“I wish you wouldn’t leave,” she blurted. “I wish so much you wouldn’t go.” Her stomach was unhappy with her, and it wasn’t just the metsovone. Milos had done something to it, mixed up all her chemistry.

“This is only see you later,” he said firmly. “I’ll be back in the spring.”

“The spring is forever away.”

“I’ll miss you terribly. I want to be with you forever, Sarah mou.”

Milos drew her to his chest, and for the first time she allowed herself to rest against it. His chest was sturdy and strong, just like she’d imagined, and she savored the sound of his heartbeat before some force outside of her lifted her head, and Milos bent down to kiss her. The kiss turned her inside out with its right-ness, like carving out a place that was now confusingly home. But she had another home, and the two could never merge.

They kissed, hungrily then, until Sarah broke from him and ran along the sea now slashed with moonlight. She forced herself not to look back, making her legs cycle faster, and faster yet, to beat down the terrible knowing that had surfaced, as to which of her two homes she might now choose.

*  *  *

When Sarah returned home, she paused just outside her door, noticing that her knapsack was open. Her chest seized in fear as she rifled inside to discover that, sure enough, the metsovone was gone. It must have fallen out somewhere in her dash home, to make it on time for her father’s birthday. She considered turning back, retracing her steps, but chances were someone had found it, already delighting in their good fortune.

Sarah stood outside the door, tears collecting in the corners of her eyes. Surely this was punishment for breaking off that piece of metsovone for her and Milos to eat. And a punishment for more, she realized with dread, for even carrying on with Milos. Sarah thought of her father’s unrelenting admonishments: how important it was to maintain their insular Jewish community; that she was not even to be friends with boys from the outside.

But this punishment of the metsovone wasn’t fair! Because it affected her father, who in the rare instances Sarah had watched him eat it, closed his eyes in rapture as he did so.

*  *  *

That evening, after delicious stuffed tomatoes, grilled fish, and potato bourekas, Sarah sat on the floor beside the fireplace wedged between their two family beds, listening to her father strum his bouzouki. Her mind was an inferno of the metsovone incident, and then Milos and perhaps never seeing him again, but her father’s voice lent familiar cadence to her despondence.

At first, he was murmuring, notes without words, and then he added some.

And so it is.

I am old.

Life has been beautiful.

“You’re not that old, Baba.” Her father was thirty-six, the same age as her mother.