Hours later, Alex scanned the scenery of Corfu Town from behind her sunglasses, stirring the striped paper straw in her coffee. She had found herself a perfect spot on a bustling corner, a café with an outdoor table where she could enjoy her ice-cold frappe and the novel she’d barely made progress on since boarding the boat. There were a few old Greek men at a table behind her, and she busied herself with sifting through their conversation for the words she understood, unbothered by the occasional drift of their cigarette smoke. Corfu had plenty of tourists—more British than any other, a fact that Sophie had warned them about with much derision—but this place felt perfectly local.

Alex had already visited the remaining stops, Mykonos and Rhodes, on the boat’s itinerary, but it was her first time in Corfu, and she almost felt lucky to have left the boat when she did. In truth, she’d hated Mykonos, though it was possibly due to the fact that she’d been a broke twenty-three-year-old who burned through a week of tips on her first night. She’d half-overheard the group’s plans for Mykonos: they would start at an exclusive rooftop restaurant and then migrate to the kind of nightclub where you don’t even sit for less than five thousand euros, and laughed at the memory of having been there when she could barely afford a sandwich.

Even without the spectacular fallout with Danial, though, she had no desire to join them. Extravagant dining experiences and shopping were simply not aligned with what she wanted to get out of travel. She loved food, of course, but she also loved discovering places. It was easy for her to bank tens of thousands of steps in a single day, wandering tiny city streets or going for a long, relaxing run. She liked to eavesdrop, to haggle, to spend indulgent hours at a café, watching the world go by. And upscale travel often meant removing yourself from a place, despite having come to see it. The guests at the resort where she’d once worked would frequently spend their entire stay within the grounds, totally disinterested in what the actual city of Athens had to offer.