MasukGREGORThe roads were dry in some places, but most of them were still slick under the gray afternoon sky. Palm fronds blocked the inside lane of the ring road, so I moved into the outside lane just as a lorry behind me blared its horn.I kept going.The first traffic light turned amber, and I kept going. The second turned red, so I slammed on the brakes. My seat belt dug into my chest, and for a few seconds, black spots floated in my vision.“Shit.”I held the steering wheel and waited for the spots to clear. Rania's voice echoed in my mind, warning me about dizziness, about driving, about all the sensible things I was ignoring. I rolled down the window and let the damp air hit my face.When the light changed, my vision was back to normal. I drove off, pressing my foot harder on the accelerator than I should have.The old tram depot stood with a row of gray warehouses, its roof partly collapsed and its tracks lost in weeds. I turned onto Dimitriou Street, where the road narrowed betwe
GREGORThe call rang out with no answer. Justina’s recorded voice, brisk and perfectly composed, greeted me and asked for a message after the tone. I hung up quietly and called again.All eight rings brought the same greeting and the same silence.“Pick up,” I muttered.Behind me, Mother folded the handkerchief into a neat square and slipped it into her sleeve. Some color had come back to her face, though it was uneven across her cheeks. She looked from my bandaged hand to the phone, then to the door.“Go,” she said.“Mother...”“I will sit with the boy. Nobody is going to move me from that chair.” She straightened her lapel, a small, careful gesture that showed me she had ended the conversation. “Find her, Gregor. And when you do, remember that she is frightened.”I stared at her. “You just told me she threatened you.”“Both things can be true.” She met my eyes. “You said as much yourself.”There was no point in arguing. My son was upstairs, barely conscious, and his mother had disap
JUSTINASomething loosened in my chest, and something else tightened in its place. The feeling was close enough to gratitude that I could have mistaken it for that, if it hadn't tasted so much like a mistake.I looked down at his hand around my wrist, then reached for the bottle. I finished what remained in three swallows, tipping my head back until the last mouthful slid down my throat and left a bitter trail behind it.“We should go,” I said.“Okay.”“Gregor will be...” I stopped, unable to decide whether I meant worried, angry, or already looking for me. “Somebody will be looking.”“Okay.”I planted both palms on the table and pushed myself upright.The floor had apparently moved while I wasn't paying attention. It tipped beneath me, slowly and deliberately, like the deck of a ferry, and my knees gave way before I'd even straightened. My chair scraped backward. I grabbed for the table, caught its edge, and felt my fingers slide uselessly along the polished wood.For one absurd seco
JUSTINAHe took a moment to absorb it. I watched the crease form between his eyebrows, then deepen as he worked through what I'd told him. Jack was clever. I should have remembered that, because clever people always found the door to a thing a few seconds before you were ready to let them in.His phone lit up on the table beside his elbow. A name flashed across the screen, too quickly and too small for me to read. He turned the phone facedown without so much as glancing at it.“Does he... Gregor... know?” he asked.“Yes.”The answer came too easily. I felt it settle beside the first truth, another piece of something I had no business handing over. Like a counterfeit bill slipped into a drawer beside the real thing, close enough to pass at a glance.“He knows Charis was his mother?”“He knows.” I picked at the edge of the bottle's label, scraping at the loose corner with my thumbnail. “He knows everything about that.”“Then...” Jack frowned, trying to fit the pieces together. “Sorry, I
JUSTINAThe song playing softly through the speakers faded, replaced by a woman’s voice scraping over a bouzouki. I dragged both palms down my face. My cheeks were slick, my mascara had migrated somewhere beneath my eyes, and when I looked up, Jack was watching me.His hand hovered an inch above my shoulder, his fingers curled as though he had forgotten how to reach for someone. The beer in front of him sat untouched, condensation gathering beneath it in a dark ring on the wood. His expression had gone slack, all its usual ease stripped away. I had seen that look on strangers who walked in on something they were never meant to witness, the stunned helplessness of someone who had stumbled into a room where the air had already run out.The warmth in my head went out like a pilot light caught by a draft.I heard myself again. If only I were his mother.The words hung between us, impossible to take back. I could still feel the shape my mouth had made around them, the soft press of my lips
JUSTINA“You’re not.” I set my glass down hard enough to make the olives jump. “Don’t do either of those. Don’t you dare. You’d be useless at both, and you’d end up in a cell with nobody to sit with her.”His grin slid off. He looked at me properly then, and I looked back, and for a second we were two people who had both been standing in the same rain.“If I leave school though, I am fucked,” he said, quieter. “And so is my sister.”“Then don’t leave school.”“But I need to take care of her, and school is eating at that too. If I stay, I have to sacrifice something because there is not enough to go around. Where the fuck is the money?”“I don’t know.” My eyes stung, and I blinked until it passed. “I don’t know, Jack. I’m sitting here drinking tsipouro at one in the afternoon because I don’t know.”He nudged the bread basket an inch toward me. “Stop drinking and eat something.”“No.”“Have you even eaten? Have some bread.”“I had half a coffee at breakfast.” I took the glass again and







