“I have to leave now,” she got out with gasps between words. “Just for a little while.” Where was she even going? she wondered. Milos lived in a room with several other fishermen across town, and they weren’t even married yet, besides. Would they go to Lefkada? That seemed the natural conclusion. They could go to Lefkada and stay with Milos’s parents, and Milos could fish there instead and work in the granite quarry too, and eventually, when her parents reconciled themselves to the new facts presented, life would peacefully rearrange. She would go, just for a little while. Sarah beat back the dread that arose, that her decision would splinter them all forever, with each spinning like a Hanukkah dreidel toward their own separate graves.

So dramatic, Sarah—to go right to death from all of this.

Sarah opened the dresser. She tried to see her clothes, her items, to pack some of them, but she was crying too hard to make them out.

Benjamin was shrieking now, pulling on her leg, trying to drag her to their bed adorned in the patchwork quilt their mother had stitched while she was pregnant with him. Sarah could recall her mother in the act of it—her belly slowly burgeoning as the quilt came to life.

Her chest suddenly seized, a crushing sensation, like the ceiling had collapsed and pinned her beneath it. She couldn’t go. She couldn’t leave her family.

But then she thought of Milos, and his arms around her, and how somehow the one plus one of them equaled something more than two.

She stuffed a few things into her bag and forced herself to hug Benjamin goodbye. “My special little brother, I’m going to Lefkada, just for a little while.” She crouched down, feeling his small back in her hands, all the tiny bones whose cricks she had memorized from a lifetime sleeping beside him. He stopped sobbing and stared up at her in eerie quiet.

“Baba once told me ancient Ithaca is Lefkada now.”

Sarah tuned out usually, when her father and Benjamin discussed Greek mythology. “I didn’t know that.”

“Say hello for me then, to the home of Odysseus. Maybe one day I will go too.”

“I’ll be back, and we’ll go together,” she choked out, and squeezed him tighter. Then somehow she mustered the strength to extricate herself.

Benjamin wiped his eyes, his chest still heaving. “Please don’t leave, Sarah,” he whispered. “Please don’t go.”

Through her cascading tears, Sarah blew her little brother a kiss, but Benjamin was shaking too hard to blow her one back.