airless world of editing legal textbooks, the boyfriend, David, whose idea of passion was a meticulously scheduled weekly dinner and a peck on the cheek that smelled of dental floss.

“He sounds… very hygienic,” Bojan said, deadpan.

“He is! He flosses after every meal. It’s admirable. And soul-crushingly boring.”

Bojan rolled onto his side, treading water. “And what does Sara, who hides from monks and accessorizes with forestry, find… not boring?”

The question hung in the air, charged like the humidity before a storm. I didn’t answer with words. I swam closer to him, until our legs brushed underwater, a fleeting, electric contact. The laughter was gone from his eyes, replaced by a focused, blazing intensity. He cupped my cheek, his thumb brushing a droplet from my lower lip. The world shrank to that point of contact: the calloused pad of his thumb, the soft give of my lip, the lapping of the water against our entangled bodies.

“This is a terrible idea,” I whispered, my breath hitching.

“The worst,” he agreed, his voice rough. And then he kissed me.

It was not a gentle kiss. It was a claiming, a confluence of salt and sun and pent-up longing. It was laughter turned into hunger. I kissed him back with a fervour that shocked me, my hands tangling in his wet hair, my body arching against his in the buoyant water. It felt less like a betrayal and more like a homecoming to a self I’d forgotten existed – a self that was wild, and wanting, and gloriously irresponsible.

When we broke apart, gasping, foreheads pressed together, he whispered, “The kiss was stolen. Who do we return it to?”

“No one,” I breathed. “It’s ours.”

That stolen kiss on the salty lips of the lake became the blueprint for our affair. It was conducted in stolen hours and hidden places, a frantic, sun-drenched rebellion against our respective realities. Bojan’s tiny stone house in Polače, smelling of rosemary and sea, became our sanctuary. Our time was a delirious cocktail of passion and play.

He’d surprise me by reading my boring legal edits in a dramatic, Shakespearean voice, naked except for his glasses. “Section 4.2: The party of the first part shall henceforth, and with all due haste, procure the requisite documentation… Or face my wrath, varlet!” I’d collapse in giggles, throwing a cushion at him.

I, in turn, dragged him on “tourist adventures,” making him wear ridiculous hats and take selfies with statues. We’d have water fights in the kayaks, our shouts echoing across the silent lakes. We cooked pasta together, a chaotic dance in his small kitchen that always ended with more sauce on us than on the plates, and we’d lick it off each other, the laughter slowly simmering into something deeper, hungrier.

The sex was a language we were both fluent in. It was fierce and tender, slow and frantic, against his sun-warmed sheets, on the floor of his boat, once, perilously, in the dappled shadows of the very pine forest where we’d met. He worshipped my body with a sailor’s hands—rough and knowing—and I discovered a shameless, vocal creature within me who chanted his name like a prayer to the cracked plaster of his ceiling.

But nature, our silent, lush witness, began to hear a different refrain. My weekly calls to David became a theater of the absurd. I’d be standing on Bojan’s terrace, my skin still smelling of him, and tell David about the “incredibly informative guided hikes” I was taking.

“You sound… different, Sara,” David said once, his voice tinny through the phone. “Healthier. Is the air good there?”

I watched Bojan, shirtless, chopping wood in the yard, the muscles in his back coiling and releasing. “The air is intoxicating,” I said, my voice thick.

Bojan caught my eye and mouthed, Liar. Then he grinned and flexed, making me snort-laugh into the phone.

“What was that?” David asked. “A… a seagull. Very funny seagull.”

The lies piled up like the olive stones in the little dish by Bojan’s door. The affair was a crystal goblet—beautiful, fragile, and destined to shatter. The twist wasn’t that it ended, but how.

I’d extended my trip twice. David was getting suspicious. Bojan was getting serious. “Stay,” he’d murmur into my hair at night. “Just stay. Edit your bloody contracts from here. Let the monk seals be your colleagues.”

The fantasy was seductive, but the gravity of my other life was pulling me back. We decided on one last, perfect day. A sail to the remote western tip of the island, a picnic on a deserted shingle beach. We made love in the shade of an ancient olive grove, a slow, aching goodbye that felt more like a vow than a farewell. Sated and somber, we swam.

That’s when I saw it. Treading water, I glanced back at the beach. Bojan’s waterproof satchel had fallen over. Beside our empty wine bottle and the crumpled blanket, two phones lay spilled out. His. And mine.

And my screen was lit up. A cascade of notifications from David. And then, as I watched, frozen in the cool water, a call came through. The screen flashed: DAVID ❤️.

Bojan, swimming nearby, saw my face. “Sara? What’s wrong?”

Before I could speak, I saw his own expression change. He followed my gaze to the beach. He saw the phones. And I saw the dawning, horrified comprehension on his face.

He swam for shore with powerful strokes. I followed, a lead weight in my stomach. He reached the phones first. He picked up his own, then mine, just as the call stopped. He stared at the screen, at the heart next to David’s name. The playful, loving man I knew evaporated. His face became a cliff face.

“You didn’t tell him,” he said, his voice flat, a stranger’s voice.

“Bojan, I was going to—” “When?” He thrust the phone toward me. “When were you going to tell him about us? Or were you ever? Was this just… a holiday romance? A crazy moment?” The words were sharp, meant to cut.

“It wasn’t! You know it wasn’t!” “Do I? What do I know, Sara? I know you have a boyfriend you call every week. I know you’re leaving tomorrow. I know you have a life that doesn’t include me. And I knew all that. I accepted it. But I thought you were at least ending it. I thought we were a secret from the world, not a secret from him.”

The betrayal in his eyes wasn’t about the affair. It was about the lie within the lie. I had betrayed him by not betraying David fully. I had kept a foot in both worlds, and in doing so, I’d made our beautiful secret into something sordid.

“I was scared,” I pleaded, tears mixing with the lake water on my face. “It’s a real life, Bojan. It’s messy and complicated and—” “And this isn’t real?” he roared, the sound echoing off the cliffs, startling a flock of birds into the sky. “This? The laughter, the… the everything? Was that not messy and complicated enough for you? Was I just a bit of Mljet madness?”

He threw his hands up, turning away from me, his shoulders rigid. The silence that followed was louder than his shout. The beautiful, witnessing nature—the whispering pines, the lapping lake, the indifferent sun—seemed to press in, condemning us.

He dressed in stiff, angry movements. I did the same, the pebbles sharp and cruel under my feet. The sail back was a silent, frigid voyage. The playful banter was gone, replaced by a chasm of unsaid things.

At his house, I packed my bag. He stood by the window, his back to me, watching the sunset paint the lakes in fiery, tragic colours.

“I love you,” I said, the words sounding pathetic and small in the crushing silence.

He didn’t turn. “Love doesn’t hide in the shadows, Sara. It doesn’t let someone else’s name flash on its screen with a heart. Love steps into the light. Even if it burns.” He finally looked at me, and his eyes were the colour of a stormy sea. “You chose the shadows.”

I left Mljet the next morning. The National Park, with its emerald lakes and ancient forests, had been the witness to our beginning. It was now the silent, eternal witness to our end. The stolen kiss had led to a stolen season, full of a laughter and longing so profound it carved a new cavity in my soul. But nature, in its ruthless honesty, had forced the one truth we’d avoided into the light: you cannot build a forever on a foundation of a lie. Some betrayals, once seen, cannot be unseen. And some beautiful, fragile things, once shattered, can never be pieced back together, no matter how brightly the Adriatic sun shines on the broken pieces.