Chapter 1: The Ferry Brought More Than Tourists

The morning ferry comes into our harbor at ten past eight, give or take whatever mood the captain is in. I know because I'm always on the pier by then, pretending to read a newspaper I finished yesterday. The truth is I like watching who gets off. You can tell a lot about a person by how they carry a suitcase across a gangplank that bounces.

Most of them are the usual summer crowd: sunhats the size of cartwheels, sandals that have never met a cobblestone, a grandmother being steered by three grandchildren. They blink at the whitewashed fronts and the pomegranate trees leaning over the quay as if someone had arranged it all for their photographs. I wave at the ones who look lost. I'm generous that way, especially before my second tea.

Then came a woman who wasn't wearing a hat at all. Dark hair tied up in a hurry, one small bag, a linen shirt the color of weak coffee, and a stillness I couldn't stop noticing. She stepped onto the pier and didn't take out a camera or a map. She just closed her eyes for a second and breathed in, as if she were tasting the air, salt and diesel and frying dough, and finding it exactly right.

I'm not nosy, whatever the baker's wife says. But I do keep a mental ledger of arrivals, and this one didn't fit any column. She wasn't a day-tripper and she wasn't a family. She walked like someone who had decided something on the crossing and hadn't yet told anyone, including herself. I folded my newspaper and, very casually, did not follow her.

I only followed her as far as the fig stall at the end of the pier, which happens to be on my way to nowhere in particular. She stopped there to buy a single fig and bit into it right in front of the vendor, who looked scandalized and delighted in equal measure. She laughed, wiped her thumb on her shirt, and glanced up. Straight at me. Caught, newspaper and all. And then she said, in perfect, unhurried Turkish, my name.

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