After

Their last full day was a Saturday. They were taking the Sunday ferry, the early one, and so Diane had packed the night before with her usual quiet efficiency, the cases standing by the door like a conclusion already reached. They had dinner at Kostas's as they always did on the final night, and Leonard was expansive and ordered a third carafe and made a toast to the island in the manner of a man who expects to return, which he did every year and every year might.

Yusuf was not there.

Martin noticed it at the level of the room's texture before he noticed it as a fact. Something was different in the way the tables were being managed — Kostas himself bringing the wine, a teenage boy Martin had not seen before collecting the plates with a teenager's unsubtle crashes and apologies. Kostas, when Martin caught his eye, offered nothing. He moved between the kitchen and the tables with his usual self-containment, his expression giving back the same neutral surface it always did, which was information of a kind if you chose to read it.

Martin chose not to. He ate his fish. He drank his wine with the precision he had always drunk it. He listened to Leonard talk about the piece he might write — the essay about place and its exhaustions — and found, for the first time, that the idea did not seem as insubstantial as it usually did. There was something in it. The way a place could ask something of you and you could decline the asking and the place would continue regardless, indifferent to what you had or hadn't done within it.

"You're quiet," Diane said. Not an accusation. An observation, offered in the mild tone she used for things she had already understood.

"End of holiday," he said.

She looked at him for a moment with her gallery expression — attentive, slightly withheld — and then she picked up her wine and looked away, and he understood that she was giving him something: the space to leave it there, unexamined. It was a form of generosity he had come to depend on in ways he had never acknowledged, and sitting with it now he felt its cost, which was hers, not his.

Leonard left at ten with his embraces and his promises to email. They paid and went out into the street and the night was cold and very clear, the stars dense above the town, and somewhere a dog was barking at something that had passed or not passed. They walked up through the lanes for the last time. He knew these stones now, these walls, this particular step that was higher than the others. He knew them in the way you know things that have become briefly yours through the accident of recurrence.

He did not sleep well. This was unusual and he noted it without examining it, the way you note a sound you cannot place. He lay on his back in the dark and the room was full of the particular silence of a place that has almost finished with you, and at some point — two, perhaps three in the morning — he heard footsteps below in the town, rapid and uneven, and then voices, one raised and one not, and then nothing.

He did not get up. He lay still and the nothing continued and eventually he slept.

In the morning they carried the cases down to the harbour. Leonard came to see them off, which he did every year, arriving with a paper bag of pastries from the one bakery and a slightly bleary warmth that Martin found, this morning, genuinely touching. They stood on the dock in the early light and ate the pastries and the ferry was visible around the headland, twenty minutes out.

Diane walked a little way along the dock, looking at the water. Martin watched her. She had her coat pulled close and her hair moved in the harbour wind and she was looking south, toward the Turkish coast, which was just visible as a dark line at the horizon in the clear morning air.

Then he saw what she was looking at.

At the far end of the harbour, beyond the last of the fishing boats, a man was sitting on the stone quay with a bag beside him — a single bag, not large. He was sitting very still with his face turned toward the water, not looking at anything on the island, his back to the town, as though the island were already behind him. He was wearing a grey jacket Martin had not seen before, and his posture was that of someone practising a stillness so complete it was almost not there.

Yusuf.

The ferry horn sounded once across the water, low and carrying.

Diane turned and walked back to Martin and took the last of her pastry and said nothing. She did not look at Martin in a way that suggested she was not looking at him. She looked at Leonard, and smiled at something he was saying, and the ferry was coming into the harbour mouth now, its engines reversing, the water churning white at its stern.

Martin looked once more at the end of the dock. Yusuf had not moved. He was waiting with the patient absolute stillness of a man for whom waiting had become indistinguishable from everything else — from working, from watching, from making himself small enough to persist. He was looking at the sea. The sea was doing what it always did, which was to offer nothing and take nothing and continue.

The gangway went down. Leonard embraced them both and stood back with his hands in his coat pockets and the pastry bag folded under his arm. Martin picked up the cases and followed Diane up the gangway and onto the ferry, and the ferry smelled of diesel and someone's coffee and the particular damp of enclosed spaces, and they found seats on the upper deck where the windows were salt-streaked and the island was already assembling itself into a view.

The engines deepened. The dock receded. Leonard raised a hand and they raised their hands back and the gap between the hull and the dock widened in the way that seems slow and then is not.

Martin looked toward the far end of the quay. At this distance Yusuf was a dark shape against the white stone, motionless, his face still to the water. Not watching the ferry leave. Not watching anything that was theirs.

Diane had taken out her book.

She read the first page and then turned it over and placed it face-down on her lap, which she never did — she was precise about spines, about pages — and she looked at the island as it arranged itself into its final form, compact and white and indifferent, and she did not say anything, and Martin did not say anything, and the water between them and the island was already wide and getting wider and there was nothing in her silence that was not perfectly, terribly clear.