Chapter 2: She Rented the Blue House Next to Mine

There is a blue house next to mine, and it has been empty since the spring, when old Madam Eftelya moved in with her daughter on the mainland. The shutters are the exact blue of the water just past the breakwater, where the sea gives up being green. Every morning I water my basil on my side of the low wall and look at those shutters, and every morning they stay closed. That Tuesday, they were open.

I didn't hear her arrive. I heard the aftermath: a window banging wide, a radio finding a station, a bucket being dragged over tile. By the time I had finished pretending to prune a plant that did not need pruning, she was standing at the wall with her sleeves pushed up and a smudge of dust on her cheekbone. She looked at my basil, then at me, and said the landlord had mentioned a neighbor who was, quote, friendly but watchful.

I told her the landlord is a gossip with a mustache. She said she liked him anyway, and that the house smelled like lemon peel and old books, which was apparently exactly what she'd hoped for. Then she asked if I knew where a person might borrow a second pillow in this town, since she had arrived with one bag and an unreasonable confidence about sleeping arrangements.

Naturally I offered her a pillow. I also offered tea, which she accepted, and a plate of the little sesame cookies my aunt posts me every month whether I want them or not. We sat on my step with the wall between our gardens, and the afternoon went soft and sideways the way afternoons do here. She told me she'd come to finish something, but she didn't say what. I didn't ask. I'm learning restraint. Slowly, and badly.

When the light turned the color of apricots, she stood and brushed the crumbs from her knees and thanked me for the pillow I hadn't actually fetched yet. I went inside to get it, and when I came back to the wall she was gone. Her door was ajar, though, and from somewhere in the dim of the blue house came the unmistakable sound of someone laughing at a thing they'd just discovered. I stood there with a pillow in my arms, wondering what a rented house could possibly be hiding.

More like this: ai soulmate chat online.