In Santorini, in a white village carved out of a cliff face, they walked into the cool of a basement bookshop, where the air was thick with incense, to avoid the crush of tourists ploughing to the most westerly point for the legendary sunset. There was an English section, and Dido gravitated towards it; specifically to the word ‘sexy’ that had been painted on the side of a shelf. Xanthe found herself thumbing through contemporary Greek poetry, still struggling to translate back in her head as she was so out of practice. She had never had much time for poetry: she’d always been too hard for it, in one way or another. But now, here, she felt something uncurling in herself. It was related to the quality of the sunlight, maybe, or the expanse of sea and sky they stared into every day. It had to do with not being in a city, and with speaking Greek again. The poet was a woman, Katerina Elogiat, her eyes brown and liquid in the picture on the jacket. She wrote tiny scraps of things, only a few words, about light on the sea, about the need to stop, be still and breathe. With the tears still in her eyes, Xanthe took it to the till, even though they were on a tight budget for the rest of the trip. The man behind the counter had a beautiful, serene face: he looked older than he was because his long hair was white under the scarf, but his tanned skin had very few wrinkles, and his beard was black.

This was Nikolas, and he took the book from her and smiled, without ever asking why she was crying. Two nights later they were eating fava beans on an old wooden table set up under a grapevine outside his tiny house. Fava beans, Nikolas explained to them in his slow, gentle voice, had to be cooked with love, because it took many hours of stirring to get them to the right consistency. That night he taught Dido how to play Greek tunes Xanthe had never heard on a small wooden flute, and they drew mandalas in the sand on the beach near his house after dark. They stayed on the island for the rest of their vacation, Dido and Xanthe curled into Nikolas’s bedroom while he slept under sheets on the floor next door, or out under the stars. On the last night, Xanthe crept out there to join him. They held hands and told their lives: hers as a revolutionary and an activist (she never mentioned her upbringing any more), his as a recovered addict. He had discovered meditation, he said, and it had saved him. Xanthe thought, finally, hopefully, that she knew how he felt. She initiated the sex, stared deep into his eyes in the dark.