“Are you carrying on with a not-Jewish boy, Sarah?” Her mother grabbed Sarah’s hands, her turquoise eyes frenzied with rage. “Tell me your thea Elpis imagined it when she went to fetch Leon at the sea yesterday and saw you embracing a blond fisherman.”

“Thea Elpis didn’t imagine it,” Sarah finally whispered, frozen still.

“Sarah!” was her father’s thunderous eruption. He took her by the shoulders. “No, no, no. No! You will end it.”

“I tried, Baba. I tried. Please, just listen. His name is Milos. He is a fisherman from Lefkada, a wonderful person. When he left for the winter, I tried to forget him, but I couldn’t.” Tears spilled from her eyes. “Please—”

“No, please. Forget please! There is only, I will never see him again, Baba. There is only, I made a terrible mistake and will never upset you again, Mama.”

Sarah knew it with a sick certainty—the familiar stubborn position her father’s features had assumed was the same position now arranging on her own. She shook her head slowly and dreadfully, a conviction rising in her, that her heart was presenting her no other option but to follow its compass. “I can’t, Baba. Please. Please try to understand. I cannot not be with him.”

“Then you will leave.” It released from her father like a gust of wind, the kind that knocks off your hat and seems to rattle the wind too at the revelation of its sudden might.

“Leave?” The words ran a jagged knife across her throat.

“Yes, leave. You will leave now, Sarah.” Her mother crossed her arms over her chest so she almost appeared like a stranger standing there, incompatible with the mother who had placed warm compresses on Sarah’s forehead when she was ill and buzzed around every hour, every day, her whole being attended to their family. “And you won’t be our daughter anymore.”

Sarah shook as she crossed the room to where Benjamin sat weeping on the floor, stroking his bunny rabbit, Penelope, through the wooden slats of her cage. Askew on Benjamin’s head was the round red hat of his Purim costume. Their father had made it to accompany the tan shorts suit of a Greek freedom fighter he’d painstakingly sewn. Benjamin had loved assuming the dress of a freedom fighter, loved imagining he was someone brave and strong. He’d donned the hat often at home ever since.

“No, Sarah.” He dove to Sarah’s leg, clinging to it like a toddler. “Sarah, you can’t leave. Please don’t leave, Sarah.”