“Hey, Jonesey, why don’t we go swimming?”

“I don’t feel like swimming.” Joey looked at her sketchbook. She looked at Leo. “How about I sketch you?”

“Sure, Jonesey.” Leo retrieved their towel from the beach bag and laid it on the sand. Joey dug in the basket for a pencil. She selected a 0.3-millimeter one. Demetris said it was a good starting pencil. It left only a thread of a line.

That was all Joey felt herself capable of now. A thread of a line.

Leo stared off at the mountain sloping over the turquoise bay.

“Look straight at me,” she said.

“Really? When you sketched that woman at Lacones, you had her turn her cheek to the side.”

Joey flicked her pencil back and forth, a warm-up for her fingers. “What I’ve learned, Leo, is that I’m really good at figure drawings. That woman at Lacones staring at the castle, her face was in shadows. The mother and son in Liston walking toward the Spianada. No faces. Only backs. The only face that interests me in the slightest is yours.”

“Understandable.” Leo sucked in his cheekbones and swiveled his head comically. “It’s a pretty stunning face.”

“I’m serious, Leo.” She debated saying the thing that had plagued her of late with her art. “I’m afraid something’s wrong with me.”

“Yeah, Jonesey? What’s that?”

She finally said, “I think I can only sketch the face of the person I love.” She was glad she had her sunglasses on.

There was just the lull of the waves as Leo reached over and removed her sunglasses. He put a hand on her thigh. He lifted her chin in a way that was so slow and tender she thought she might faint. “Jonesey, I love you too. You have to know how important you are to me.”

She bit her lip. Finally, she nodded.

“This yacht thing, it’s really scary. I need you to understand it. It’s like…” He touched his neck, the part right below his Adam’s apple, the part she avoided even brushing against because he always flinched. “It’s like this whole year I’ve felt like someone was strangling me. And now, well, I think I’ll be able to breathe again.”

A tear plopped onto her sketchbook; the source of it was Leo.

Joey reached over to touch him. And as she stroked his back the way she knew he liked, she had a sinking feeling that the future she’d been counting on had surprised her by shifting askew, and she had no clue how to get it back upright.

Chapter Twelve

Joey

Corfu
2004

“But you know,” Bea was saying, knees clasped to chest, “you only have to look so far as the Greek language itself to see how the Greeks place enormous value on femininity.”