11 Espresso, Jealousy, and Other Strong Things

The first betrayal was the sun. It rose over the ridge of Mount St. Ilija as it had every morning of my thirty-two years on the Pelješac peninsula, but this morning it felt different. It wasn’t the gentle, gilded benediction of my childhood, the light that promised a day of harvesting salt in Ston or olives from the family groves near Orebić. No, this morning’s sun was a spotlight, harsh and interrogating, illuminating every crack in the white stone of our family’s konoba, every faded thread in the blue-checked tablecloth on the terrace, every single one of my own accumulated doubts. It was the kind of light that didn’t allow for shadows to hide in.

I was already moving, muscle memory propelling me through the pre-dawn chill. The key turned in the heavy lock of the stone building, the scent of yesterday’s coffee grounds and damp stone blooming out. Kavana i Konoba Milić. The sign, hand-painted by my Deda, was faded but stubborn. Inside, my hands performed the sacred, solitary ritual: grinding the dark, oily Lokalac beans from a roaster in Split, their aroma—earth, dark chocolate, a hint of sea-salt—filling the small space. The Gaggia machine, a gleaming, hissing beast from another century, shuddered to life. My first espresso of the day was never for a customer. It was a sacrament, a bitter, concentrated shot of reality. I drank it standing at the bar, watching the first ferry of the day creep across the channel from Korčula, a tiny, lit matchstick in the vast, pearly grey of the Adriatic.

The second betrayal was the silence. It used to be a companionable thing, this early quiet, filled only with the gurgle of the machine and the distant cry of gulls. Now it was a vacuum, waiting to be filled with the day’s performances. In an hour, the village would stir. Old men would shuffle in for their bijela kava, their arguments about football and politics as regular as the tides. Tourists, blinking in the brilliant light, would hover at the door, asking for “latte to go” in hesitant English, a request that still made my father, if he were here, mutter under his breath. And then, at precisely 10:15, she would arrive.

Lena.

My cousin. My ghost. My replacement.

She had blown in from Zagreb two summers ago, a whirlwind of linen dresses and ambitious ideas. “Maja, dušo, this place is a treasure! But it’s sleeping!” she’d exclaimed, her city-accented Croatian cutting through the familiar drone of cicadas. She saw a “brand,” not a legacy. A “venue,” not a home. Where I saw Deda’s worn wooden tables, she saw “shabby chic potential.” Where I heard the comfortable silence of locals, she heard a lack of “curated atmosphere.”

And my father, my stubborn, salt-of-the-earth father who had taught me how to pull the perfect espresso so the crema was like “the sunset on a calm sea,” had listened. His heart, weakened by years of hard work and strong wine, had softened along with his mind. Lena was his brother’s daughter, bright and full of life, a connection to a wider, more modern Croatia he felt he’d failed to give me. She spoke of social media, pop-up dinners, wine pairings with our family’s Plavac Mali.

I became the keeper of the old ways. The reliable one. The one who woke at dawn, who knew how much sugar Mr. Pavić took in his coffee (two, but only if his arthritis was bad), who could fix the espresso machine with a wrench and a prayer. Lena was the vision. She brought in a graphic designer for a new logo. She started a Instagram page, Kavana Milić, filled with photos of sparkling rosé against our stone wall, of local oysters on ice, of her own smiling face, windswept and beautiful. The caption was always the same: “Authentic Dalmatia. Family-run since 1962.” She wasn’t lying. But she was editing. I was cropped out of the frame.

The morning unfolded like every other. I was a machine within the machine: grind, tamp, pull, steam, wipe, serve. The familiar faces, their rhythms, their orders. It was a language I spoke fluently. But my eyes kept flicking to the clock.

At 10:15, the door opened, and the sunlight framed her. Lena wore a simple white dress that probably cost more than a week’s takings from the konoba. Her hair, the same dark chestnut as mine, was artfully tousled. She carried a tablet, not a notepad.

“Bok, Maja!” she sang, air-kissing near my cheek. She smelled of expensive sunscreen and fig perfume. “Busy morning?”

“The usual,” I said, my voice tight. I was already preparing her double macchiato. She’d developed a taste for them after a weekend in Milan.

“Perfect, thanks.” She took the cup, her eyes scanning the terrace. “I’ve booked a sommelier from Ston for Friday night. A themed tasting: ‘Pelješac in Five Glasses.’ We’ll need to clear the big table. And I was thinking—what if we did a limited-run rakija? From Deda’s old plum recipe? We could call it ’Milić’s Secret’…”

Her words washed over me. Deda’s rakija recipe was scribbled in a notebook in our kitchen drawer. It wasn’t a secret; it was just ours. The thought of bottling it, slapping a stylish label on it, selling it to Germans for twenty euros a pop, felt like sacrilege.

“We’d have to talk to Tata,” I said, a feeble dam against her tide of ideas.

“Of course,” she smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. She saw me as an obstacle, a stubborn stone in the path of her progress. She took her coffee to a terrace table, transforming it into her office, her kingdom.

The third betrayal came at noon, wearing deck shoes and a smile that made my stomach clench.

Ivan.

He was a regular from Dubrovnik, a yacht captain who brought crews and clients to our konoba for “the real deal.” He was maybe ten years older, with sun-bleached hair at his temples and eyes the colour of the sea before a storm. For two summers, there had been a quiet, unspoken thing between us. A held glance a beat too long when he paid his bill. A compliment on the new olive oil. A question about my life that felt genuinely interested, not just polite. He was a man of the sea, steady and quiet. I’d built a fragile, hopeful daydream around him, a secret I kept even from myself, nurtured in the lonely hours after closing.

Today, he didn’t look at me. His gaze went straight to the terrace, to Lena, lit by the midday sun, laughing at something on her screen. He straightened his shirt.

“Bok, Maja,” he said, his voice warm but his attention elsewhere. “Is Lena around?”

The words were a physical blow. I managed a nod towards the terrace. He gave me a grateful smile, the kind you give a helpful signpost, and walked past me.

I watched through the window as he approached her table. Saw her look up, the practised, dazzling smile switching on. Saw him gesture, animated, telling a story. Saw her touch his arm, laughing. The espresso cup I was holding trembled in its saucer. The sound was deafening to me.

Jealousy is not a mild emotion. It is not a twinge or a pang. On Pelješac, where the soil is rocky and the winds are strong, things either root deeply or are washed away. My jealousy was a Plavac Mali vine, digging its gnarled fingers into barren stone, desperate, tenacious, and bitter. It twisted in my chest, constricting my breath. It was jealousy for the business, for my father’s attention, for my own heritage that she was packaging and selling. And now, it was jealousy for the one, silly dream I’d allowed myself.

The rest of the day passed in a blur of acid and heat. Every clink of their laughter from the terrace was a needle in my skin. When Ivan left, he waved at me, but his eyes were still bright from his conversation with Lena. She came in beaming.

“Ivan’s bringing a private group for dinner tomorrow! Eight people. They want the full experience: oysters, peka, the best wine. This is huge, Maja.”

“I’ll need to order more lamb,” I said flatly, turning to the sink.

That night, the silence of my small apartment above the konoba was suffocating. The familiar view of the moon over the water offered no comfort. I felt like a ghost in my own life, the silent, necessary engine in the basement of someone else’s brilliant show. I had become part of the “authentic” atmosphere—the taciturn local woman making coffee. A prop.

The next day was a siege. I prepared for Ivan’s dinner with a ferocious, meticulous energy, channelling all my hurt into chopping parsley, seasoning the lamb for the peka, polishing glasses until they sang. Lena floated, orchestrating, directing the placement of tables, the lighting of candles. She had changed into a dress the colour of midnight, simple but devastating.

The group arrived. Ivan was at the centre, charming, playing the perfect host. His eyes followed Lena as she explained the wine, her voice a melodic murmur. I served, I cleared, I retreated to my kitchen. At one point, carrying a heavy tray of used plates, I passed their table. Ivan was telling a story about a storm near Lastovo. Lena was leaning forward, captivated.

“…and the waves were like mountains,” he said. “You learn what’s strong out there. Not just the boat, but inside you.”

Lena sighed, a theatrical, beautiful sound. “It must be incredible. To have that kind of strength. That connection to something so powerful.”

Something in me snapped. It was a quiet snap, a dry twig underfoot. But it was final. Connection? She’d been here two years. She thought strength was a yacht weathering a storm. She had no idea. Strength was Deda building this place stone by stone. Strength was my mother nursing him through his illness in this very room. Strength was my father getting up every day for forty years to make coffee for the same men. Strength was me, standing here now, my heart breaking while I made sure their glasses were full.

It was almost midnight when the last guest left, full of praise and promises to return. Lena was exhilarated, counting tips in a cloud of perfume and success. Ivan helped her stack chairs, their movements easy, synchronized.

“Maja,” Ivan called as he was leaving. “Another perfect meal. Thank you.” He smiled, and for a fleeting second, it was the old smile, the one that felt like it was just for me. Then he glanced at Lena. “You two make an amazing team.”

The vinegar in my soul rose. I just nodded, turning away.

Later, after Lena had gone home to her rented villa with its sea view, I was alone, wiping down the Gaggia. The moon was high, painting a silver road across the water to Korčula. The jealousy hadn’t left; it had just cooled and hardened into a clear, cold resolution.

I would not be a ghost. I would not be a prop.

The next morning, I didn’t make my usual solitary espresso. I made two. I carried them out to the terrace, where the first light was just brushing the rooftops. I set them down on a table and waited.

When Lena arrived at 10:15, she looked surprised to see me sitting there. “Maja? Everything okay?”

“Sit,” I said. My voice was strange to my own ears. It wasn’t loud, but it had the texture of our stone walls. It held.

She sat, wary.

I pushed one espresso toward her. “Drink.”

She took a small sip, her eyes on me over the rim of the demitasse.

“You want to know what’s strong, Lena?” I began, my gaze fixed on the channel. “Strong is the karst, this rock that gives nothing, and yet we grow the best red wine in Croatia from it. Strong is the bura wind that tries to tear the tiles from the roof, and the wall that has stood against it for a hundred years. Strong is an espresso at 5 AM after three hours of sleep, because the work must be done.”

She opened her mouth to speak, but I held up a hand.

“You have ideas. Good ones. The Instagram, the wine tastings… they bring life. Money. A future.” I took a breath, my heart pounding. “But this place… it is not a concept. It is a body. And I am its heart. You don’t get to package the heart and sell it. You don’t get to smile at the man I love and think I don’t have the courage to feel it because I’m too busy cleaning tables.”

Lena’s face went pale. “Maja, I didn’t—”

“I know you didn’t,” I interrupted, the bitterness finally leaving my voice, leaving only exhaustion and truth. “You didn’t see me. Just like Ivan didn’t, yesterday. You see the atmosphere. He sees the hostess. But I am here. I have always been here.”

Silence settled between us, deeper and more profound than any of our previous strained quiet. The only sound was the distant putter of a fishing boat.

“What do you want?” Lena asked finally, her voice small.

“Partners,” I said. The word hung in the air, new and terrifying. “Not you as the brain and me as the hands. Partners. You handle the world out there.” I gestured towards the sea, towards the digital ether. “I run the world in here. We talk. We agree. No more surprises. No more of Deda’s rakija becoming a ‘secret’ without me.” I took a final, scalding gulp of my cold espresso. “And you can stop flirting with Ivan. It’s undignified.”

A slow blush crept up Lena’s neck. She looked down at her hands, then out at the sea, and finally, for what felt like the first time, truly at me. She saw the shadows under my eyes, the strength in my hands that could wrestle a fifty-kilo sack of coffee beans, the stubborn set of my jaw that was our grandfather’s.

“I am jealous of you,” she said quietly, the admission leaving her in a rush. “You’re so sure. Of this place, of who you are. It’s like you’re made of this peninsula. I’m just… visiting.”

The unexpectedness of it disarmed me. My own jealousy, so monstrous and consuming, shrank just a little, making room for this new, startling piece of truth.

“You can’t visit for two years, Lena,” I said, my voice softening. “You’re here. You’re family. But you have to see all of it. Not just the pretty light on the stone.”

She nodded, a single, sharp movement. Then she picked up her espresso and drank it down in one go, wincing only slightly at the bitterness. “Partners,” she said, the word a promise.

It wasn’t a magic cure. Ivan didn’t suddenly appear, declare his undying love for me, and carry me off on his yacht. The sun the next morning was still a spotlight, but now I felt less like a suspect and more like a subject—a complex, layered one. Lena showed me the Instagram analytics. I showed her the peeling plaster in the storage room that needed fixing before we bought new cutlery. We argued, fiercely, about the price of the tasting menu. But we argued with each other, not past each other.

A week later, Ivan came in alone, in the quiet lull of the afternoon. My heart, that foolish traitor, stuttered. He walked to the bar, not the terrace.

“Maja,” he said. “An espresso, please.”

I turned to the machine, my movements precise, a ritual to steady myself. When I set the small cup before him, he didn’t pick it up immediately.

“I owe you an apology,” he said, his grey eyes serious. “I’ve been coming here for years. I think I got distracted by the… new light. But it’s the steady warmth that makes a place a home. Not the flash.”

He wasn’t poetic. He was a sailor. He spoke in practical metaphors. But I understood. He was talking about the lighthouse, not the fireworks.

“It’s a strong thing, espresso,” I said, nodding at his cup. “It’s not for everyone.”

“I’ve developed a taste for strong things,” he replied, and finally, he smiled. It was a question. And for the first time, I felt I had something of my own to offer in return, not just what was part of the konoba, part of the scenery.

“Come back at nine,” I heard myself say. “After closing. The espresso is better when it’s not for customers.”

He nodded, a quiet understanding passing between us. He finished his coffee, paid, and left.

That night, after Lena had left and the doors were locked, I made two more espressos. The moon was a sliver, a shy comma in the sky. When Ivan knocked, I let him in. We didn’t sit on the terrace, the stage. We sat at the old wooden bar, where my father had taught me my trade. We talked. About the sea, about the stubbornness of Plavac Mali vines, about the peculiar loneliness and satisfaction of keeping things going. It was just a conversation. But it was mine.

Later, walking home along the water, the taste of coffee and something like hope on my tongue, I looked up at the ridge of Mount St. Ilija. The sun had long since set, but the stone held the day’s warmth, releasing it slowly into the cool night. It wasn’t a spotlight anymore. It was just stone. Strong. Enduring. And finally, enough.

12 Dalmatian Summers Are Not Neutral

The first lie I ever told was to a customs officer at Split Airport. He’d glanced from my Canadian passport to my face, my dark hair and the olive skin I’d inherited from my father, a man I’d never met.

“Purpose of visit?” he’d asked in accented English.

“Tourism,” I’d said, the word tasting like ash. I was twenty-two, and I’d come to find a ghost.

The second lie was to myself. I pretended the trembling in my hands as the rental car hugged the cliffside roads of the Makarska Riviera was from the altitude, not from the dread and longing that had propelled me across an ocean. The Adriatic stretched below, a blue so profound it seemed to swallow light and time. It was nothing like the slate-grey, choppy waters of Lake Ontario. This blue was a living, breathing entity, and it watched me.

My destination was the village of Vrulja, a cluster of stone houses clinging to a hillside like barnacles, where my mother, Anya, had spent a summer twenty-three years ago. A summer that resulted in me. She’d spoken of it only in fragments, shards of memory that cut her when she handled them: the scent of rosemary and salt, the punishing sun, the sound of church bells competing with the klapa songs from the harbour, and a man named Luka with eyes the colour of a stormy sea. She’d left before she knew I existed, and a letter she’d sent had vanished into the void of the recent war. She’d built a new, quiet life in Toronto, and the past became a sealed room. But she’d kept one photograph: a young man on a pebbled beach, squinting at the camera, a half-smile on his face, behind him a faded blue door in a stone wall.

That blue door was my only compass.

Vrulja was postcard-perfect and utterly alien. Bougainvillaea blazed against sun-bleached stone. The air hummed with cicadas and the distant thrum of boat engines. It smelled of pine, dried fig, and diesel. I’d booked a room in a soba – a family home’s spare room – owned by a formidable woman in her sixties named Matea. She sized me up with eyes that missed nothing.

“You are here for the beaches? The Pakleni Islands?” she asked, hefting my suitcase as if it were a feather.

“Family history,” I said, another half-truth. “My mother visited long ago. She loved it.”

Matea’s gaze sharpened. “What was her name?”

“Anya. Anya Petrović.” My mother’s Serbian name hung in the air, a subtle change in the atmosphere. Matea’s smile didn’t fade, but it solidified.

“A beautiful name. Enjoy your stay, Lira.” She said my name, the name my mother had chosen for its Slavic melody, with careful neutrality.

The neutrality was a fiction. I felt it the next morning at the bakery. When I attempted my clumsy, rehearsed Croatian, the woman’s polite smile was a fortress wall. At the small supermarket, the cashier’s chatter died when I approached. It wasn’t hostility; it was a quiet, firm demarcation. I was an outsider, and my accent, my very blood, placed me in a category they were too polite to name but everyone understood. The war here had ended less than a decade ago. Its silence was deeper than any noise.

I walked the narrow, steep streets, the photograph a talisman in my pocket. I found the pebbled beach from the picture. I found the stone wall. But the blue door was gone, replaced by a new, green one. The disappointment was a physical blow. My quest, born of a desperate, fatherless longing, suddenly seemed foolish. The past wasn’t just another country; it was a buried city.

For days, I wandered in a haze of heat and futility. I swam in the shockingly cold, clear sea. I ate grilled fish and blitva, the chard and potato dish that tasted of earth and garlic. I drank strong, bitter coffee watching old men play brišula in the shade. The stunning beauty of the place was a backdrop to my growing isolation. I was a ghost haunting a postcard.

The breakthrough came from Matea. One evening, as I picked at a fig she’d given me, she sat heavily opposite me on the terrace. The sun was setting, painting the sea in molten gold.

“You look for someone,” she stated, lighting a cigarette. It wasn’t a question.

I hesitated, then pulled out the worn photograph. “My father, I think. His name was Luka. My mother… she was here in ’81.”

Matea took the photo, her expression unreadable. She studied it for a long time, the smoke curling around her face like memory. “Luka. There were several. Luka the fisherman, Luka the teacher, Luka who died in Vukovar…” Her voice trailed off. She pointed a blunt finger at the background. “This wall. It was the back of the Konoba ‘Kamen’. The old one, before the fire.”

“A fire?”

“In ’89. Bad electrical wiring. They rebuilt it bigger, for the Germans and Austrians who come now.” She handed the photo back. “The man who owned ‘Kamen’ was also Luka. Luka Perić. He had a son, also Luka. The son, he was wild, like a summer storm. He loved foreign girls, guitars, and trouble.” She looked at me, and for the first time, her eyes held something softer than assessment. “He went to Zagreb to study. Then the war came. He fought.”

“Is he… is he here?”

Matea shook her head. “He came back after. But he is not in Vrulja. He lives up there.” She gestured towards the Biokovo mountain, its rugged spine darkening against the twilight sky. “In the old shepherd’s stan. He keeps to himself. The war… it changed the weather in some men’s souls.”

She gave me directions that were more parable than map: past the broken shrine, follow the goat path where the rosemary grows thick, look for the stone with the iron ring. The mountain will tell you.

I set out at dawn, my heart a frantic bird in my chest. The path was steep, treacherous with loose stones. The aromatic maquis gave way to sparse, wind-gnarled pines. The sun, not yet the brutal hammer of midday, was a vigilant eye. Sweat soaked my shirt. After two hours, I saw it: a low, stone hut built into the hillside, almost a part of the mountain itself. A thin wisp of smoke rose from a chimney. A few chickens scratched in the dirt. And there, sitting on a bench whittling a piece of wood, was a man.

He was older than the photograph, of course. His hair, once dark, was heavily streaked with grey, his face carved by sun and something harder. But the line of his jaw, the set of his shoulders—it was him. It was the stormy-sea eyes that confirmed it. They lifted from his work and fixed on me, not with curiosity, but with a weary, immediate vigilance. He didn’t speak.

My mouth was dry. “Zdravo,” I managed. “I… I am looking for Luka Perić.”

“You found him.” His voice was gravel, his English fluent but heavily accented. “What does a Canadian want on my mountain?” He’d seen the rental car, deduced the rest.

I took a step closer, pulling the photograph from my pocket. My hand shook. “My name is Lira. My mother is Anya Petrović. She was here in the summer of 1981.”

The name, her name, did not spark recognition. His face remained a closed door. Then I held out the photograph.

The change was seismic. The knife stilled. The guarded, weathered mask didn’t so much crack as undergo a slow, tectonic shift. Something raw and unbearably young surfaced in his eyes, only to be instantly shrouded in a deeper, more profound pain. He took the photo, his fingers calloused and careful.

“Anya,” he breathed, the word a ghost released after decades of confinement. He looked from the photo to my face, his gaze scanning my features, tracing the inheritance. The dark hair, the shape of my eyes—my mother’s. The olive tone of my skin, the stubborn set of my brow—his.

“She left,” he said, not to me, but to the memory. “She said she would write. I waited. Then… everything happened.” He meant the war. The collapse of a country, the unraveling of a world. A letter from Serbia would have been a leaf in a hurricane.

“She did write,” I said softly. “You didn’t get it.”

He was silent for a long minute, staring at the photograph of his younger self, a man who knew only the storms of passion, not the storms of war. “And you?” he finally asked, his eyes rising to meet mine, filled with a terrifying vulnerability. “You are…?”

“I was born in March 1982. In Toronto.”

The arithmetic was simple, inevitable. He flinched as if struck. He put down the knife and the wood, stood up, and turned his back to me, looking out over the vast, breathtaking sweep of coast below. His shoulders were rigid. The silence stretched, filled only by the whisper of the mountain wind and the distant, indifferent sea.

“All this time,” he said, his voice choked. “I fought in that stupid, hellish war. I lost friends. I lost… parts of myself. I came up here to forget the smell of it. And all this time…” He couldn’t finish.

“She didn’t know how to find you,” I offered, a weak defence for a history that had wounded us both.

He turned back, his eyes glistening. “Come,” he said, his voice rough. “You will have coffee.”

The stan was dark, simple, neat. A wood stove, a bed, books—poetry, philosophy, histories—in both Croatian and English. He made coffee the Turkish way, in a džezva, the ritual giving his hands a purpose. He asked about my mother—was she happy, was she well? His questions were careful, respectful of the life she had built without him. I told him she was a librarian, that she gardened, that she was quiet and kind but carried a sadness I only now fully understood.

“And you?” he asked, pushing a tiny cup of thick, fragrant coffee towards me.

I told him about my life in Canada, my studies in art history, my quiet childhood with a single mother and a gaping, unasked question. “I needed to see where I came from,” I said. “I needed to know if the other half of me was real.”

“I am real,” he said, a simple, devastating statement. “And I am… I am sorry I was not real for you before.”

That day, and the days that followed, were a strange, halting dance of discovery. The initial shock gave way to a cautious, overwhelming tenderness on his part. He was a man who had chosen isolation, and now he was confronted with a living, breathing piece of a past he’d tried to bury. He showed me his world: the hidden spring where he got his water, the olive grove he tended for a cousin in the village, the best place to watch the eagles ride the thermals. He spoke little of the war, but its shadow was in the way he listened for sudden sounds, in the profound gratitude he had for the silence of the mountain.

One afternoon, as we sat under a fig tree, he said, “You have her smile. But you have my temper, I think. I see it, banked like a fire.”

“How can you see that?” I asked, surprised.

“A father knows,” he said, and the word, otac, hung between us, new and fragile and immense.

But Vrulja below was not neutral. Matea had been kind, but word travels on mountain winds. I went down for supplies, and the atmosphere had shifted from quiet demarcation to a low-grade chill. At the konoba, the conversation at the bar died when I entered. The cashier at the supermarket was pointedly slow. Finally, an old man with a face like a walnut, who had watched me for days, approached me as I bought water.

“You go up the mountain to see Luka Perić,” he said, not asking.

“Yes. He is my friend.”

The old man’s eyes were hard. “His war was not your war. His losses are not your tourist curiosity. Some ghosts are better left in the ground.” He walked away, leaving me cold despite the heat. I was no longer just an outsider; I was an outsider who had disturbed a sacred, painful peace.

When I told Luka, his face darkened. “That is old Barišić. His son was in my unit. He died in my arms. He thinks you are a rich foreigner digging up bones for fun.”

“What do I do?” I asked, the complexity of the history I’d stepped into finally dawning on me. I wasn’t just finding a father; I was stepping onto a battlefield where the trenches were still fresh.

“Nothing,” he said. “You are my daughter. That is a fact. Here, on this mountain, that is the only fact that matters.” But he looked towards the village, and I saw the old wound, the exile he had imposed on himself, and now, by association, on me.

The tension broke a week later. A storm rolled in from the sea, a dramatic, violent thing that turned the sky purple and lashed the mountain with rain. I was in the stan with Luka, safe by the fire, when we heard the shouts from the path. Two German hikers, caught unprepared, desperate, one with a twisted ankle. Luka didn’t hesitate. He brought them in, gave them dry clothes, brewed tea, and when the rain lessined, he and I helped the injured hiker down the treacherous path in the failing light, a slow, difficult procession to the village clinic.

We were a spectacle: the recluse, the foreign girl, the bedraggled tourists. We sat in the clinic waiting room, soaked and exhausted. Old Barišić was there, visiting a relative. He watched us. He saw Luka’s quiet competence, my unwavering support. He saw the way Luka, after checking on the hikers, turned to me and asked, “You are alright, kćeri?” My daughter.

Barišić approached. He looked at Luka, then at me, his gaze lingering on our similar eyes, the same stubborn set of our mouths now etched with identical fatigue. He gave a slow, almost imperceptible nod. “The mountain is dangerous in a storm,” he grunted. “It was a good thing you were there, Luka.” It wasn’t an apology; it was an acknowledgement. A line had been crossed.

The final day of my stay came too soon. Luka and I walked down to our beach, the one from the photograph. The green door was still there, a testament to change, but it didn’t matter anymore.

“I have something for you,” he said. He pressed a small, heavy object into my hand. It was an old, tarnished silver medal of Saint Blaise, the patron saint of Dubrovnik. “It was my grandfather’s. It survived the war. Now it is for you.”

I clutched it, the metal warming in my palm. “I don’t want to leave.”

“You must. You have a life, a mother who needs you.” He put a hand on my shoulder, a gesture still new and precious. “But you also have a life here now. A father. This coast. It is part of you. These summers… they are not neutral, Lira. They bake everything in their light. They show what is strong and what is weak. We have been baked now, you and I. The bond is fired. It will not break.”

At the airport, the same customs officer stamped my passport. “Purpose of visit?” he asked.

I met his eyes. “Family,” I said.

It was the first true thing I’d told him. The medal was a weight in my pocket. The memory of the mountain light, the taste of the bitter coffee, the sound of my father’s voice saying kćeri, were bones knitting, a missing part of my foundation finally settling into place. The Dalmatian summer had not been a gentle host. It had been a crucible, burning away my illusions, forcing history and identity into a painful, beautiful alloy. I was no longer just Lira from Toronto. I was Lira, daughter of Anya and Luka, born of a love story fractured by time and war, forged anew on a sun-bleached, unforgiving, breathtaking coast. The neutrality was a lie. Some places claim you, violently and forever.

13 The Night We Broke Every Rule in Dalmatia

The air in Cavtat that night was thick with salt and jasmine, a scent that belonged to late summer, to things forbidden and things remembered. I stepped out of my small villa onto the cobblestone streets, the moon painting everything silver, and felt immediately that the city itself was conspiring.

The rules of Cavtat were simple, whispered, but never written. Locals knew them. Tourists stumbled over them. You did not wander past midnight into the old harbor with strangers. You did not drink wine in the empty courtyards of stone houses. And you certainly did not fall in love—or lust—with someone who might vanish with the tide.

I broke every single one.

It began with a sound—a laugh, carried down from the waterfront terrace above the old apothecary. Daniel. I had seen him earlier that week in the café near the marina, a stranger with a Berlin accent, pale eyes that caught the Adriatic moon like a mirror. And yet he was not just a stranger; something about him suggested he was meant to appear in moments like this, in nights that could bend the rules of space and propriety.

I followed the sound instinctively, barefoot on the warm stones, past sleeping shops and shuttered windows. Cavtat slept, but the city seemed aware of us, aware that rules were about to break. I saw him standing under the fountain at the center of the plaza, tossing pebbles into the water with a dangerous, casual grace.

“You’re late,” he said, without looking up.

“I like to make an entrance,” I said, feeling my pulse surge, not from fear, but from the thrill of knowing I was already trespassing.

He smiled, that crooked smile that made the moon jealous. “Tonight, nothing is off-limits.”

We walked toward the marina, past the yachts glinting like ivory teeth under the moonlight. Normally, this path was full of tourists, lights, laughter. Tonight, it was ours. Even the sea seemed still, holding its breath. We spoke in whispers, in glances, sharing secrets neither of us planned to keep.

By the old lighthouse, he stopped. “I could kiss you here,” he said. And he did. The kiss was electric, a collision of everything restrained and everything urgent. His hands found the small of my back, pulling me closer, and I laughed softly, a sound I hadn’t realized had been trapped in me for days.

The first rule broken: no touching in public.

We climbed the lighthouse steps, creaking beneath our weight. The top was empty, a private world with nothing but the wind and the sea. Daniel’s fingers tangled in my hair. I leaned back against the stone wall, inhaling the scent of him—wine, pine resin, the faint sharpness of his cologne.

“Rule two,” he said, his voice low, “we are not allowed to get carried away.”

I bit my lip. “Then we should probably start.”

We kissed again, longer this time, the city lights dancing on his skin. My hands roamed freely, memorizing curves and lines as if time itself had softened its edges for us. Somewhere below, a dog barked, distant. I did not care.

Rule three: no wine on the lighthouse balcony. I found a bottle Daniel had hidden in his bag. The cork popped with a soft laugh, and we drank, letting the bitter-sweet liquid burn our throats as we kissed. We laughed, dangerously, shaking against each other, daring the world to notice.

Hours passed like minutes. We chased each other through the alleyways, barefoot, laughing as we ran across the cold stones, slipping occasionally, catching each other before disaster could strike. Cavtat had never felt so alive.

At the old chapel near the cypress trees, we paused. Daniel’s hands cupped my face. “I think,” he whispered, “we are doing something we’ll never forgive ourselves for.”

I smiled, brushing my lips against his. “Or maybe something we’ll never regret.”

We tumbled down the steps into the courtyard, the ground hard, the walls echoing our laughter. A stray cat hissed at us from a shadow. I imagined its tiny judgmental eyes piercing our souls. I didn’t care.

Rule four: no trespassing sacred spaces. We didn’t enter, but we claimed their periphery as our own. The air hummed with history, ghosts of weddings and funerals, saints and sinners alike, and I felt like a conspirator in a divine joke.

By midnight, we were drenched in moonlight, in sweat, in wine. Cavtat had become ours, a secret world where rules bent and hearts leapt without permission. We sat by the harbor, legs dangling over the water, sharing truths I had never spoken aloud. He told me of Berlin, of stories and music, of love that had failed him quietly. I spoke of things my own voice had never risked: desires, fears, half-forgotten dreams.

The sea reflected the moon, silver and infinite. “Do you ever regret?” he asked, eyes fixed on mine.

I shook my head. “Only the nights I didn’t do what I wanted. Tonight, I have no regrets.”

He leaned in. Our lips met again, softer now, intimate in a way that didn’t need rush. I let the sound of the waves, the faint bells from the distant church, and the night itself wrap around us like a cocoon.

At some point, we climbed into a small fishing boat Daniel had borrowed—or stolen, I suspected, because rules were not for us tonight. The harbor was empty, save for the lights glinting on the water. We drifted, the boat rocking gently, the city shrinking behind us.

I rested my head on his shoulder, listening to the night: the soft slap of water, the distant church bells, our own laughter echoing through the hull. Cavtat had rules, yes, but the sea had none. Out here, we were free.

He whispered my name. I whispered his. We shared kisses that spoke louder than any promises could. The wine made the air sweet, our hands reckless, our hearts full.

We watched the first light of dawn paint the city in gold. “We’re going to regret this,” Daniel said, and I laughed.

“Maybe,” I said. “But only if the city remembers. And I think it will forget. Dalmatia has a habit of forgiving.”

We returned to shore, boat slipping into the quiet marina. The city was waking now, birds, distant voices, shutters opening. We parted with a soft kiss, a last laugh. The rules we had broken were countless: public touch, wine in forbidden places, trespassing in private courtyards, laughter in sacred spaces, lust in the open air, secrets whispered and promises unmade.

And yet, I felt lighter than I had in years. Cavtat seemed to hold its breath, perhaps amused, perhaps forgiving, perhaps already forgetting.

I walked back to my villa as the sun rose, painting the stones in rose and gold. I thought of Daniel, of our night, of the rules we had shattered. And I realized: breaking rules was not about chaos—it was about claiming life when the world tried to dictate how it should be lived.

That night, Cavtat became a memory, a legend of our own making, a story to tell or not to tell, as we pleased. And I, lying on my bed later, smelled salt in my hair and jasmine in my sheets, and counted every thrill like a bell toll in the night.

The bells rang again, in the distance. I smiled. The city was awake now, the world was waking. But the night we broke every rule in Dalmatia remained ours, untouchable, and eternal.

14 She Walked Into the Sea, Smiling

The last time I saw my wife, she walked into the sea, smiling.

That’s the sentence that plays on a loop in the hollowed-out cavern of my skull. It’s a simple sentence. Brutally factual. It contains no explanation, only the unbearable image. It’s been three months, and I am still here, in our rented apartment in Split, because the thought of going back to London, to our terraced house in Walthamstow filled with her plants and her half-read novels and the smell of her perfume, is a greater impossibility than staying in this city of ghosts.

Her name was Elara. Not a name you hear often. She said her mother plucked it from a book of myths, a moon of Jupiter, a captive princess. She had a way of tilting her head when she said it, as if listening for the echo of the myth in her own life. I am Mate. Just Mate. A solid, Croatian anchor of a name. She used to say it tasted of the earth and the sea on her tongue. “My Mate,” she’d say, and it felt like a title, a kingship I had never sought but cherished utterly.

We came to Split in early September, chasing the thinning crowds and the honeyed light. I was between consulting contracts; she, a translator, could work from anywhere with her laptop and a stable internet connection. “Let’s go live by that impossible blue,” she’d said, her finger tracing the Dalmatian coast on a map pinned above her desk. “Let’s breathe salt for a while.”

The apartment was in Veli Varoš, the old fisherman’s quarter, a labyrinth of white stone and rust-red roofs tumbling down the hill to the Riva. Our tiny balcony clung to the side of the building, a perch overlooking a jigsaw of rooftops and, in a sliver between two houses, a fragment of the Adriatic. It was perfect. She filled it with the scent of jasmine tea and the soft clatter of her keyboard, the silence between us a comfortable, living thing.

For the first few weeks, it was a dream. We explored Diocletian’s Palace not as tourists but as residents, learning the shortcuts, finding the bakery with the best krafne, the hole-in-the-wall where the crni rižot was ink-black and sublime. She learned to greet our neighbour, old Mrs. Pavić, with a tentative ”Dobar dan.” In the evenings, we’d walk along the Riva, past the glowing bars and the melon sellers, and she’d slip her hand into mine, her skin cool and familiar.

But then, a subtle shift. A change in the atmospheric pressure of her. It started with her sleep. Elara, who usually slept deeply, like someone diving into a dark pool, began to surface in the night. I’d wake to the emptiness of her side of the bed, to the faint blue light from the balcony seeping under the bedroom door. I’d find her there, curled in the wrought-iron chair, staring at the fragment of sea, her face lit by the moon or the distant glow of the city.

“Can’t sleep?” I’d ask. “The water’s so loud tonight,” she’d whisper, or, “The stars are so clear here. They feel closer.” I’d put a hand on her shoulder. “It’s just the wind in the palms. Come back to bed.” She’d come, but reluctantly, as if leaving something unfinished.

Her smiles, once quick and bright as the flashes of sun on the waves, became slower, more considered. She spent hours on the stone beach at Bačvice, not swimming, not reading, just sitting on the smooth pebbles, letting them run through her fingers. When I’d join her, her conversation was… abstract.

“Do you ever think about permeability, Mate?” she asked one afternoon, her eyes fixed on the horizon where the sky bled into the sea. “Permeability?” “The boundaries of things. Skin. Water. Self. How porous it all might be. We think we’re so contained, but maybe we’re leaking all the time. Maybe the sea is just the biggest leak of all.”

I squeezed her hand, a practical pressure. “You’ve been reading too much poetry in the sun.” She smiled that new, distant smile. “Maybe.”

Looking back, the clues were not clues at all but landmines disguised as pebbles. I was a man walking across a familiar field, not knowing the ground had been fundamentally altered. I saw her quietness as contentment, her introspection as a natural response to the beauty around us. I was busy, too, fielding emails, on video calls that felt absurdly urgent against the backdrop of ancient stone and timeless sea. I told myself she was just settling into the rhythm of the place.

The day it happened was a day of impossible clarity. The bura wind had scoured the sky for three days, leaving the air crystalline, the sea a sharp, resonant blue that hurt to look at. Elara was luminous with a strange energy. She made breakfast, humming a tune I didn’t recognize. She kissed me with a fervour that was both familiar and startling.

“Let’s go to Kašjuni,” she said, naming the small, less-populated cove beneath the Marjan hill. “Just us. A proper swim.”

We packed a bag—towels, water, her favourite linen shirt. She wore the simple emerald-green swimsuit that made her pale skin look like marble. On the walk through the pine-scented park, she held my hand tightly, swinging our arms like a child. She pointed out the details she loved: the way the light dappled through the pines, the silver-green of the olive leaves, the defiant purple of a late-blooming bougainvillaea clinging to a stone wall.

“It’s all so itself, isn’t it?” she said. “The stone doesn’t want to be anything but stone. The sea is perfectly, completely sea.”

Kašjuni was nearly empty. We spread our towels on the flat rocks at the far end of the cove. The water was cooler now, in late October, but the sun was warm. She didn’t rush in. She sat, knees drawn up, watching the gentle lap of the waves. Her profile was a clean line against the brilliance of the water.

“I love you, Mate,” she said, not looking at me. “You know that, don’t you? So completely.” “I know,” I said, leaning over to kiss her temple. “I love you, too. More than the sea loves the shore.” It was our old, silly proverb. She smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes.

Finally, she stood. “Last one in is a rotten egg,” she said, but there was no playfulness in it. It was a statement of fact.

She walked to the water’s edge, her steps steady on the smooth stones. She waded in, not flinching at the cold. When the water reached her waist, she turned back to look at me. And she smiled.

That smile. This is the heart of the torment. It was not a smile of sadness, of resignation, of madness. It was a smile of profound, unmistakable recognition. It was the smile you give when you see a beloved friend approaching from across a crowded room. It was wide, unguarded, lit with a joy so pure it was terrifying. It was meant for the sea.

Then she turned. And she swam. Not the playful splash-and-stroke of our usual swims, but a clean, purposeful crawl, straight out, past the buoys that marked the safe zone, past the rocks, heading for the open channel between Marjan and the island of Brač.

I sat there, stupidly, for a full minute. This was our ritual. She’d swim out, I’d watch, then join her. But she didn’t stop. The green of her swimsuit became a speck against the vast blue.

A coldness, deeper than the Adriatic could ever be, seized my gut. I scrambled up, shouting her name. “Elara! ELARA!”

My voice was swallowed by the immensity of sky and water. I plunged in, the cold a shocking slap. I swam, a frantic, inefficient thrash, my heart a frantic drum against my ribs. “Elara! Turn around! Come back!”

She didn’t look back. Her stroke remained steady, relentless. I am a strong swimmer, but fear and the crushing distance made me weak. The shore receded. My breath tore at my throat. The speck of green grew smaller, smaller, and then, just as a wave trough lifted me, it was gone.

Not a sink. A disappearance. As if she had simply been absorbed into the blue.

---

The following hours, days, weeks, are a blurred nightmare of officialdom and futile hope. Coast Guard boats with their grim-faced crews. Helicopters beating the air into a frenzy. Divers plunging into the deep, silent channels. The police, with their kind, pitying eyes and endless questions.

“Was she depressed, Mr. Ivanišević?” “Did she leave a note?” “Any financial troubles? Marital problems?” “Had she been acting strangely?”

I told them about the night walks, the abstract talk. It sounded pathetic, insignificant. They noted it down. The search scaled back, then became “ongoing monitoring.” A missing person. Presumed drowned. The case remained open, but the active hope was extinguished.

I refused to leave. Mrs. Pavić brought me rozata and muttered prayers. The landlord, a stoic man with seamed cheeks, patted my shoulder and said, “The sea gives, and the sea takes. It is a hungry god.” It wasn’t a comfort; it was a confirmation of a terrible truth I was not ready to accept.

I began to walk. I walked every inch of coastline from Stobreč to Žrnovnica. I stared at the water until my eyes burned, as if my gaze could summon her back from the elements. I revisited our spots: the bakery, the konoba, the palace basement where she’d shivered and said the air felt old. I was a ghost haunting our life.

And then, the dreams began. Not nightmares of drowning, but worse. Dreams of perfect peace. In them, I am not me, but I am with her. There is no sound, only a slow, graceful movement through a world of liquid, golden light. There is no up or down, no breath to catch, no heavy body to drag. There is only a sublime, weightless drifting, and a feeling of homecoming so intense it aches. I’d wake gasping, not from fear, but from the loss of that feeling, the crushing return to the gravity of grief.

One grey afternoon, trapped in the silence of the apartment, I did the thing I had been avoiding. I opened her laptop. Her password was my name, our wedding date. The desktop was a photo of us, laughing on the Riva, a sunset behind us.

There was a folder, simply titled: “For Mate.”

My hands shook. Inside, no suicide note, no lengthy explanation. Instead, a collection of files. Dozens of audio recordings, dated over the past year. The most recent was from the morning of that day.

I clicked it.

Her voice filled the room, soft, clear, a little husky from sleep. It was so present I turned, expecting to see her in the doorway.

“My love,” the recording began. “If you’re hearing this, I’ve gone for the long swim. Please don’t think of it as an ending. That’s the first thing. It’s not an ending any more than the river thinks it ends when it meets the sea.”

A long pause, the sound of her breathing.

“I’ve tried to explain this feeling, this… pull. It’s not sadness. It’s the opposite of sadness. It’s a calling. For months, maybe years, I’ve felt like I’ve been listening to the world through a thick pane of glass. Everything has been muted. My love for you, the taste of food, the colour of the sky—it was all once so vibrant, but it’s been fading, like a radio signal losing strength. But here, by this sea… Mate, the glass is gone. The signal is clear. And it’s coming from out there.”

Another pause. I could hear the distant cry of a gull in the recording, our gull, from our balcony.

“I remember the first time you took me to the seaside in Wales. It was freezing, and the water was the colour of slate. But you swam, and I watched you, and I thought, ‘He is part of this. He knows how to be in it.’ I’ve always envied that. I’ve always felt separate. But now… now I feel a belonging so profound it drowns out everything else. It’s a harmony. I need to be part of that blue, that vast, singing silence. I need to stop being a thing that looks at the sea, and become a thing that is the sea.”

Her voice grew softer, more intimate. “This is the hardest part, because I love you. I love your solidness, your Mate-ness. You are my anchor. But an anchor must let the ship go sometimes, mustn’t it? I am not a ship meant for harbour. Not anymore. This is my course. Please, don’t spend your life searching for a reason in madness or melancholy. The reason is joy. A joy you cannot hold in your hands. A joy that is in the letting go.”

“Walk in the sun. Feel the stone under your feet. Love again. Be happy. And when you think of me, don’t think of a woman drowning. Think of a woman who saw home on the horizon, and finally, smiling, swam.”

The recording ended. The silence that followed was of a different quality than the silence before. It was not empty. It was charged with her presence, her certainty.

I played it again. And again. Each time, the image solidified: not of a victim, but of a pilgrim. Her walk into the sea was not a retreat from life, but a progression towards a different form of it, one I could never comprehend.

I left the apartment that evening as the lamps on the Riva began to glow. I walked to the stone jetty near the Palace, a place we often went. The water was black, speckled with reflected gold.

The loop in my mind had changed. It was no longer: The last time I saw my wife, she walked into the sea, smiling.

It was now: The last time I saw my wife, she saw her home, and she went to it, smiling.

I do not understand it. I may never understand it. My grief is not less; it is transformed. It is the grief of a man left on the shore, watching a ship he loves vanish into the radiance of a horizon he cannot reach. There is loneliness in that. A terrible, vast loneliness.

But there is also, for the first time, a fragile thread of peace. She was not taken. She chose. And in her choice, in that final, radiant smile, she was utterly, incontrovertibly herself.

I took off my shoes. I sat on the cold stone, my feet dangling above the dark water. Somewhere out there, in the channels between the islands, in the deep, silent blues, she was part of the current, part of the salt, part of the endless, whispering song.

“Moja Elara,” I whispered to the night. My Elara.

The water lapped against the stone, a gentle, rhythmic sound. It did not feel like a hungry god. It felt like a vast, breathing being. And for a moment, just a moment, I imagined I felt not loss, but a connection—permeable, porous—a love that had simply changed its form, from the solid anchor to the boundless, surrounding sea.

15 The Fisherman Took More Than Fish

The Adriatic, in the hour before dawn, was not blue. It was a sheet of hammered lead, whispering lies to the limestone shore. From my balcony, the world was a study in monochrome: the black pines of the Rector’s Palace, the grey shroud over the island of Mrkan, the silver sigh of the water. I wrapped my cardigan tighter, the wool scratchy and familiar, a shield against the damp chill and the quiet.

Down in the small harbour, a single light bobbed—Bogdan’s boat, the Sirena. It was always the first to stir, a creature of habit in a town that lived on its rituals. I watched the dark silhouette of him moving against the lantern’s glow, all economical muscle and taciturn purpose. To the summer people, Bogdan was a postcard: the rugged Dalmatian fisherman, his face carved by sun and salt, his hands eternally mending nets that looked like giant, discarded spiderwebs. They snapped his picture, bought his bream and dentex, and called it an authentic experience.

I knew the price of that authenticity. It was in the set of his shoulders, a permanent tension as if bracing against a tide only he could feel. It was in the way his laughter, when it rarely came, sounded like something rusted being forced open. We were neighbours, our white stone houses leaning towards each other on the steep, cobbled street like old gossips. Our lives were adjacent, yet parallel, separated by the gulf of his quiet and my own, which was of a different, more melancholic order.

My quiet was born of books and dust. I ran the town’s only proper bookshop, a tiny, cave-like space tucked under an archway, its shelves bowing under the weight of Croatian poetry, dog-eared maritime histories, and the bright, transient paperbacks left behind by tourists. It was a place of echoes and memories, where the scent of yellowed pages mingled with the brine from the open door. My husband, Luka, had been a writer, a man whose words were as fluid and captivating as the sea he loved. He’d drowned five years ago, not in a storm, but on a calm evening, his sailboat found empty, a half-finished manuscript about local myths left sodden on the galley table. His quiet had been a permanent one, and mine had grown to fit the space it left behind.

The first time Bogdan stepped into my shop, it was not to buy a book. It was a Tuesday, the air thick with the promise of summer heat. He filled the doorway, blocking the light, smelling of iodine, engine grease, and the clean, cold scent of deep water.

“Milena,” he said, his voice a low rumble. He held out a cloth-wrapped parcel. “Too much tuna. It will spoil.”

I took the cool, heavy packet, our fingers not touching. “You shouldn’t.”

“The sea provides,” he said, a phrase so common it was almost meaningless. But his eyes held mine, and in them, I saw not pity, but a simple, stark recognition. He knew about absence. His wife, Ana, had left him years ago for a hotel manager in Split, taking their young son with her. The town had talked of nothing else for a season. His loss was a public scar; mine was a private ghost.

That became our ritual. Fish for… nothing, really. He would bring mackerel, glossy as polished metal, or a slab of swordfish, and place it on my counter. Sometimes he would linger, his gaze drifting over the spines of the books as if they were mysterious sea creatures in a trench.

“Do you ever read them?” he asked once, nodding at Luka’s novels, which had a dedicated, dust-collecting shelf near the window.

“I know them by heart,” I said, the words sharp. Too sharp.

He merely nodded. “Knowing by heart is different than reading.”

The observation startled me. It hung in the air between us, more intimate than the gift of fish. He began to stay longer. He’d buy a coffee from the Konoba next door and sit on the little stool by the travel section, a man entirely out of place among the guides to Paris and Rome. He didn’t read. He just sat, a silent, solid presence while I sorted invoices or rearranged displays. His silence wasn’t empty; it was a listening silence. He listened to the shop, to the town outside, to the spaces between my movements.

One afternoon, after a fierce Bora wind had scoured the town clean, he came in smelling of spray and effort. He didn’t bring fish. Instead, he placed a small, wet object on the counter. It was a piece of sea glass, worn to a perfect, cloudy oval the colour of a winter sky.

“Found it in the net,” he grunted. “With the trash.”

I picked it up. It was cool and smooth, a jewel made by time and indifference. “It’s beautiful.”

“It’s broken,” he said. “And then it’s not.”

He left without another word. I held the glass until it grew warm in my palm. That night, for the first time since Luka died, I didn’t dream of dark water. I dreamt of light filtering through green waves.

The seasons turned. The summer crowds swelled, a noisy, colourful tide that receded every October, leaving the town to its true, older self. Bogdan and I settled into a rhythm that was neither friendship nor courtship, but a mutual anchoring. He told me, in his spare, concrete way, about the sea’s moods—the deceptive calm of a jugo before it struck, the way the dolphins hunted, the ancient Roman amphorae he sometimes snagged in his nets and returned to the deep. I told him about the stories in my books—the tragic heroines, the questing knights, the monsters and the saints. He listened as if they were tide charts.

He began to help with small things—fixing the sticky lock on my back door, carrying boxes of new stock from the delivery van. His physicality, so contained and capable, was a strange comfort. Luka had been all air and fire, ideas and passions that could scorch or illuminate. Bogdan was earth and water. Grounded. Deep.

One evening in late autumn, the sky a bruised purple, he invited me onto the Sirena. “Not to go out,” he said quickly, seeing my hesitation. “Just to sit.”

The boat was impeccably ordered, every rope coiled, every surface scrubbed. It smelled of tar and solitude. We sat on upturned crates on the deck, a bottle of robust Pelješac wine between us, watching the lights of Cavtat glitter like fallen stars on the hillside.

“She said I was a closed book,” he said suddenly, the wine loosening the lock on his words. He meant Ana. “Said living with me was like living in a sealed room. That the sea had my voice.”

“And did it?” I asked softly.

He took a long sip, looking out towards the open water. “I thought silence was strength. I thought providing was enough. Fish on the table, roof over head. I didn’t know… words were also a thing to provide.” He turned to me, his face etched by the pier light. “Luka. He gave you many words.”

“Yes,” I said, the old ache rising, but tempered now, less sharp. “So many they sometimes drowned out my own.”

He nodded slowly. “A different kind of net.”

It was the most he’d ever said about his past. We sat in a new kind of silence, one that held our shared understanding of failure and loss. When his hand brushed mine as he poured more wine, I didn’t pull away. The touch was as startling and smooth as the sea glass.

Winter came, quiet and introspective. The tourists were gone, and the town belonged to us again. Our meetings moved from the shop to my small living room, with its view of the harbour. We shared simple meals—the fish he caught, the vegetables I stewed. We talked more. He told me about his son, Marko, now a teenager in Split who spoke to him in monosyllables over the phone. I told him about the terrifying, hollowing grief of the first year after Luka’s death, how I’d wanted to follow the words right off the page and into the sea.

“I used to watch you,” he admitted one night, the fire crackling. “From my boat. On your balcony. You looked like you were waiting for a ship that would never come in.”

“And what do I look like now?” I asked, my heart a drum against my ribs.

He looked at me, his eyes black in the firelight. “Like someone who has decided to come down to the harbour.”

The change was gradual, like the shifting of a coastline. His silence, once a wall, became a space I could inhabit. My bookshop melancholy softened, warmed by his consistent, undemanding presence. The townspeople noticed, of course. I saw the looks in the market, heard the murmured asides. The widow and the abandoned fisherman. It was a story they understood, almost a cliché. But they didn’t know the texture of it, the quiet, daily work of rebuilding trust in life itself.

The crisis, when it came, was from the deep. It was early spring. A vicious, unforecast storm had blown up while Bogdan was at his offshore lines. The Sirena was late. As dusk fell and the wind howled around my house, rattling the shutters, a cold fear, colder than any I had known since the day they brought news of Luka, seized me. It wasn’t the dramatic panic of before; it was a deep, certain dread. The thought of Bogdan’s solid presence erased from the world, of his quiet gone forever, of returning to a silence that was truly empty—it was unbearable.

I stood on the rain-lashed balcony, staring into the choppy, ink-black void of the bay until my knuckles were white on the rail. The old Milena would have descended into helpless terror. The new one, the one he had helped rebuild, acted. I called the harbourmaster, my voice surprisingly steady. I pulled on my oilskin and fought my way down the slick cobbles to the pier, joining the small, anxious knot of other fishermen’s families.

Hours later, a single light emerged from the squall. The Sirena, riding low and battered, but afloat. When Bogdan jumped onto the dock, his face grey with exhaustion and strain, he was met with relieved shouts and backslaps. His eyes scanned the crowd, frantic, until they found me, standing apart under a flickering lamp.

He walked straight to me, ignoring the others. The smell of storm and sweat and fear radiated from him. Without a word, he pulled me to him, his arms a vise around me, his face buried in my wet hair. I could feel the furious hammering of his heart against mine.

“I saw it,” he whispered, his voice raw, his lips against my ear. “The empty boat. Luka’s. In my head. I thought… I would do that to you. Leave you with another silence.”

I held him just as tightly, the truth washing over me. He wasn’t just afraid of dying. He was afraid of becoming the source of the same unending grief that had shaped me. He was afraid of taking more than fish from me; he was afraid of taking my hard-won peace.

“You came back,” I said, my own tears mixing with the rain on his jacket. “You’re here.”

That night, he didn’t go to his own house. We went to mine, shedding wet clothes, stoking the fire. There were no more words for a long time. There was the warmth of skin, the map of old scars on his back, the salt on his lips, and a tenderness that felt not like a beginning, but like an arrival. It was not the passionate, storybook love I’d known with Luka. It was quieter, deeper, born of salvage and understanding. It felt like roots finding purchase in difficult ground.

The next morning, the storm had passed, leaving a world washed clean and brilliant. We stood together on my balcony, looking at the Sirena, which sat peacefully in a harbour now as calm as a millpond.

“I’m selling the boat,” he said quietly.

I turned to him, shocked. “Bogdan, no. It’s your life.”

“It was a life,” he corrected. “A solitary one. I want a different one now.” He took my hand, his own still rough, but his grip gentle. “I’ve taken enough from the sea. Let it keep its fish. I have everything I need here.”

He didn’t sell the Sirena in the end. He kept it, but he took fewer trips, and never alone. He started a small business taking small groups out, not just to fish, but to hear the stories of the coast—the ones I helped him tell. He learned to be a guide, to share the silence, not just inhabit it.

And I? I still run my bookshop. But now, on the shelf next to Luka’s finished novels, there is a single, empty journal. On its first page, in my own handwriting, are the words: “The Fisherman Took More Than Fish.” The story is just beginning. It is not a loud story. It is a story of morning coffee shared on a sun-dappled balcony, of his hand resting on the small of my back as we walk the evening riva, of the easy quiet that fills my little house, a quiet that is no longer empty, but richly, profoundly full.

He took more than fish. He took the chill off my loneliness. He took the ghost from my harbour. And in return, I gave him a language for his silence. We are two broken pieces, worn smooth by our own private storms, finding that together, we make a whole that is stronger, and more beautiful, than what we were before. The Adriatic is blue again, a thousand shades of it, and from my balcony, the world is no longer a study in monochrome, but a painting, waiting for us to step into its frame.

16 When the Market Closed Too Early

The sun over Trogir did not set so much as it was absorbed. It sank into the limestone of the Cathedral of St. Lawrence, into the worn, ivory-smooth flagstones of the Riva, into the very marrow of the island-city, lighting it from within like a lantern. To Ema, who had lived all her twenty-seven years within its ancient walls, this evening absorption was a daily sacrament. It meant the tourists, with their loud shirts and clicking cameras, would begin to retreat to their waterfront restaurants. It meant the relentless, dazzling commerce of the open-air market in the main square would finally still. It meant she could breathe.

She was locking the iron grate over the front of Nono’s bookshop, Papir i Sjećanje – Paper and Memory. The smell of old paper, lemon polish, and the damp-stone scent unique to Dalmatia clung to her cotton dress. Her grandfather’s shop was a cave of forgotten stories, tucked into a narrow alley off the main square, and Ema was its reluctant priestess. Reluctant, because the stories she craved were not in brittle, yellowed pages, but in the living world beyond the city’s medieval gates. But Nono was fading, his memories becoming as fragile as his oldest volumes, and the shop was a stone around both their necks – a beloved, burdensome anchor.

The market stallholders across the square were packing up with a practiced, weary rhythm. Piles of lavender sachets, embroidered linens, and dubious ‘Roman’ coins vanished into plastic crates. The air, which had hummed all day with a dozen languages and the tang of salted fish and overripe peaches, began to soften. Ema fumbled with the stubborn padlock. She’d promised to fetch Nono his favourite rozata from the bakery before it closed, a caramel custard pudding that was his one unwavering pleasure.

A raised voice, sharp as a shard of glass, cut through the twilight murmur. It came from the far end of the square, near the 15th-century Čipiko Palace. A tourist, florid and sweating in a tight polo shirt, was jabbing a finger at a lone market stall that was still half-stocked.

“But it says open until seven! It is six forty-five! This is unacceptable!”

The stall belonged to Igor.

Ema knew him only by sight and reputation. Igor Soldo. He wasn’t from the old Trogir families, not really. He was a newcomer of five years, a Bećar from Zagreb, they whispered. A bachelor. He ran a stall unlike any other: not souvenirs, but a meticulously curated collection of local oddities. Fossilized sea urchins from Brač, hand-forged iron door knockers shaped like lions’ heads, antique fishing floats of green glass worn smooth by the sea, jars of wild sage honey from the Biokovo foothills. He was a collector of lost things, a trader in whispers of the past. And he was, by all accounts, as unmovable as the city walls.

Igor was already draping a heavy canvas sheet over his wares. He was a man in his late forties, tall and lean, with the kind of rangy strength that spoke of physical work rather than a gym. His hair, thick and peppered grey, fell over a forehead that was permanently creased, not with worry, but with a focused intensity. His hands, currently securing a rope, were large, scarred, and capable.

“The market light is off,” Igor said, his voice a low, calm baritone that carried across the emptying square. He didn’t look at the tourist, but at the old iron lantern above the square’s well, which had indeed just been extinguished by the town keeper. “When the light is off, the market is closed. The sign is for the summer. This is late September. My time is my own now.”

“I want to buy that!” the tourist blustered, pointing at a beautiful, rust-speckled astrolabe that lay on the velvet. “Name your price!”

Igor finally turned. His eyes, Ema saw from her distance, were a remarkable, pale grey, like the winter sea under a cloudy sky. They held no anger, only a profound, impenetrable finality. “It is not for sale to you. It is packed. The market is closed.”

The exchange escalated, the tourist’s voice growing louder, more insulting. Igor simply continued his methodical packing, a silent rock against the tide of entitled outrage. Ema felt a familiar clench in her stomach – a mix of sympathy for Igor’s quiet defiance and a weary dread of confrontation. She hated raised voices. They reminded her of her parents’ final, bitter years before they left Trogir for Split, leaving her with Nono and the dusty books.

Suddenly, the tourist, in a final act of frustration, swiped his arm across the near-covered stall. A small, carved wooden box tumbled off, its lid flying open, spilling a cascade of old, silver Venetian coins across the flagstones. They rang like tiny, discordant bells.

The sound froze everyone in the vicinity. Igor’s head snapped up. The tourist, realizing he’d crossed a line, took a step back, his bluster evaporating into panic. Igor didn’t shout. He slowly straightened to his full height, and the air around him seemed to grow colder, denser. He took one step towards the man.

That was enough. The tourist mumbled an apology, turned, and almost fled towards the Riva.

Ema realized she’d been holding her breath. She exhaled, the padlock finally clicking shut in her hand. She should go. The bakery. The rozata.

But her feet moved of their own accord, carrying her across the shadowed square towards the scattered coins. Igor was on his knees, already gathering them with swift, careful movements. Without a word, Ema knelt opposite him, her dress pooling on the cool stone. She began to pick up coins, their surfaces worn smooth, the winged Lion of St. Mark barely visible. She handed them to him, one by one.

Their fingers did not touch. He took each coin with a quiet “Hvala,” not looking at her face, his gaze fixed on the task. When the last coin was retrieved and placed gently back in its box, he closed the lid with a soft, definitive click. He looked up.

Those sea-grey eyes met hers. In the dimming light, they were not cold, as she’d expected, but deep, filled with a tired, guarded intelligence. He had a strong, angular face, softened by lines at the corners of his eyes and a mouth that looked, for a moment, uncharacteristically vulnerable.

“You are Ema. From the bookshop,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

She nodded, surprised. “And you are Igor. The man who closes his stall when the light goes out.”

A ghost of a smile touched his lips. “The only sane thing to do. Once the light is gone, the theatre is over. No one should perform in the dark.” He stood, offering a hand to help her up. After a heartbeat, she took it. His palm was calloused, warm, and he pulled her up with an effortless strength that startled her.

“You were kind to help,” he said, releasing her hand. “Most people just watch.”

“I don’t like watching,” Ema said quietly, brushing invisible dust from her knees. “It feels… complicit.”

He studied her for a moment longer, then gestured to his now-covered stall. “Can I offer you a coffee? As thanks. The kavana on the Riva is still open. I… do not like to drink alone after such nonsense.”

Ema thought of Nono, of the rozata, of her quiet, predictable evening. She thought of the bookshop’s dust, and the weight of all its unread stories. “The bakery,” she said. “I need to get my grandfather his pudding before it closes.”

“Petar’s? I walk past it. I’ll accompany you. If you don’t mind the company of a stubborn market trader.”

They fell into step through the labyrinthine streets, narrow enough in places to touch both walls with outstretched arms. The silence between them wasn’t awkward, but pensive. He moved with a quiet certainty, a man utterly at home in the maze.

“He was right, you know,” Ema said finally, her voice echoing slightly off the high stone. “The sign does say seven.”

“The sign is a suggestion,” Igor replied, his tone neutral. “The light is a law. Older and wiser. We spend our lives reading the signs, Ema, and ignoring the light. When to begin, when to stop. When something is truly over.” He glanced at her. “Your grandfather’s shop. It has a beautiful sign. ‘Paper and Memory.’ But is the light still on inside?”

The question was so blunt, so perceptive, it stole her breath. It was the very question that haunted her nights. “The bulb is old,” she said, evading. “It flickers.”

He nodded, as if she’d given a profound answer.

They reached Petar’s bakery just as the owner was pulling down the shutter. Igor, with a quiet word and a smile that transformed his severe face, convinced him to wait. He bought two rozatas, handing one to Ema in its waxed paper package. “For your silence,” he said, that almost-smile returning.

They ended up on a quiet bench on the Riva, away from the bustling restaurant terraces. The sea lay before them, a sheet of dark silk shot through with the reflected gold of house lights on the mainland. The water slapped gently against the stone quay. They ate their puddings, the sweet, eggy cream a comfort.

He told her, in fragments, why he was here. A life in Zagreb as a history teacher, disillusioned by a system that valued tests over curiosity. A divorce that had left him shipwrecked. An inherited cottage just outside Trogir, near the ancient ruins of Tragurion. He’d come to salvage his soul, he said, by salvaging fragments of the past. “The things people discard, Ema, they tell the real story. Not the kings and wars in the books, but the life that was lived. A coin lost from a purse. A tool mended one last time. A toy.”

“And the astrolabe?” she asked.

“Found in a fisherman’s loft in Drvenik. He was using it as a doorstop. He thought it was junk.” Igor’s eyes gleamed in the dark. “It was about to tell its story to a man who would have called it ‘cool decor’ for his yacht. It deserved better. So I closed my stall.”

Ema found herself talking more than she had in years. About Nono, his fading mind still bright with tales of Trogir under Tito. About her parents, whose love for each other had curdled and who had seen the bookshop only as a dead end. About her own trapped feeling, as if she were a character in a book someone else had stopped reading.

“You are not trapped,” Igor said, his voice firm. “You are the guardian of a gate. A very specific, important gate. The gate between memory and oblivion. It is a sacred duty, but a heavy one. It does not mean you must live in the gatehouse forever.”

They talked until the moon rose, a silver wafer over the bell tower. When Ema finally stood, stiff and chilled, she felt strangely unburdened. Igor walked her back to the alley of her bookshop. At the heavy wooden door, he paused.

“The market is closed, Ema,” he said. “But other things are just opening. Would you… would you like to see where the things from my stall go to rest? The ones that are not for sale. My cottage. It has a view that explains why people never really left this coast.”

She met his gaze. The guardedness was still there, but behind it was an open, waiting clarity. Like the sea after a storm. “Yes,” she said. “I would.”

The next afternoon, she found the path he’d described, leading out of the city, through pine groves and scrubland. The cottage was old, stone-walled, with a terraced garden that tumbled down towards a secluded cove. It wasn’t a home; it was an archive of a life not yet lived. Shelves lined the walls, holding his collections: not just the sellable items, but bird skulls, pressed wildflowers in frames, shelves of sea-worn glass arranged by colour, hundreds of old keys. It was chaotic, beautiful, and deeply personal.

Igor was different here. The sternness melted away. He made her tea with wild mint, showed her his latest find—a perfectly intact Murex shell, the source of ancient Tyrian purple. He explained how the light changed the colour of the sea below them, naming the shades: Kornatski modrilo, Brajanski azur, Jadranska tinja.

They fell into an easy rhythm. Ema began visiting twice a week, then more. She brought him books from the shop he might like—histories of navigation, of Dalmatian flora. He began leaving small, unsellable treasures in her letterbox: a piece of amber with a fossilized fly, a tile from a Roman hypocaust. Notes accompanied them, written in a precise, elegant hand. “For the guardian of the gate. A fly that thought it knew better, 40 million years ago.”

Nono noticed the change in her. “You have colour in your cheeks, dušo,” he rasped one day, his gnarled hand patting hers. “You have found a story you like, outside of my books.”

One evening in late October, a fierce Bora wind scoured the coast. It screamed around the cottage, rattling the shutters. Ema and Igor sat by the fire, a blanket shared across their laps, a bottle of dark Plavac Mali open between them. They had been talking about loss—his failed marriage, her absent parents, the slow, cruel loss of Nono to time.

“I came here because I believed nothing new could hurt me,” Igor confessed, staring into the flames. The firelight danced on the planes of his face. “I surrounded myself with dead, finished things. Closed my stall early. Built walls.”

“And now?” Ema asked, her voice barely a whisper over the wind.

He turned to look at her. The pale grey of his eyes was molten in the firelight. “Now I find myself wanting to be… unfinished. With you.”

He didn’t kiss her then. It was more profound than that. He simply leaned his forehead against hers, a gesture of such staggering tenderness and mutual shelter that Ema felt something deep within her, something she hadn’t even known was frozen, crack and melt. They sat like that for a long time, as the Bora yelled its ancient fury outside, powerless against the quiet fortress they had built.

Winter softened into early spring. Nono passed away peacefully in his sleep, holding Ema’s hand, a smile on his face. The bookshop was now truly hers. The weight of it was different now. It was no longer an anchor, but a foundation.

On a bright, clear day in April, with the market square bustling once more, Ema stood inside Papir i Sjećanje. She was rearranging the window display. Not with the usual dusty classics, but with a new collection. “Found Stories: Fragments of the Coast.” It featured Igor’s finds, each with a small, typed card explaining its history. The astrolabe was there, on loan. So was the box of Venetian coins.

The doorbell tinkled. Igor walked in, bringing the scent of salt and rosemary. He went straight to her, his hand coming to rest on the small of her back, a gesture that was now as natural as breathing.

“The stall is set up,” he said. “But the light is still strong. We have time.”

She smiled, leaning into his touch. “What’s today’s treasure?”

He pulled from his pocket a single, weathered sea urchin fossil, its five-pointed pattern eternal. He placed it in her palm and closed her fingers around it. “A promise,” he said. “That some things, when they are found, are meant to be kept. Forever.”

Ema looked from the fossil in her hand to the man before her, to the shop that was now a bridge between their two worlds, to the square outside bathed in the honest, golden light of mid-morning. The market was open, buzzing with life. Her heart was open, brimming with a story that was just beginning.

She understood now. It wasn’t about the market closing early. It was about recognizing the right moment to stop one thing, so another, better thing could finally begin. Igor hadn’t just closed a stall that September evening; he had, with his unwavering respect for the old light, made space for a new dawn. And she, the guardian of the gate, had finally walked through it.

17 The Woman with the Black Cat

The stones of Sibenik know the weight of time. They hold the sun’s heat long into the cool Adriatic evenings, and they remember the echo of every footfall—Venetian merchant, Croatian king, weary traveler, and local gossip. My footsteps, Irena Brkanović’s, have been adding to that echo for seventy-three years. They are slower now, a measured tap of sensible heels on the ancient limestone of the stari grad, the old town. My world has shrunk to the familiar geometry of my apartment on the third floor of a honey-colored block on the Riva, the market square at its bustling heart, and the winding, stair-street labyrinth that climbs towards the fortress of St. Michael.

My life is a quiet composition of routine: the morning coffee at Pod Lampom under the old gas lamp, the careful selection of figs and cheese at the market, the afternoon walk along the waterfront to watch the boats, their masts a bare forest against the blinding blue sky. It is a life of observation. I have become a curator of minutiae, a silent historian of my own tiny corner of Sibenik.

And then, she arrived.

She took the apartment across the landing, the one old Mrs. Jurić vacated when her son spirited her off to Zagreb. The moving was done with a strange, muffled efficiency—two men in dark clothes, no shouting, no clatter of familiar furniture. Just boxes, sealed and silent. The new tenant appeared on a Tuesday, and the first thing I noticed, through the crack of my chained door, was not her, but the cat.

A creature of absolute midnight, it was, large and composed, with a lush coat that swallowed the light from the stairwell window. Its eyes were the colour of old Roman glass, a green so pale it was almost mercury. It sat neatly beside a leather suitcase, still as a statuette, regarding my door as if it knew I was there. Then she stepped into its line of sight, bending to pick it up. She was perhaps in her late forties, with a face that was striking rather than beautiful—sharp cheekbones, a mouth that seemed accustomed to stillness, and hair the deep, smoky grey of a storm cloud, swept back from a high forehead. She wore a simple dress of charcoal linen, and her movements were economical, precise. She didn’t glance at my door. She simply unlocked hers, and she and the cat vanished inside with a soft click that felt definitive.

Her name, I learned from the buzz in the market the next day, was Anka. Anka Kovač. She was a writer, they said, from Zagreb, come to Sibenik for the quiet. A writer. This explained the odd hours, the silence, the air of self-containment. But it did not explain the cat, nor the peculiar quality of her presence.

Sibenik is a sieve; nothing stays secret for long. Gossip is our second currency, traded as vigorously as kuna. But Anka Kovač proved strangely impermeable. She shopped at odd hours, always alone, her basket filled with simple things: bread, olives, wine, fish for the cat. She frequented the lesser-used stairs, the androne passages that tunnel through the buildings. She would sit on the stone benches near the Cathedral of St. James, not to marvel at its famous frieze of 71 stone heads, but to look out towards the channel of St. Anthony, her notebook open but often untouched on her lap, the black cat a shadow at her feet.

The cat’s name was Morana. I learned this one evening when I fumbled my keys and dropped a bag of groceries. Oranges rolled across the landing. Before I could bend, a silent, dark shape darted from the shadow of her door, batting one playfully with a velvet paw. Anka’s door opened.

“Morana,” her voice was low, a contralto hum. “Do not harass the neighbours.” She looked at me. “I am sorry.”

“It’s no trouble,” I said, scooping up oranges. “She’s… beautiful.”

“He,” Anka corrected gently. “And he is a terrible nuisance. A charming one.” A ghost of a smile touched her lips. It transformed her face, lighting it from within, before it vanished. She picked Morana up, and he went limp in her arms, purring like a small engine. “You are Irena. I have seen you at the market.”

Thus began our careful, wordless dance. A nod on the stairs. A shared glance of commiseration in a long queue at the baker’s. She began to acknowledge Morana’s clear fondness for me. He would sometimes be waiting by my door in the evening. I never fed him, but I would sit on the wooden chair in my hallway and he would coil around my ankles, his purr vibrating through the thin soles of my slippers. Anka would appear, apologetic, and call him. “He seeks warmth,” she said once. “Your apartment faces the sunset. Mine is cooler.”

One afternoon, emboldened by the mellow light and a particularly good batch of rožata, I knocked on her door with a small plate of the custard. She opened it after a moment, dressed in a grey sweater despite the warmth. Behind her, I glimpsed a room of shocking austerity. White walls, a stark wooden desk, a single bookshelf neatly filled. No pictures. No clutter. Just a typewriter on the desk, and a window framing a perfect square of sea and sky. Morana was a splash of living ink on a white rug.

“Forgive the intrusion,” I said. “I made too much.”

She hesitated, then took the plate. “Thank you. This is kind. Would you… like to come in? For coffee?”

That was how the border was crossed. Our conversations were initially like the stone stairs of our town—careful, incremental, with occasional flat places to rest. We spoke of Sibenik: the way the light fell on the stone in October, the taste of the first new wine, the legend of the stone heads on the cathedral. She was a keen listener, her strange mercury eyes fixed on me, absorbing not just my words but, I felt, the spaces between them. She asked about my life. I told her of my late husband, Marko, a ship’s engineer, of our quiet, childless marriage, of his death ten years ago from a heart attack as swift and final as a summer storm. I told her of my years working in the town archives, of my love for the forgotten stories pressed between the pages of old ledgers.

She offered little in return. She was working on a book, a historical novel set during the Venetian rule. She valued the silence here. She had lived in many cities. That was all.

But Morana was our diplomat. He bridged our silences. He would leap onto my lap as I sat on her austere sofa, kneading my wool skirt. “He has chosen you,” Anka said one day, watching this ritual with an unreadable expression. “He is an excellent judge of character. He dislikes almost everyone.”

“And what does he like in me?” I asked, stroking the dense, warm fur.

“Solitude,” she said simply. “And sorrow that has settled, like dust in a sunbeam. It is quiet. It does not threaten.”

It was an intimate thing to say, piercing in its accuracy. My grief for Marko was no longer a sharp knife; it was a familiar weight, a stone I carried smoothly in my pocket. Anka saw that. I realized then that her writer’s gaze missed nothing.

The seasons turned. The bura wind began to scour the streets, whipping the sea into white fury. Anka withdrew further, her light burning later into the night. I heard the steady, frantic cadence of her typewriter through the wall. Sometimes, I would find Morana at my door in the small hours, meowing softly. I’d let him in, and he’d sleep on the rug beside my bed. In the morning, I’d return him. Anka would answer the door hollow-eyed, whispering thanks.

The change came in early spring. The gossip, which had dulled to a murmur, found a new, vicious fuel. In the market, the fishwife, Branka, a woman with a voice like grating stone, held court. “A writer, she says! I have a cousin in Zagreb. He says he knows of her. Anka Kovač. She wrote for newspapers, years ago. Then she stopped. There was a trial.”

My blood, usually so sluggish, ran cold. “A trial?”

Branka’s eyes gleamed with the pleasure of imparting poison. “Not her on trial. Her husband. A businessman. Nasty case. Fraud, embezzlement. He was convicted. And then… he killed himself. In their garage. She found him.”

The small crowd around the fig stall let out a collective gasp. I felt the stone in my pocket turn to ice.

“They said she knew,” Branka pressed, savouring the words. “They said she was cold as a stone through it all. Testified against him, some say. Took his money and vanished. Changed her name, maybe. And that cat… black as sin. A witch’s familiar, if you ask me.”

I walked away, my heart pounding a sick rhythm against my ribs. The story unfolded in my mind, horribly vivid. The shame, the shock, the terrible discovery. The relentless gossip of a bigger city, far crueler than our own. It explained her exile, her austerity, the sorrow that lived in her bones—a sorrow far more violent and complicated than my own. It explained Morana, perhaps her only steadfast companion in the wreckage.

I didn’t know what to do. The knowledge felt like a heavy, ugly object I’d stumbled upon. That evening, I saw her on the landing. She was taking out her rubbish, Morana weaving between her legs. She looked exhausted, her grey skin pulled taut over her bones.

“Anka,” I said. The word came out strangled.

She turned. Her eyes, those pale, intelligent eyes, met mine. And she saw it. She saw that I knew. It was all there, in the slight widening of her pupils, in the almost imperceptible stiffening of her spine. The shutters came down. Her face became a mask of smooth, distant stone.

“Irena,” she nodded, and turned back to her door.

“Wait.” The word was out before I could stop it. “I… I don’t care.”

She stopped, her hand on the knob. She didn’t turn around. “Don’t you?” Her voice was flat. “Everyone cares. It is the currency of places like this. Of every place.”

“It’s not my currency,” I said, with a fierceness that surprised me. “My husband was a good man. We had a quiet life. But quiet lives can be prisons, too. I am not the town gossip. I am your neighbour. And Morana’s friend.”

She was silent for a long moment. Then, she turned. The mask had cracked, just a hairline fracture. In her eyes, I saw a universe of fatigue. “It is a boring story, really. Just pain and stupidity and waste. He was weak, not evil. I was blind, not complicit. And the end… was an ending. There is no more to tell.”

“I am not asking for the story,” I said. “I am telling you I have heard a version of it. And I am still here.”

She looked at me, truly looked at me, for what felt like the first time. Not as the kindly old neighbour, but as Irena. A woman who also knew about carrying weight. She gave a slow, almost imperceptible nod. “Would you like a drink? Something stronger than coffee?”

That night, in her bare room, with Morana a warm heap on my knees, we drank travarica, the herbal brandy that tastes of the Dalmatian hills. We did not speak of her past. Instead, we spoke of the future—or rather, of her book. For the first time, she told me about it. It was not about Venetian merchants. It was about a woman in the 15th century, a stone carver’s widow, who, against all law and custom, finishes a famous statue for the cathedral after her husband’s death, carving her own face into the base where no one would ever see it.

“She leaves her mark in the shadows,” Anka said, her voice softened by the brandy. “A secret testament. Not for glory. Just to say: I was here. I endured. I created.”

“That is a beautiful story,” I whispered.

“It is a true one,” she said. “I found her in your archives. In a supply ledger. Payments for ‘the carver’s widow for completion of the saint’s foot.’ One line.”

I felt a surge of profound connection. My forgotten archives, her secret story. Our solitudes had touched, intertwined.

After that, a new rhythm began. Our friendship deepened into something quiet and essential. She would read me passages of her manuscript. I would bring her documents from my old notes. We walked together, often in the early mornings when the town was still asleep, our footsteps and Morana’s padding ones the only sound in the narrow kala. We were two women tethered to different tragedies, orbiting a shared, silent understanding.

The crisis came in high summer. Anka’s manuscript was finished. She sent it to her publisher in Zagreb. The gossip about her, stoked by Branka, had reached a fever pitch, fanned by some tourists who claimed Morana had “cursed” their child (the child had simply tripped over him). One evening, I found a crude symbol smeared on Anka’s door in grease. A pentagram. Below it, the word Vještica. Witch.

Anka stared at it, her face blank. Morana bristled, hissing at the stain. I felt a rage so pure and hot it burned away my years of placid observance. Without a word, I went to my apartment, fetched a bucket and brush and strong soap, and began to scrub. Anka watched me, motionless.

“They are just words,” she finally said, but her voice was thin.

“Stones remember,” I said, scrubbing fiercely. “But stone can also be cleaned. This is my home too. They do not get to define it.”

The next day, I did something I had not done in decades. I went to the market at the busiest hour. I walked straight to Branka’s stall. The chatter died.

“Branka,” I said, my voice clear and carrying. “The woman across my landing is my friend. Her name is Anka Kovač. She is a writer of talent and integrity. Her cat is a better creature than many people I know. The next person who defaces her door will answer to me. And the next lie you tell about her, I will correct, loudly, here, every single day. Do you understand?”

The market was utterly silent. Branka’s mouth hung open. I, Irena Brkanović, the invisible old woman, had become a force. I turned and walked away, my knees trembling, but my spine straight.

That evening, Anka came to my door. She didn’t speak. She simply took my hands in hers. Her hands were cool, the fingers long and strong. She held them for a long minute, her eyes bright. Then she said, “Thank you, Irena. You have given me back the air.”

Her book was published the following spring. It was called The Widow’s Mark. It bore a dedication: For Irena, keeper of true stories. She gave me the first copy. We sat on my balcony overlooking the Riva, the sea a sheet of hammered silver in the evening light. Morana lay between our chairs.

“They want me to go to Zagreb,” she said. “For promotions. Interviews.”

“Will you go?”

She looked out over the red roofs towards the cathedral. “I don’t know. This has become… a home. A surprising one.”

“Home is not a place you find,” I said, repeating something my Marko once told me. “It’s a place you build from the ruins you carry.”

She smiled, a true, full smile that reached her mercury eyes. “Then we have built something here, you and I.”

She did go to Zagreb, but she returned. She still leaves for periods—the world now wants pieces of her. But she always comes back. The gossip, of course, continues. But it has shifted, tempered with a grudging respect. She is now “our writer.” Morana is “our famous cat.”

Today, as I write this, I am sitting on our balcony—for it is ours now, a shared territory. Anka is at her typewriter, working on a new novel. The steady clack-clack is a comforting sound, a heartbeat through the wall. Morana is a warm pressure on my feet, a living, purring blanket.

The stones of Sibenik still hold their heat. They have absorbed new footsteps: hers, steady and purposeful; mine, slower but sure; and the soft-padded ones of a black cat who bridges two solitudes. We are three quiet testaments, living our stories in the ancient labyrinth, leaving our own marks, not in stone, but in the softer, more enduring material of shared days and silent understandings. The woman with the black cat is no longer a mystery to me. She is my friend. And in the golden light of a Dalmatian afternoon, that is the only story that matters.

18 The Sound of Drying Laundry

The first time I saw Daniel was through a veil of rain and wet linen. It was a Tuesday in late November, the kind of day when the Adriatic turns the colour of tarnished pewter and the wind, the bura, arrives not as a guest but as a conqueror. In our small Dalmatian town, tucked like a bone into the fist of the coast, winter is not a season of snow, but of air turned sharp and saline, of skies scrubbed raw, and of laundry that becomes a daily, desperate act of defiance.

My ritual is unchanging. At 8:15 AM, after my coffee turns to silt in the cup, I carry the plastic basket out to the narrow terrace that clings to the seaward side of my stone apartment. The courtyard below is a communal well of light, surrounded on three sides by the weathered, honey-coloured facades of other homes. My terrace and the one directly opposite are close enough that I could, if I were braver, stretch out a hand and almost touch the opposing railing. I never do. I hang my life out for the elements to taste: faded cotton dresses, my late husband Marko’s old fishing sweaters (which I still wear, for their smell of salt and cedar has not entirely faded), tablecloths embroidered by my grandmother, their patterns softened by a thousand washes.

That Tuesday, the bura was shrieking, trying to pluck the pegs from my fingers and send my sheets flying towards Italy. As I wrestled with a damp corner, a movement across the divide caught my eye. The sliding glass door of the opposite apartment, which had been shuttered and dark since old Mrs. Babić passed in the spring, was open. A man stood there, holding a single, white shirt.

He was tall, with the leanness of a man who uses his body for work, not ornament. His hair was dark, threaded with silver at the temples, cut short but unruly where the wind caught it. He had a face of angles and quiet—a prominent nose, a thoughtful mouth, eyes that seemed to be looking at something far beyond the shirt in his hands. He wasn’t young, perhaps my age, mid-forties, but there was a solitude about him that felt both ancient and immediate.

He didn’t fumble with the wind. He simply picked up a wooden peg, clipped the shirt by its tail to the line, and watched as the bura instantly filled it, transforming the cotton into a violent, flapping ghost. He stood there for a moment, one hand on the railing, gazing out at the choppy, leaden sea visible between our buildings. Then he turned and went inside, sliding the door shut without a sound.

I realized I had stopped breathing. My own sheet had wrapped itself around my legs like a shroud. The encounter lasted less than a minute, but it left a vacuum in the air, a silence that was louder than the wind. Who was he? Mrs. Babić’s nephew from Zagreb, someone said at the market later. A writer, or a teacher, maybe. Taking the place for the winter. His name was Daniel.

From that day, my laundry ritual gained a second, silent act. The observation. At 8:15, I would go out with my basket. Sometimes, he would already be there. Sometimes, he would emerge a few minutes after me. His own rituals were sparse, austere. He never had a full load. A shirt. Two pairs of dark trousers. A handful of plain cotton socks. A single, grey towel. His movements were economical, precise. He used wooden pegs, never plastic. He always hung each item with a kind of deliberate care, as if performing a minor sacrament. And then he would pause, that same still pause, hand on the railing, eyes on the horizon, before retreating.

I began to learn him through his laundry. The white shirt appeared every third day. The trousers were heavy, perhaps corduroy. The socks were always black. The towel was hung with military corners. There was never any intimacy on his line—no underwear, no vests. It was a public display of utter privacy. I, who hung out my heartbreak and my history for the town to see, was fascinated by this curated anonymity.

The bura gave way to the jugo, the southern wind that brings humid, heavy air and a strange, metallic tension. On jugo days, the laundry hangs limp, stubborn, taking days to dry. It was on such a day that our first almost-communication happened. The air was thick as wool, and my grandmother’s tablecloth, a large, lace-edged thing, was particularly obstinate. A gust, a spiteful twist of the jugo, sent a peg skittering across my terrace and over the railing. It landed, with a tiny tap, on his.

We both looked at it. The white plastic peg against his grey stone floor. He looked from the peg to me. I raised my hands in a helpless, apologetic gesture. He gave a small, almost imperceptible nod. He did not smile. He bent, picked up the peg, and then, instead of tossing it back, he walked to the shared railing. He stretched out his arm. I mimicked the movement, our fingertips a foot apart. He dropped the peg. It fell, but I caught it against my chest.

“Hvala,” I said, my voice rusty from disuse. Thank you.

“Nema na čemu,” he replied, his voice deeper than I had imagined, with a slight, unplaceable accent. It’s nothing.

He held my gaze for a second longer than necessary, and in that second, I saw not just solitude, but a profound, anchored sadness. Then he was gone.

That tiny exchange became a kind of lodestone. I thought about it while stirring soup, while listening to the radio, while lying in the dark. I started to shape a story for him. He was a historian, perhaps, writing a book on coastal fortifications. He was a composer, listening to the wind for melodies. He was a man recovering from a great loss, the way I was, except his loss was tidier, more contained, folded like his grey towel.

Winter deepened. The days grew shorter, the light a precious, liquid gold that gilded the stone walls for a brief hour each afternoon. My obsession grew roots and tendrils. I found myself timing my market trips to see if I might pass him on the narrow kaleta. I didn’t. He seemed to exist only in the context of his terrace and the sea. I listened for the sound of his door, for his footsteps on the stairs. I learned the schedule of his minimal shopping: a small, canvas bag every Tuesday and Friday at Konzum.

One morning in January, a hard frost had silvered the town. The air was still and biting. I went out to find my laundry from the day before frozen stiff, the fabrics board-like in postures of arrested flight. I started to laugh, a puff of steam in the cold air. It was absurd.

I heard the slide of his door. He came out, saw his own frozen shirt, a sculpture of a man running. He looked at mine, then at me laughing. And then, a miracle. Daniel smiled. It was a small, slow event, like the sun finding a crack in the clouds. It transformed his face, erasing years of quiet gravity.

“It’s a gallery of ghosts,” he said, his voice clear in the crystalline air.

“Ghosts who need to thaw before lunch,” I replied, surprising myself.

He nodded, his smile lingering. That day, he didn’t retreat immediately. We stood for a few minutes in the shared, silent gallery of our frozen clothes, the morning sun beginning to melt the edges, releasing droplets that fell like timepieces.

After that, a new layer was added. The acknowledgement. A slight tilt of the head when we both emerged. Once, when a sudden squall sent a wall of rain horizontally across our terraces, we both scurried to rescue our washing. As we frantically pulled in sodden garments, our eyes met through the watery chaos, and we shared a look of pure, shared exasperation. It felt like a conspiracy.

I began to hear him at night. Not sounds, but the absence of them. The quiet rhythm of a life being lived in measured steps. The soft scrape of a chair. The gentle click of a lamp being turned off. I imagined his apartment: a few books, a desk facing the wall, a single bed made with tight sheets. A world of essentials.

Then, in February, something changed. For three days, he didn’t appear. His terrace was empty. A cold dread settled in my stomach, more chilling than the bura. Had he left? Was he ill? The silence from his apartment was absolute. On the fourth day, unable to bear it, I committed my only act of real intrusion. Under the pretext of returning a misdelivered piece of mail (an old circular I saved from my own box), I went to his door. I knocked, my heart a frantic bird against my ribs.

There was no answer. Just that immense, echoing silence. I was about to leave when the door opened a crack. He looked terrible. Pale, with shadows like bruises under his eyes. He was wearing a robe, and he seemed smaller, diminished.

“I’m sorry,” I stammered, holding out the circular. “This was in my box.”

He took it, his fingers brushing mine. They were hot. “Thank you, Una.” He knew my name. Of course he did; this was a small town. But hearing him say it felt seismic.

“Are you… all right?” I asked, the question pushing past my propriety.

“A flu,” he said, his voice hoarse. “It’s passing.” He looked past me, down the stairs, as if yearning for the sea air. “The laundry will be piling up,” he added, with a weak attempt at a joke.

“The wind will still be there tomorrow,” I said softly.

He met my eyes then, and in his fevered gaze, I saw something raw and grateful. He nodded, and closed the door.

The next morning, he was back. He moved slowly, carefully. He hung a single pair of pyjamas. They were a soft, faded blue. It was the most vulnerable thing I had ever seen on his line. I didn’t look away. I hung my own things, and when I was done, I didn’t go inside immediately. I mimicked his pose, hand on the railing, looking out at the sea. I felt his presence beside me, a quiet warmth across the divide. We stood like that for a long time, two sentinels listening to the sound of the town waking up, the distant bells of the cathedral, the cry of gulls, the relentless, soothing whisper of the sea on the rocks below.

And the sound. The true sound of drying laundry. It’s not one sound, but a symphony conducted by the wind. On bura days, it’s a frantic, snapping drumming, a percussive battle. On jugo days, it’s a soft, sighing flagellation, a wet kiss against the fabric. On still days, it’s the gentle creak of the line, the quiet flutter of a hem. I realized I had been listening to his laundry as much as my own. The deep, soft whump of his towel, the sharp, crisp crack of his shirt. It was a language. A dialogue of clean, simple things waiting for the sun and air to restore them.

Weeks blended. The almond trees in the courtyard began to show their first, brave blossoms. The winter light softened, grew kinder. One morning in early March, the air held a faint, green promise. I was hanging a final sheet when he came out. He had no laundry with him. He came to the railing, leaning on it with both hands.

“Una,” he said.

I turned, a peg in my mouth. I took it out. “Daniel.”

“I’m leaving next week,” he said. His voice was calm, flat.

The world did not tilt, but it stilled. The fluttering symphony of laundry stopped. All I heard was the blood in my ears. “Oh,” I said, the most useless of words. “The book is finished?” I ventured, clinging to my imagined story for him.

He gave a small, sad shake of his head. “There is no book.” He looked down at his hands, then back at me. “My wife. She died. Last spring. In Zagreb. This was her aunt’s place. I came… I came to learn how to be alone.”

The words hung between us, more real than any laundry. My own loss, a dull, familiar ache in my chest, reached out to his, a sharp, fresh wound. I had been right and wrong in all my guesses.

“I am so sorry,” I whispered, the town’s old, shared phrase for grief.

“I thought if I could just be quiet enough, if I could just do the small things correctly—hang a shirt, make a coffee—the silence would become bearable. That the emptiness would just be… space.” He looked at my line, at Marko’s old sweater, at my floral dress, at the embroidered tablecloth. “You hung your life out every day. All of it. The beautiful, the worn, the sentimental. You gave it to the wind to do with as it pleased. I thought my way was stronger. It wasn’t. It was just more afraid.”

I had no words. Tears, stupid and hot, pricked my eyes. I blinked them away, looking at the sea.

“This morning,” he continued, “I realized I will miss the sound. The sound of your laundry. It was… it was the sound of life continuing. Messy, colourful, unafraid.”

Now I looked at him. “It’s just laundry,” I said, my voice thick.

“No,” he said. “It never was.”

He pushed himself away from the railing. “Thank you, Una. For the company.”

He went inside. He did not slide the door shut. He left it open, an invitation for the spring air.

The week passed. He appeared each morning, hanging his sparse items. We did not speak of his confession again. But something had shifted. Our silences were no longer parallel; they were shared. A communion.

On his last day, a Friday, the weather was pure Dalmatian spring: a sky of impossible blue, a warm, gentle maestral blowing from the west. We both came out at the same time. He had a small, final load. I had my usual basket.

We hung our laundry side by side, in silence, for the last time. His white shirt, my floral dress. His grey towel, my embroidered cloth. His dark socks, Marko’s old sweater. The maestral caught them all, filling them with a gentle, buoyant energy. The lines danced, the fabrics brushed and whispered against each other, a soft, rustling chorus.

When we were finished, we stood at our respective railings. The space between us felt different—no longer a divide, but a bridge made of sunlight and moving air.

“Goodbye, Daniel,” I said.

“Goodbye, Una,” he said. “May your lines always be full.”

He turned and walked inside. I stayed. I watched the laundry, his and mine, flying together like friendly flags. I listened. To the sigh of the cotton, the snap of the denim, the gentle strain of the line against the hook. The sound of drying laundry. The sound of things being made clean, light, and ready for use again. The sound of two solitary winters ending, not with a bang, but with the soft, everlasting whisper of cloth and wind.

19 The Winter Swimmers

The Adriatic in November is not a sea that invites. It is a sea that challenges, that defies. Each morning, as the first bruise-like light seeped over the spine of the Mosor mountain, Niko would stand on the shale-and-concrete lip of Bačvice bay, feeling the promise of the coming day as a physical ache. The water, a sheet of hammered lead under the dawn sky, whispered not of summer’s saline warmth, but of a profound, mineral cold that promised to strip everything back to its essence. For Niko, a 42-year-old shipyard welder whose hands were permanently etched with fine, metallic scars, the daily swim was not a hobby, but a necessary recalibration. It was the sanding down of life’s rough welds, a plunge into a silent, liquid world where the only sound was the roar of his own blood and the rhythmic, stone-knock beat of his heart.

His routine was immutable. 6:15 AM. The scrape of his bicycle tires on the promenade. The careful folding of his towel on the same sun-bleached bench. The slow walk to the water’s edge, his breath pluming in the still air. And then, the woman.

He first saw her on the third of November. A dark shape against the darker water, already twenty meters out, a steady, economical crawl carrying her parallel to the shore. He paused, mid-stretch. Winter swimmers were a rare, eccentric breed in Split, and he knew the few regulars by sight. This one was new. He entered the water, the cold a thousand needles, then a vise, then a single, unifying shock that forced a gasp from his lungs. He began his own swim, aiming for the red navigation buoy three hundred meters out. Their paths didn’t cross.

The next morning, she was there again. And the next. They never arrived together; she was always already in the water when he arrived, a seal-like head bobbing in the grey expanse. They established an unspoken geography. He swam to the buoy and back. She swam a longer, looping course along the protected curve of the bay. Their trajectories would sometimes intersect near the midpoint. In those moments, they would both pause, treading water, steam rising from their shoulders in the chill air. They would exchange a nod—a barely perceptible dip of the chin—and then push off again, their separate silences momentarily touching before diverging.

He named her Rea in his mind, for no reason other than it felt short, solid, Croatian, and somehow suited the quiet determination of her stroke. He didn’t wonder about her life. The swim was a parenthesis in the day, and she was a figure within that parenthesis. Her presence was a fact, like the temperature of the water or the scent of pine and salt on the breeze. He noted details only in the way one notes landmarks: her plain black swimsuit, her efficient, unhurried pace, the way she emerged from the water with a swift, unshaken motion, as if leaving one element for another was a trivial thing.

Weeks bled into each other. November deepened. The sea temperature dropped to 12 degrees, then 10. The cold became a sharper, more demanding companion. One morning, a fierce Bura wind scoured the bay, chopping the surface into a chaotic, white-capped frenzy. Niko hesitated, watching the waves slam against the concrete. Then he saw her head, a dark punctuation mark in the tumult, moving with the same metronomic rhythm. He plunged in, the fight against the waves a brutal, exhilarating agony. When they passed near each other, both gasping, salt spray stinging their faces, she actually looked at him—a direct, assessing look—and gave a single, sharp nod of what might have been camaraderie, or simple acknowledgment of shared madness. It was the most communication they had ever shared.

The silence between them was not empty; it was full. It was filled with the shared understanding of the ritual, the mutual respect for the cold, the unspoken agreement that this was a space for purification, not conversation. He sometimes imagined she might be a doctor, shedding the weight of night-shift decisions, or a writer, washing away the clutter of words. He never once considered asking. To ask would be to break the spell, to drag the complications of the world—names, jobs, histories, sorrows—into their elemental refuge. It was enough to know that someone else needed this silent, frigid baptism as badly as he did.

On the morning of November 28th, the world was utterly still. The air was cold and clear, the sea a pane of smoked glass reflecting a washed-out, peach-streaked sky. Niko cycled faster, a strange anticipation humming in his veins. The sea was perfect. He reached the bench, unfolded his towel with practiced precision, and turned to the water.

It was empty.

He stood, staring. The bay stretched out, smooth and unbroken. No ripples, no bobbing head. He scanned the shoreline, the far curve of the beach, the distant piers. Nothing. A gull cried, the sound lonely and sharp. He waited five minutes, ten, the cold morning air beginning to bite through his tracksuit. Perhaps she was late. Perhaps she had changed her routine. But a deep, instinctive certainty settled in his gut: she was never late.

The plunge, when he finally took it, was a solitary shock. The silence, which had always been peaceful, now felt vast and accusatory. His swim to the buoy was mechanical. Every stroke felt out of rhythm. He kept looking around, half-expecting to see her dark shape slicing through the water. He saw only the indifferent sea. The buoy, when he reached it, was just a red float on a chain, not a milestone. He clung to it, breathing hard, the cold finally seeping into his core. For the first time, the swim felt punishing, not purifying. He swam back quickly, clumsy with a disorientation he couldn’t name.

He emerged, toweled off roughly, and sat on the bench, not dressing. He watched the sunrise gild the Roman walls of Diocletian’s Palace in the distance. The beauty felt remote, a postcard for someone else. The absence had a shape, a weight. It pressed on him. He realized, with a jolt, that he had no way to find her. He knew nothing. She was a pattern of movement in the water, a shared nod in the cold, and now she was a gap in the fabric of his morning.

The day at the shipyard passed in a fog of grating metal and blinding torch-light. His hands worked automatically, joining steel plates for a new ferry, but his mind was out in the bay, scanning an empty horizon. Who was she? Why had she stopped? Had the cold finally won? Had she simply moved on? The questions, once kept at bay by the ritual itself, now swarmed him. The not-knowing was a new kind of cold, one the sea could not cure.

The next morning, he was at the bay before dawn. The water was empty again. He didn’t swim. He sat on the bench, a sentinel. On the third morning, a Saturday, he brought two coffees in a paper carrier. He placed one on the far end of the bench, a silent, foolish offering. He drank his, watching steam merge with his breath. An old man, one of the year-round chess players who haunted the promenade, shuffled over.

“You’re the swimmer,” the old man stated, his voice gravelly.

Niko nodded.“The woman,” the old man said, gesturing vaguely toward the water. “The quiet one. Black suit.”Niko’s heart thumped once, hard. “Yes.”“Haven’t seen her this week. You ask at the hospital?”“Hospital?” The word was a block of ice in Niko’s throat.“Ja. Clinical Hospital. She’s a nurse there. Or was. Saw her in scrubs a couple times, early, heading that way after.” The old man shrugged, a philosophy of non-interference in the gesture. “Just a thought.” He shuffled away, leaving Niko with a name—a direction.

The Clinical Hospital of Split was a sprawling, modern complex on the western edge of the city. Niko stood outside its main entrance, feeling absurd. He couldn’t just walk in and ask for a nurse he knew only as a shape in the water. He spent an hour loitering near the staff entrance, watching figures in blue and green scrubs come and go, feeling like a trespasser. None of them were her. Defeated, he turned to leave, and his eyes caught on a small, tucked-away café across the street, its windows steamy. On a whim, he went in.

The air was thick with the smell of coffee and fried dough. It was clearly a haunt for hospital staff. He ordered an espresso and, mustering courage, showed a photo on his phone—a generic picture of a woman swimming he’d downloaded—to the tired-looking barista. “I’m sorry to bother you. I’m looking for a woman who swims at Bačvice every morning. A nurse, I think. Dark hair, quiet. Her name might be Rea?”

The barista wiped the counter, her expression unimpressed. Then a voice from behind Niko said, “Rea? Rea Juric?”

He turned. A young woman in nurse’s scrubs, her cap in her hand, was looking at him with curiosity. “Yeah, Rea Juric. She swims. Or used to. Crazy, in winter.”

“Do you know where she is?” Niko asked, the words too urgent.The nurse’s expression softened into something like pity. “She’s not on shift. Hasn’t been for… ten days, maybe? She’s up in Oncology. Eighth floor.”

Niko’s world tilted. The café noise receded. “Is she… working there?”The nurse just looked at him, and in her eyes, he saw the truth. She wasn’t working on the eighth floor. She was a patient. The winter swimmer, the figure of fierce, silent strength, was in the oncology ward.

He took the stairs, not the elevator, needing the burn in his legs, the physical proof of ascent. The eighth floor had a different air—a hushed, sanitized solemnity, smelling of antiseptic and suppressed fear. He approached the nurses’ station, his story a clumsy jumble on his lips.

“I’m… a friend of Rea Juric’s. From swimming. I was told she was here. Could I… see her?”

The nurse at the desk, an older woman with kind, exhausted eyes, scanned a chart. “Room 814. But she’s very tired. Only a few minutes.”

Room 814. The door was ajar. He knocked softly, pushed it open.

The room was bathed in the thin, afternoon light. And there she was, propped up on pillows, looking out the window at a sliver of distant, grey sea. She was thinner, paler, her dark hair lying loose on the pillow instead of being slicked back by saltwater. But the set of her jaw, the quiet intensity in her profile—it was unmistakably her. The woman from the sea.

She turned her head. For a long moment, she just looked at him, her dark eyes registering no surprise, only a deep, weary recognition. Then, a ghost of a smile touched her lips. “You found the shore,” she said, her voice a dry whisper.

He moved to the side of the bed, his own voice failing him. He simply stood there, a man made of welding scars and sea salt, in a room that smelled of illness.

“I wondered if you would,” she continued, her gaze drifting back to the window. “When I couldn’t go back… I thought maybe you’d just keep swimming. To the buoy and back. Every day.”

“The water was empty,” he said, the words finally coming. “It was wrong.”

She nodded slowly. “For me, too. Not being there.” She looked back at him. “You never asked anything.”

“It wasn’t the place for questions,” he said.

“It was the only place for them,” she corrected him gently. “The real ones, anyway.” She took a shallow breath. “Leukemia. A relapse. The swims… they were my last free thing. My last strong thing. Until they weren’t.”

Niko pulled the visitor’s chair close and sat. He didn’t offer platitudes. He didn’t ask for details she might not want to give. He simply said, “Tell me about the water that morning. The day of the Bura.”

And she did. She spoke, her voice gaining a faint strength. She described the feel of the waves like battering rams, the taste of salt, the triumph of not yielding. He told her about the yard, about the arc of the welding torch being the only other thing that made him feel as focused as the cold sea. They talked of the silence, the strange companionship of it. He learned she was 38, a pediatric nurse, that she loved the specific clarity of winter light on the Marjan hill, that she hated the noise of motorbikes on the Riva. Ordinary details that, in this room, felt like sacred revelations.

His few minutes stretched to half an hour. When the kind-eyed nurse peeked in, he rose to leave.

“Will you come back?” Rea asked, her hand, fine-boned and threaded with IV lines, resting on the blanket.

“Yes,” he said. “Tomorrow. And the next day.”

“And will you swim?” she asked.

He thought of the empty bay, the leaden water. “I don’t know.”

“You should,” she whispered. “For both of us. Tell me how it feels. How cold it is.”

The next morning, before dawn, Niko returned to Bačvice. The sea was there, eternal, indifferent. He stood on the shale, feeling the old pull, the old dread. He thought of Rea in her white room, watching the same distant slice of it. He unfolded his towel, and beside it, he placed a second one—a small, blue one he’d bought on the way. A gesture.

He walked into the water. The cold was a shock, as always. But as he began his stroke toward the red buoy, he realized he was not alone. He carried her with him. He swam for her, feeling the push and pull of the current, noting the exact quality of the dawn light on the water, the way the cold made his lungs burn and his skin feel alive. He would be her senses. He would be her strength.

When he emerged, shivering and vital, he did not hurry to dress. He sat on the bench, took out his phone, and began to type a message. “The water is 9 degrees today. A skin of ice formed in the shallows by the rocks, and it cracked like glass when I walked in. The sunrise hit the tip of the bell tower of Saint Domnius just as I reached the buoy. It looked like it was on fire. A cormorant dove near me. It was so quiet afterwards, I could hear my own heart for a full minute. It sounded… steady.”

He hit send. A moment later, his phone buzzed.“Thank you,” the message read. “I felt the cold. I saw the light.”

Niko looked out at the now-sunlit bay, the water dancing with diamonds. The parenthesis of the swim was broken open. It was no longer an escape, but a connection. The silence they had shared was now a bridge, built from seawater and winter light, spanning the distance between a concrete shore and a white room, carrying the essential, unspoken things: the cold, the struggle, the fragile, stubborn persistence of life, and the profound understanding that sometimes, the deepest bonds are formed not in the asking, but in the shared, silent endurance of the swim.

20 The Woman Who Swore at the Sea

The first time I told the Adriatic to go fuck itself, I was six years old, and it had just stolen my brand-new, cherry-red plastic sandal. My mother, a woman perpetually braced for divine judgment, nearly swallowed her own tongue. “Paula! The sea is God’s creation! You don’t swear at it!”

“Well, God’s creation is a thieving little bastard,” I’d muttered, hopping on one foot as the foam licked my toes, smug and frothy. That set the tone for our relationship, the sea and I. It wasn’t a majestic, soul-stirring entity to me. It was a capricious, salty neighbor who’d steal your stuff, ruin your hair, and then lie there glittering, pretending it had done nothing wrong.

Thirty years later, nothing had changed except the venue. I was on a pebbly stretch of coast outside Rovinj, my inherited cottage a stubborn, sun-bleached thing clinging to the rocks. The sea had just delivered a particularly aggressive wave that soaked the hem of my sundress and the paperback I was attempting to read. I slammed the soggy book shut.

“You insufferable, bloated piss-pot,” I announced, voice conversational. “Was that necessary? I was getting to the good bit, the bit where the detective realizes the vicar did it. But no, you’ve got to heave your great aqueous arse up here and baptize Agatha Christie. What’s next? You going to salt my wine? Piss in my tea?”

I went on, detailing the sea’s many flaws: its poor boundary-setting, its monotonous colour scheme, its frankly derivative sound design. “The whole ‘roar’ thing is overplayed. Ever think of a gentle hum? A whisper? No, it’s all drama with you, isn’t it?”

“It’s more of a susurrus, I’d argue. But your point about its lack of creative acoustics is fascinating.”

The voice came from my right. I jumped, nearly joining the Christie in a briney grave. A man was sitting on a large, grey rock I could have sworn was empty a moment ago. He was tall, lean, dressed in linen that looked both expensive and permanently crumpled. His hair was a tousled, salt-streaked grey, and his face was a map of interesting lines, the kind earned by smiling and squinting at distant things. He held a small, leather-bound notebook. A pencil was poised in his hand.

“How long have you been there?” I demanded, my heart doing a furious tarantella against my ribs.

“Long enough to appreciate your critique of its narrative pacing,” he said, nodding toward the water. His accent was unplaceable—educated, melodic, with a faint, warm roll beneath it. “Though I think you’re being unfair about the colour. At this hour, it’s not just blue. It’s a veined Lapis Lazuli fading into a jealous, celadon green near the shore. You have to look properly.”

“I look plenty proper. And it’s a greedy bastard of a colour, sucking up all the light and giving back glare.”

He laughed, a sound like dry stones rubbing together pleasantly. “May I?” He gestured to the notebook.

“May you what?”

“Record some of this. Your phrasing is… uniquely incisive.”

I stared at him. “You want to write down me swearing at the sea.”

“I want to document a singular philosophical stance,” he corrected gently. “You engage with it as an equal. A delinquent equal, but an equal. Most people just sigh and say ‘how beautiful.’ It’s banal. You… you converse. You see its personality. Its malevolence.”

He was clearly a lunatic. A handsome, well-spoken lunatic. I found myself intrigued. “Fine. But if you’re going to be my scribe, you have to contribute. What’s your take on it, then? Mr…?”

“Luka. And I listen.” He closed his eyes for a moment, turning his face to the slight breeze. “It’s not one voice, but millions. The sigh of parted molecules, the grumble of stones turning over in sleep, the slow exhalation of ancient, drowned things. It’s the closest thing we have to the planet’s pulse. Scripture written in salt and motion.”

“Right. So you’re a poet.” I said it like I was diagnosing a rash.

“A marine biologist, actually. On sabbatical. The poetry is a side effect.”

And so it began. Our ritual. He’d appear in the late afternoons, on his rock. I’d arrive, often bearing the sea’s latest offense—a ruined basket of figs, a sand-filled shoe, a mood that only a good rant could fix. I’d let loose.

“Look at you! Lolling about like a drunk Roman emperor! You think you’re so profound? You’re just a big, wet desert! A pointless, repetitive catastrophe waiting to happen!”

And Luka would listen, head cocked, his eyes—the colour of that deep, veined Lapis—fixed on me with a focus that was unnerving and flattering. He’d scribble in his notebook, sometimes chuckling, sometimes looking profoundly moved. Then he’d offer his counterpoint, a lyrical, scientific, spiritual dissection of the very same water. Our banter was a tennis match of blasphemies and benedictions.

“You anthropomorphize its indifference,” he said one day, after I’d cursed it for being a “feckless, moody cow.”

“And you spiritualize its pointlessness,” I shot back. “It’s not indifferent. It’s malicious. It knows I just washed this blanket.” I shook out the damp weave for emphasis.

“The malice is in your perception. It simply is. That’s its glory.” “Its glory is in my perception, you pedantic plankton-fancier.”

He threw his head back and laughed, and the sound did something warm and dangerous in my stomach.

The shift from philosophy to passion was as inevitable as the tide, and just as tumultuous. It happened after a fierce summer storm. The sea was a churning, triumphant monster, and I was on the rocks, screaming myself hoarse at it, rain and spray and tears of fury mingling on my face. I was yelling about loss, about my mother’s recent death, about the general, vast, wet, awful unfairness of everything.

Luka wasn’t writing. He was just watching me, his usually placid face etched with a fierce empathy. When my voice finally broke, spent, he climbed down from his rock and came to me. He didn’t say a word. He took my face in his hands, his thumbs rough on my wet cheeks, and kissed me.

It wasn’t a gentle kiss. It was a counter-attack. A grounding. A argument made with lips and tongue and teeth against the chaos. It tasted of salt and red wine and the wild, electric air. We stumbled back to my cottage, a tangle of soaked clothes and desperate hands, leaving a trail of curses (mine) and soft, reverent praises (his) on the floor.

Sex with Luka was like our conversations: profound, shocking, hilarious. He worshipped my body like a sacred text, murmuring about the “cartography of your freckles” and the “perfect, furious arch of your spine.” I’d tell him to shut his daft, beautiful mouth and get on with it. Once, in the throes, my elbow knocked a ceramic jug of wildflowers off the bedside table. It shattered.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” I groaned. “It’s just a thing,” he panted, not stopping. “A beautiful, fragmented thing now. Like us.” “We’re not fragmented, you pretentious git, we’re fucking,” I corrected, pulling him back down.

We were a riotous, impossible fit. He’d cook elaborate seafood risottos, explaining the ecology of each mollusc. I’d butter toast and tell him the seagulls outside were having a louder, more interesting debate about property rights. He’d read me sonnets; I’d read him the more creatively worded graffiti from the harbour wall. We made love in my bed, on his boat, once perilously on his rock at midnight, him quoting Ovid and me threatening to push him in if he didn’t hurry up.

He called me his “furious muse.” I called him my “over-educated barnacle.” We were, against all odds and my better judgment, gloriously, messily in love.

The crack appeared on a day so perfect it was offensive. The sea lay flat and docile as a millpond, a sheet of polished sapphire. We were on his little wooden boat, the Apostata, drifting. I was sunning myself, bored by the tranquility.

“Pathetic,” I sighed. “No backbone. One good stiff wind and you’d turn into a neurotic, frothing mess.” I aimed a lazy kick in the water’s general direction.

Luka was at the tiller, quiet. He’d been quiet for days. “You’re not writing,” I said, propping myself up on my elbows. “I’m remembering,” he replied softly. He looked at me, and the depth of sadness in his eyes stole my breath. “Paula, I have to go back.”

“Back? Back where? To the university?” “To the world. My sabbatical… it’s over. They’ve offered me a lead on a research vessel. Two years. Mapping the abyssal plains in the South Pacific.”

The silence that followed was louder than any storm. The boat bobbed stupidly on the placid water. “Two years,” I finally said, my voice flat. “It’s the work of my life, Paula. You know what this means. The deep, silent places… listening to the planet’s oldest songs…”

“And what about my songs?” The question came out small, stripped of its usual armour. “My swearing, furious, shore-bound songs?”

He came to me then, kneeling in the boat, taking my hands. “Come with me.”

I blinked. “On a research vessel? Me?” “Why not? You’d be a revolutionary force. You could curse at the Mariana Trench. Tell the Humboldt Current it has a stick up its arse. It would be an adventure.”

He painted a picture: us, against the vast, unexplored deep. My voice, his science. Our own floating, rebellious world.

And for a moment, I saw it. The dizzying, terrifying freedom of it. Leaving this rocky cove, this predictable feud, for a boundless, saltier argument.

Then I looked back at the shore. At my stubborn, sun-bleached cottage. At my rock. At the thieving, familiar, bastard sea that I knew like the back of my own hand, that held my stolen sandal and my mother’s memory and the rhythm of my own furious heart.

This was my territory. My argument. This specific, infuriating, beautiful stretch of Adriatic. It was my lifelong conversation. To go with him would be to become a spectator to a different, grander mystery. I would be adrift, literally and metaphorically. My curses would become quaint, my perspective lost in the sheer scale. I would be Luka’s colourful companion, not the Woman Who Swore at This Sea.

“I can’t,” I whispered, the words tearing something vital inside me. “This is my dialogue. This petty, provincial, thieving water. It’s mine. I can’t just… take it on tour.”

His face crumpled, the lines deepening into ravines of pain. “So this is it? You choose a body of water over me?”

“I choose my life over a voyage!” I shot back, the anger returning, a life-saving tide. “You’re asking me to trade my voice for a footnote in your logbook!”

“I’m asking you to be with me!” “On your terms! In your world! What about mine? Who’ll listen to my scripture if I go?”

We yelled then, our first real fight. It wasn’t playful. It was brutal. He accused me of loving my own anger more than him. I accused him of loving the idea of me—the shocking, shore-bound muse—more than the reality of a woman who needed her own ground to stand on, even if it was just to shake her fist at the horizon.

We broke there, on that stupidly calm sea. It wasn’t a clean break. It was a splintering. We spent one last, desperate night in the cottage, a night of tears and touch and a sadness so profound it felt like we were drowning in the still air. In the morning, he was gone. No note. Just the absence of his notebook on the table.

The choice broke us both.

He left for the South Pacific. I stayed. I read about his expedition sometimes, in online science journals. Dr. Luka Veres, pioneering new acoustic mapping techniques. I wondered if he missed the susurrus, or if the deep’ silence had finally satisfied him.

And I kept swearing at the sea. But it felt different. Hollow. My tirades were now monologues. The sea would steal, and I’d call it a “brainless, brine-soaked wanker,” and the words would just hang there, unanswered, before being swallowed by the wind. It was like shouting into the ear of a deaf, indifferent god. I missed my atheist.

I grew older. My hair got streaks of grey to match the rocks. The cottage creaked a little more. The sea remained, in its infinite, thieving bastardry.

Five years after he left, a package arrived. No return address. Inside was his leather-bound notebook. The one he’d scribbled in all those afternoons. With trembling hands, I opened it.

It wasn’t notes. It was transcripts. Page after page of my rants, recorded with meticulous, loving accuracy.

“You insufferable, bloated piss-pot…”“Lolling about like a drunk Roman emperor…” “A greedy bastard of a colour…”

But in the margins, in his tiny, precise script, were his responses. Not the ones he’d said aloud. Different ones.

“She calls you a piss-pot. She is not wrong. But you hold the memory of every rain that ever fell. You are the world’s cistern.”“A drunk emperor. Yes. And she is my rebellious, truthful court jester. The only one who tells the truth.” “The colour is greedy because it has swallowed the sky. She understands absorption, theft. She feels it in her soul.”

On the last page, dated the day before he left, was a final entry, not in the margin but centered, alone:

“I went to listen to the planet’s oldest songs. But I found I had already heard the only one that mattered. It was not a susurrus. It was a glorious, furious, living curse. A prayer in reverse. A woman telling the infinite to be more considerate. I have mapped the silent dark, but I am lost in it. For I am haunted by a voice that made the shallow, thieving shore the centre of the universe. My love, you were the scripture. I was just a fool who learned to read too late.”

I closed the book. I walked down to the rocks. The sea was doing its usual glittering act. I held the notebook to my chest. My throat was tight, my eyes hot.

I opened my mouth. The old, familiar venom rose. But what came out was a whisper, raw and broken.

“You…” I began, then stopped. I took a shuddering breath. I looked at the vast, blue, thief of my sandal, my peace, my love. I thought of Luka, somewhere on a deep, silent sea, haunted.

I found my voice again. It wasn’t loud. But it was clear. It carried.

“You beautiful, terrible bastard,” I said to the water. “Look what you’ve done now.”

And for the first time in five years, I didn’t feel like I was talking to myself. I felt, somehow, that the message was being received, carried on the currents, across the continents, down into the silent, dark deep, where a man with a notebook might just feel a ripple, a faint, familiar echo of a shore-bound curse that meant I love you. I miss you. Go fuck yourself.