What She Took

"What did you take?"

"Nothing that belongs to him."

"Lena."

"Nothing that belongs to anyone who should have it." She ties off the jib sheet with a little more force than necessary. "I'm not being mysterious to be annoying. I'm being mysterious because if I tell you, it becomes your problem. Right now you're just a man with a boat and a strange client. That's all. That's safe."

"I hid you from a coast guard cutter and a helicopter."

"Skipper with a very strange client." She glances at you. "Please, Ethan. Let me keep one thing to myself for a little longer."

You let it go. For now. It sits between you in the cockpit for the rest of the afternoon like a third passenger.

By evening you're out of ice and nearly out of water, and Stelio's tomatoes are a memory. Isola Fenice is three miles off the bow, its market town stacked up the hillside in pink and ochre and blue, church bell going for vespers.

"You stay aboard," you say, picking up the dinghy line.

"Absolutely not."

"Rule two."

"Rule two says cap and glasses. It doesn't say I have to stay in a cabin like a parcel." She's already pulling the cap on, tucking her hair under. She digs into the windbreaker pocket and comes out with the sunglasses. "I've never been to a market. A real one. Where you pay with money and nobody curtsies."

"You've never been to a market."

"I've opened markets. With scissors. There's a difference."

You look at her. She looks back, chin up, the whole of her face a dare. You think you've lost this argument before it started.

"Stay next to me," you say. "Don't talk to anyone. If anyone looks at you too long, look at the vegetables."

"Look at the vegetables," she repeats, very seriously. "Understood, Captain."

The market is in the square below the church, under strings of bare bulbs just coming on. Stalls of peaches and fat white beans and fish laid out on ice with their eyes still bright. Old women arguing over cheese. A man selling lemons the size of your fist, shouting about them like they've personally done him a favor.

Lena is overwhelmed in the first ten seconds.

She doesn't say so. But you see it: the way she slows down, the way her head turns from stall to stall, the way her hand comes out to touch a peach and then stops in midair like she needs permission.

"You can touch it," you murmur.

She touches it. Picks it up. Smells it. Turns to you with an expression you've only seen on very small children at the beach.

"How much is this?"

"Ask him."

She turns to the stallholder, a grandfather with a face like a walnut. "How much is this, please?" she says, in a voice so perfectly modulated it could be on the national news.

The grandfather squints at her. "Two for one scudo."

"Two for one scudo," she breathes, like he's told her a secret. She hands him a coin from your pocket, which she took without asking. She gets two peaches. She holds them like they're the crown jewels.

You buy everything else while she drifts from stall to stall in a daze. Bread. Cheese. Water. Ice. A bag of tiny clams for pasta. She buys a bunch of wild oregano for no reason and holds it to her face and breathes it in with her eyes closed.

You're paying for olive oil when you see the woman.

Sixty or so, elegant, a little linen dress, a straw bag on her arm. Not a local. A tourist from the capital, maybe, here for the summer. She's at the stall beside Lena's, and she's stopped picking through the apricots, because she's looking at Lena. Not glancing. Looking. Her head tilting a little, slowly, the way people's heads tilt when they're trying to place a face.

Lena hasn't noticed. Lena is sniffing a melon.

The woman takes a step closer. Her lips part.

You put the olive oil down and cross the space in two strides. You slide an arm around Lena's waist from behind and pull her back against you, and you lean down so your face is close to her ear, between her and the woman, and you say, loudly and fondly, "There you are. I lost you at the peaches."

Lena goes absolutely rigid. For one terrible second she doesn't understand.

Then she does. She melts back against you, turns her face into your shoulder so all anyone can see is the brim of her cap, and laughs. Not the goose laugh. A soft, intimate, private laugh, like you just said something only she was meant to hear.

"You always lose me at the peaches," she says.

"Come on. Before the fish man sells out."

You turn her away with your arm still around her, steering her through the crowd, and you don't look back, and you don't let go, and neither does she. Her hand has found yours where it's resting at her waist. Her fingers are laced through yours, tight.

You can feel her heartbeat through the windbreaker. You can feel your own, louder.

Behind you, the woman in linen calls, uncertainly, "Excuse me? Aren't you—?"

You keep walking.

At the corner of the square, under the church, you finally risk a look back. The woman is standing by the apricots, shaking her head at herself, laughing a little, the way people do when they've almost said something embarrassing to a stranger. She turns back to her shopping.

You let out a breath you've been holding since the olive oil.

Lena doesn't move away. She's still against your side, still holding your hand, her face tipped up toward yours under the cap. Her sunglasses have slipped down her nose. Her eyes are very close and very green in the light of the bulbs.

"That," she says, a little breathless, "was rule one?"

"That was improvising."

"You're good at improvising, Ethan."

"You're good at laughing on cue."

"I've had a lot of practice." But she's not laughing now. She's looking at your mouth. Just for a second. Then she looks away, fast, and steps back, and suddenly there's air between you again, cool evening air, and your hand is empty.

"We should go," she says. "The fish man."

"Forget the fish man."

You pick up the bags you abandoned at the oil stall. You walk her down the steep lane toward the harbor, where you left the dinghy tied to the ferry landing. Neither of you says anything. The church bell has stopped. The light is going purple.

You're twenty yards from the landing when you stop dead.

Two men in dark suits are standing at the foot of the ferry ramp. Not tourists. Not locals. Short hair, earpieces, the stillness of people who are paid to stand still. One of them is holding up a phone to a fisherman mending a net, showing him something on the screen.

The fisherman squints, shrugs, shakes his head.

The man in the suit turns, and holds the phone up to the next person in line, and from twenty yards away you can see exactly what's on it.

Pearls. Pale blue silk. A smile the whole kingdom knows.