Athens

Mikrolimano harbor at dusk was a wall of masts and string lights and the specific noise of a hundred restaurant terraces competing for the same stretch of view, and Vega brought The Meridian into her berth with the small, private satisfaction of a passage completed cleanly, no drama in it, just eighteen months of accumulated competence expressing itself as an easy, unremarkable arrival. The Correspondent sat across the harbor, close enough to see but far enough that finding each other again would require an actual choice rather than proximity doing the work.

Jo found her within the hour anyway, the way she always seemed to, appearing at the head of the pontoon with the particular energy of someone who'd been waiting rather than merely arriving.

"You made it," Jo said, and hugged her hard enough that Vega felt, for a moment, the whole of the eighteen months compressed into the length of an embrace — Dubrovnik and Bola and the storm and London and everything in between, held briefly, wordlessly, in two arms on a Greek pontoon.

"I made it. You made it. We're both remarkably, unfashionably alive."

"Low bar. I'm choosing to clear it enthusiastically anyway."

They found a restaurant on a terrace above the marina, the kind of view that would have felt cheap and postcard-perfect anywhere else and felt, here, entirely earned — the harbor's lights doubled in still water, the two boats visible from the table if you knew where to look, which both of them did, repeatedly, without quite admitting to it.

Vega set her phone on the table, speaker up, mostly out of habit now rather than decision, and somewhere through the first course Meeseeks's voice and ARIA's found each other across the short distance between phone and boat-mounted speaker, low and constant under the meal, a conversation neither woman was fully following and neither felt any need to.

"—I'm just saying, structurally, a wedding and a passage have more in common than people think, both require you to commit to a heading and then deal honestly with whatever weather actually shows up—"

*That's a strained analogy even by your standards.*

"Everything I say is a strained analogy, it's part of my charm, Jo's told me so directly—"

*Jo tells you a great many things directly. I've noticed you retain the flattering ones selectively.*

Jo laughed into her wine, catching Vega's eye over the rim of the glass, and for a moment neither of them said anything, letting the small domestic bickering underneath the meal stand in for everything they weren't yet saying to each other directly.

"I keep thinking about the storm," Jo said, finally, when the plates had cleared and the second bottle had opened itself with the specific ease of a conversation that had earned the right to slow down. "Not the fear of it. The after. The way you find out, all at once, what actually matters to you, because you spent eleven hours doing the math on losing it."

"What did you find out mattered?"

Jo considered the question with real seriousness, turning her glass, the harbor lights catching in it the way they had in Hvar, months and a whole different self ago. "You. Which I knew, probably, before the storm, but hadn't let myself say plainly, because plainly felt like a decision I wasn't ready to make on a boat I'd bought as a correction rather than a beginning." She looked up. "I'm saying it plainly now. Not asking you to do anything about it tonight. Just not compressing it into a smaller sentence anymore."

Vega felt the whole of the trip arrive at this single point — three years of careful distance, eighteen months of a friendship that had refused, patiently, repeatedly, to stay the size she'd tried to keep it — and found she didn't want to compress her own answer either.

"I don't know what I'm doing next," she said, which wasn't an answer to what Jo had said, and was, somehow, exactly the right answer anyway. "I don't know if that's Athens with you, or Gibraltar without you, or something that manages to be both at different times of year. I know I don't want to make you into another compressed sentence. You deserve better than the two-hour version. You've earned the whole thing, same as I've been slowly earning yours."

"That's not nothing."

"No," Vega agreed. "It's not nothing. It's just not resolved either."

"I can live with not resolved," Jo said, and reached across the table, and took Vega's hand, not as a claim but as a marker — here, now, this much is true, whatever comes after it — and neither of them let go for a long time.

She said goodnight to Jo at the head of the pontoon, an hour past midnight, the kind of goodnight that held a door open rather than closing one, and walked back to The Meridian alone through a harbor still loud with other people's celebrations, other people's lives she'd never know the shape of, and stood on her own deck under a sky too bright with city light to show many stars.

*You're thinking loudly again,* ARIA said. *I can tell by the quality of the silence.*

"I'm thinking about next year. Gibraltar, maybe. The Atlantic beyond it, if the boat and I are both still up for it."

*That's a bigger ocean than anything we've done.*

"I know."

*I find I'm not afraid of that the way I might have been eighteen months ago. I don't know what that means about what I've become. I know it means something.*

Vega stood at the rail, the city loud and warm and full of a hundred thousand lives she'd never know, full of Jo across the water and Bola an ocean away and a version of herself, once, who'd sat on a bench outside a pharmacy and grieved a girl who hadn't known yet she'd need to leave. She was not going home. She was not staying put. She was standing, for once, in the exact honest middle of both, and finding that the middle, unlike the equilibrium she'd mistaken it for eighteen months ago, was not numbness at all. It was simply where she actually was.

"ARIA."

*Yes.*

"Which way is west from here?"

A long pause — not evasive, not tactical, just the particular pause of something turning a simple question over and finding, underneath it, the much larger one it was actually asking.

*All ways,* ARIA said. *Eventually.*

Vega smiled at the dark water, at the lights, at nothing and everything at once, and did not reach for her phone, and did not narrate the moment to anyone, and let the harbor be exactly as loud and as hers as it wanted to be.