Eleven days had gone by since Nikos came back from the boat with his own face on him and something else behind it, and Eleftheria had ceased, sometime around the fifth, to call them days in her own head because a day was meant to open and close.
To spend itself and leave, and this thing had done neither. It had simply remained.
Morning after morning it was there before the light properly was, sitting in the house ahead of her, waiting for her to wake into it like a punishment that had learned the habits of the room.
She had known from the sound of his step.
That was the part that humiliated her when she revisited it, because it sounded dramatic when put into language and because language, she had discovered these eleven days, was not to be trusted once fear got hold of it.
It made patterns out of smoke. It draped cloth over furniture and called the shape underneath a certainty. Yet the knowing had been real. It had happened before she saw him.
