The Fragile Archive

Moris

I forgot I had a cat.

It was his first night in the apartment. He was six months old, a tiny, terrified shadow that had spent most of the day hiding in some invisible corner of the house. He came out briefly to eat, keeping low to the ground, then disappeared again. I had spent the day getting the apartment ready for him, buying bowls and carrying litter, the things you do to welcome another life into your own. But by the time I turned off the lights and got into bed, I was exhausted. My brain discarded the new data. I fell asleep as a man living alone.

Around 3:00 a.m., I woke with the feeling that someone was watching me.

The room was pitch black. I opened my eyes and saw two massive, glowing green eyes right in front of my face. For a moment, they were all I could see.

His name is Moris. He is entirely black. In a dark room, he becomes the dark. He had climbed onto the bed without making a sound and was inspecting my sleeping face.

For three seconds, I was terrified. My heart started pounding, and I pulled back before I understood what I was looking at.

On the fourth, I took a breath. The void blinked, made a small sound, and sat down on my blanket.

I lay back down, my pulse slowly returning to normal. He found a spot near my feet, curled into a tight shape, and went to sleep.

I stayed awake a little longer. The refrigerator hummed, and a whistle rose from the street below. I lay there sorting the day behind me, rehearsing the one ahead. Moris just existed. He breathed slowly and evenly, with the ease of a creature with no unfinished business.

I listened to that rhythm for a while.

Then I closed my eyes and let the dark simply be the dark.

Gölgem

Moris is already in every room I walk into. I close the bathroom door behind me. A few minutes later he’s on the bath mat, studying me as I dry my hair. The doors stay open in this apartment. He sees to it.

When I’m working, he climbs onto the desk and rubs his cheek along the side of the laptop, talking the whole time. Then he walks across the keyboard. He sits down on the trackpad and looks at me.

I look up from the page and he’s on the back of the sofa, tail twitching, watching a sparrow on the railing. The sparrow has personally insulted him.

I look up twenty minutes later and he’s at my feet, asleep. He moves when I look away. And sometimes he turns and gives me a look that says I have seen everything in this room a thousand times and I am still surprised by your face.

I laugh out loud. The laughter comes unbidden, sudden as a sneeze. He is on the kitchen table now, asleep, one paw over his eyes.

A Small Apocalypse

The door opened.

I called his name. Checked behind the sofa. Under the bed. Inside the wardrobe, the dark corner behind the washing machine, the bathroom. I opened the kitchen cupboards. I looked in places a cat could not fit.

I stood in the hallway and looked at the front door. The latch had not caught. A finger’s width of dark between the door and the frame, and on the other side of that dark, the stairwell, the floors below, the street.

I went out.

The sensor light stayed off. Two floors of black, and in the black the building’s old sounds—pipes, the settling of walls.

A door opened two floors up. “Hakan?” someone called down. “It’s nothing,” I said. The door closed.

Then I heard him.

High and raw and continuous, coming from below, from the dark below the dark.

He was on the second floor landing, body against the wall, all four paws sunk into the carpet. He had made himself as flat as he could. His eyes caught what light there was and held it.

I reached down. He stayed rigid. I freed his claws from the carpet one paw at a time and lifted him against my chest. His heart was going so fast I could not count it. A continuous trembling, a small engine.

I stood in the dark stairwell with my face in his fur.

Here I am. Here you are.

His heart began to slow. The rigidity eased, one muscle at a time, until he was just warm weight in my arms, breathing.

I carried him back up.

The Kitchen

I am sitting at the kitchen table, under the yellow, hazy light of the hood. There is a strange, heartwarming comfort that light gives you at this hour of the night. Under it, all the secrets of the world seem briefly solvable. For a moment—and it is only a moment—I do not remember sitting down. The chair is under me, the tea in front of me, but the ordinary sequence of walking to the kitchen and filling the kettle has dropped out—a missing stair in the dark. I look at my hands on the table. They are mine. Whatever just happened did not happen. I shake it off. The hum in my head won’t stop, and tonight even the yellow light cannot silence it. All the questions and answers are tangled in the dimness.

The refrigerator runs its low constant note. Through the open window, I hear the long, flat sound of a ship out on the Marmara.

Moris is curled up sleeping at the other end of the table, in his own little kingdom. Every now and then, his soft paws twitch; he is probably chasing a bird in his dream that he will never catch.

My tea has gone cold. I register it as a minor betrayal.

I think about that bird Moris is chasing in his dream. And that old cartoon pops up in my mind.

Wile E. Coyote, whose whole existence is dedicated to catching the Road Runner. In one episode, he achieves the impossible. He catches the bird. At that moment, the world stops. Coyote turns to the screen, pulls out a sign, and looks at the audience. The sign reads:

“Alright, wise guys, you always wanted me to catch him. Now, what do I do?”

I smile.

I remember a physics paper I read the other night.

“The future can shape the past.”

Just then, blockchain technology comes to mind. The sealed blocks. The chain that cannot be rewritten.

One reality where the past has not been written yet. Another where it cannot be unwritten.

I pause.

Outside, a car passes on the wet street.

And yet that resemblance sticks to the corner of my mind like a stain that won’t come out.

The Curse

I turn my eyes to the exam papers in front of me on the table.

I’m holding colored pens. The classic red one stays in the drawer. I don’t like the way it screams “You are wrong!” all over the paper. Mistakes shouldn’t look like casualties of war.

But everything becomes mechanical when the answer key is right here. The student reads the question, sweats, thinks, tries to find meaning. For them, that question is an adventure. An unknown.

For me? Just “A, C, D, B.”

I know the answers. And the paper holds no magic for me.

People sometimes find teaching boring. “You teach the same things every day,” they say.

I sigh.

They don’t know that the best part of teaching is who you teach. The students change, and so does the spirit of the time. The subjects don’t have to.

I put the pens down.

The fluffy ball at the end of the table moves. Moris lifts his head and looks at me. Pure curiosity in his eyes.

He doesn’t know if the sun will rise tomorrow, or if the bird he saw today will land on the windowsill again.

His curiosity makes him more alive than me.

I return to those two thoughts. A faint old spark catches.

“Could it be?” I say. Then I shrug.

“Saçmalama, Hakan,” I mumble. “You’ve turned into a conspiracy theorist. One is just a digital ledger. The other is subatomic particles. Git yat.”

I stand up and reach for the light switch.

All of it—the two thoughts, the question, the half-answer—buried in darkness with a mechanical click.

Maybe the answer is there. But not tonight.

I follow Moris toward the bedroom in the dark. The question goes with me, postponed to tomorrow.

There is class in the morning.

I have a lot to tell those variable souls waiting for me.

You Can Finish It

A young man called to me outside the ferry terminal.

“Hakan Hocam.”

I knew the face before he reached me. Older now.

“How are you?”

“Good, hocam. You?”

“Still here.”

“I heard.”

He laughed. The shoulder lifted first. I had seen that movement from behind a desk. For a second, a classroom returned around him. His coat hanging from the back of a chair, dripping onto the floor.

“You were going into engineering,” I said.

“Translation Studies.”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Kerem was engineering.”

“Kerem.”

The name opened another face. We stood to one side as people moved around us toward the turnstiles. He told me where he worked. I followed every sentence.

He glanced toward the ferries.

“I still hear you sometimes,” he said. “When I stop in the middle of a sentence. You used to say, ‘Mert, if you started it, you can finish it.’”

None of Us Are

We were standing outside Teacher’s Bar on a Saturday night.

We had been sitting inside for hours. Stepping outside felt like waking up. Kadife Sokak was packed. Midnight was approaching. People spilled off the sidewalks and into the road. We could hear people laughing at the tables around us.

My back was to the street. I was talking to a friend.

Whatever I was saying has disappeared.

The conviction has stayed.

Then two hands landed on my shoulders.

They arrived with purpose. Firm enough to enter the body. Calm enough to make resistance feel absurd.

By the time I understood that someone was standing behind me, he had already leaned close to my ear.

In a deep, resonant voice, he said:

“You are not special. None of us are.”

Then he let go.

Before I could turn properly, he was walking away.

I watched him.

He passed between groups of people, disappeared behind shoulders into the movement of the street.

My friend was still talking beside me.

The interruption straightened my shoulders. My pulse quickened. Electricity moved through me, almost pride.

I kept looking at the place where the man had disappeared.

I felt chosen.

· · ·

There was a year when I became close with people who seemed to live slightly higher than the rest of us. When the bill came, no one counted. I stopped counting too.

One evening, my oldest friend joined us.

He was the same person he had always been. I had loved him for years.

That night, I watched the others measure him.

A glance lasted too long. Someone smiled with patience.

Nothing was said.

That made it worse.

I felt myself move away from him.

For a while, I called it growth.

· · ·

We were on the couch. Some show was on. A couple was fighting on screen—about something small. We watched them as you watch the street from behind a window. I felt Seda’s hand find mine on the cushion. Neither of us said anything. But the room had an agreement in it. We were not the kind who would shout. We were not the kind who would keep score. The silence between us felt like proof.

Three nights later she was standing by the kitchen counter. The kettle had just clicked off. I was at the stove, back turned.

She said: “I’m trying to figure out how to tell you something without it sounding like I’m blaming you.”

“Tell me what?”

She went quiet. Then: “You don’t even know what it is.” She stopped. “I can’t believe you don’t even know.”

“You haven’t said anything yet.”

“I shouldn’t have to.”

I turned around. I was holding some papers. I wanted the papers to feel heavier than they were. I wanted the moment to need me more than it did.

“So say it.”

“I just tried.”

“You said you were trying to figure out how to say it. That’s not saying it.”

“And you just proved why I can’t.”

The fight lasted three minutes. We never reached the subject. Neither of us raised a voice. But the disappointment—I am still measuring it.

I stood there under the yellow light.

I felt a phantom pressure on my shoulders.

Firm enough to enter the body.

Şafak

The receptionist had reading glasses pushed up into her hair and a pen behind each ear.

“Şafak?” she said.

The waiting room smelled like someone had recently microwaved fish and then tried to cover it up with lavender. Şafak had been in one of the orange plastic chairs for thirty-two minutes. A woman in a stiff blazer sat reading her phone with surgical focus. Next to her, a young man kept adjusting a short tie. Şafak counted the adjustments. He stopped at nine.

He stood up before the second syllable had landed.

She pointed down a corridor with the pen from her left ear. “Second door on the right.”

The office was larger than he expected. A wide mahogany desk, nearly empty—just a closed laptop, a glass of water with no coaster, and a single manila folder, very thin, positioned exactly in the center. Behind the desk, a window that looked out onto a construction site. A crane was moving something slowly across the sky, and for a moment Şafak watched it, trying to figure out what it was carrying.

The man behind the desk stood up to shake his hand. He was short and wide, built like a filing cabinet, with thick fingers and a watch that sat too loose on his wrist, sliding down toward his knuckles every time he gestured. His eyebrows were two gray caterpillars conducting an orchestra only they could hear. He wore a shirt that had been ironed recently and well, except for one crease along the left forearm that he kept smoothing with his other hand.

Şafak’s arm fell against the side of the chair. His own silver watch slid down his wrist.

“Sit, sit,” the man said, waving at a chair. The chair was leather, tall-backed. Şafak sat.

“So,” he said, opening the manila folder. He looked at whatever was inside for a long time. Şafak resisted the urge to lean forward and peek.

“Tell me about yourself.”

Şafak told him. University, internship at an agency, some freelance social media work, a certificate in Google Analytics that he’d earned on a Sunday afternoon while eating leftover börek. He didn’t mention the börek. The man nodded throughout, his eyebrows rising and falling with the rhythm of Şafak’s sentences.

“Good, good,” he said. He closed the folder. Opened it again. Closed it.

“And your English—how is it?”

“Fluent,” Şafak said. “I lived in England for a year.”

“Let’s continue in English, then.”

This made sense. International company, probably. Maslak was full of them. Şafak straightened in his chair.

“What do you think,” the man said, switching to English with an accent that was hard to place, “about the current state of the Turkish economy?”

Şafak blinked.

“It’s in a transitional period,” he said. “There’s inflation pressure, but the export sector is showing resilience, and there are structural reforms underway that could—”

The man wrote something in the folder. His pen moved quickly. Şafak tried to read it upside down. He couldn’t.

“Now. If you had to choose between—let me think how to phrase this—between institutional loyalty and operational efficiency, and you could only preserve one, which would you eliminate?”

“I’d argue they’re not mutually exclusive,” Şafak said. “But if I had to choose, I’d preserve efficiency, because loyalty without results eventually erodes itself.”

The man did not answer. He picked up the glass of water, took a sip, and put it back down in a different spot. Then he smiled, wide enough to push his eyebrows toward his hairline and show his teeth.

“Very good answer.”

He leaned back. The chair creaked under him. A wet ring remained where the glass had been.

“One more question. This is important.” He leaned forward again. “Do you believe that a person can be taught integrity, or is it something they either have or they don’t?”

They must know what they’re doing, Şafak thought.

“I think integrity can be practiced,” he said. “It’s like a muscle. Some people are born with more of it, but everyone can develop it if the conditions are right.”

The man closed the folder for the last time. He stood up. He extended his hand.

“Welcome aboard.”

Şafak walked out of the building into the afternoon sun, lighter than he’d been in months. The receptionist smiled at him on the way out. She already knew. The woman in the stiff blazer was still in the waiting room. The young man with the short tie was gone.

Outside, he called his mother. She cried. He called Hakan. Hakan said finally. He walked to the Starbucks on the corner and ordered a Venti Java Chip Frappuccino, which cost more than his dinner the night before.

The email arrived two hours later. He opened it on the bus home, standing, holding the overhead rail with one hand and his phone with the other, reading between the jolts.

Dear Şafak,

We are delighted to confirm your appointment as Junior Policy Analyst at the Strategic Planning Division of…

He read the sentence again. Then once more.

He had never applied to be a policy analyst, never heard of the Strategic Planning Division. Someone had sent him to the wrong office.

He could call. He could say there’s been a mistake, I’m not who you think I am, I was here for the marketing position on the third floor.

The bus stopped. Someone got off. Someone got on. The doors closed, and they moved again.

Şafak put his phone in his pocket.

He started on Monday.

The Joy

The last day of school smelled like warm asphalt and cheap erasers. June had already started doing its work on the city, the tar going soft under sandals, the balconies hung with laundry. It was the early nineties.

The report card was perfect. Pekiyi across the board, every line. Şafak held the thin card in both hands, careful not to crease it, and walked out of the school gates into the afternoon. His father was waiting by the car, a boxy sedan with vinyl seats that branded your thighs if you sat down too fast. He glanced at the card and nodded.

“Haydi, kasetçiye gidelim.”

The shop was squeezed between a bakkal and a tailor, its walls lined floor to ceiling with VHS cases, their plastic spines faded from the sun. The cases were empty. Display copies, lighter than they should have been. The tapes lived behind the counter, and if someone else had rented the one you wanted, you could only stare at the cover and wait. Sometimes for weeks.

At eye level: Superman IV.

Christopher Reeve, cape billowing, fist raised. He brought the case to the counter with both hands. The owner checked behind him. The tape was there.

His father talked to the owner for a while. Then they walked out with it.

Outside, his legs moved on their own. He hopped off the curb and swung his arms and looked up at the sky and worked out the exact trajectory he would take if he could fly. All he needed was the cape. He made a note to negotiate with his mother about a towel.

Report card: perfect. Superman: in the bag.

· · ·

They did not go straight home.

His father pulled over on a side street outside an apartment building with a rusty garden gate and a vine-covered balcony. Five minutes, he said. He wanted to see a friend.

The friend was a large man with a mustache, in a living room that smelled of cigarette smoke and strong tea. Tulip glasses stood on a brass tray. The television was on. The two men fell into it instantly, reunited after years.

Şafak sat on the edge of a chair that was too big for him, the tape on his lap, the report card folded in his back pocket, and waited.

Then the man turned to him. He leaned in, reached over, and gave his cheek one of those pinches. He squeezed and smiled.

“Yakışıklı, senin nasıl gidiyor bakalım? Kaç manitan var?”

He was seven. He knew about Superman. He did not know what a manita was.

The word went around in his head. Manita. Manita. It sounded like something that belonged on a report card.

And the man had asked how many.

He straightened up in the chair.

“Hiç yok amca. Hepsi pekiyi.”

The silence lasted three seconds. On the fourth, the room exploded.

His father threw his head back and laughed, mouth open, shoulders shaking. Şafak had never heard him laugh like that. He was a quiet man. He smiled plenty. The friend grabbed his own knee and the tea nearly went with it. The laughter fed itself, passing from one man to the other until neither could stop.

Şafak smiled along. He had said something brilliant, clearly. People laughed. He did not mind. He had things to do, and the thing to do was get home and press play.

· · ·

That evening, after the cape had gone back to being a towel and the Fanta had gone flat in its bottle, his father called him into the kitchen. He had a small box in his hand.

“Karne hediyen,” he said.

A silver watch. Analog. Too big for his wrist.

“Evladiyelik,” he said, and helped him with the clasp.

He wore it the rest of the summer.

The Turn

“I was leaving work,” Deniz said. “I got into the elevator with some of the girls. We were laughing about something, and then I took out my phone. I looked at the screen. No Service. I just froze.”

She paused, looking at him.

“All I could think was, damn it, I didn’t bring the car today. How am I going to get home?”

“The shuttle from work?”

“Yes.”

Şafak started laughing. She tried to keep talking, but seeing his face made her laugh too.

“I was in an elevator, Şafak. It took me the whole way down to work out what No Service meant.”

The waiter came to clear their plates. Deniz moved her glass to give him room, still laughing.

Her white shawl hung over the back of her chair, the dark wood showing through its open weave.

They left the restaurant late enough that the boy from the shop next door was bringing the shutter down, and the sidewalk in front of the tables had been hosed and was still dark.

Şafak drove. He put the next episode on before he pulled out, the one about the bank. When the opening music started, she reached over and put the volume up, and on the way back she closed her hand over his and left it there.

At the lights before the junction she lifted her hand to her shoulder and her fingers found the seam of her dress.

The restaurant was three streets back. The lights were red and the road behind them was empty.

“They’d never get those bags down that stairwell,” Şafak said.

“They’d use the service elevator.”

The lights changed.

In the hallway at home she reached up to unwind it and there was nothing there.

· · ·

She drove past the road on Thursday with the back of the car full of shopping and did not think of it.

On Sunday, she went for it. She put the show on when she got onto the main road and she was most of the way through the episode when she parked.

The restaurant was between services. Two men were eating at the bar, their plates set on sheets of paper. A girl went into the office and came back with a cardboard box and set it on the bar: three umbrellas, a pair of glasses, a child’s coat, and the shawl folded on top.

Outside it was cold enough for it. She put it on the back seat and drove home.

The Road

The car asked if we wanted music.

Neither of us answered right away. Şafak had his temple against the glass, watching the spaces between the trees. I was watching the road. The car didn’t need me to watch anything. But my hands still floated near the wheel.

“Something calm,” Şafak said.

The car played something acoustic. Spanish guitar, maybe Portuguese. It had learned us well enough by now—no lyrics when the mood was ambiguous, nothing percussive before noon.

We were heading south toward a cove Şafak had found. He said it was past Kuşadası, tucked beneath a cliff that faced west. We were going for two days. Nothing was planned. We hadn’t spoken in seven months.

Şafak turned from the window. “Who’s got Moris?”

“A friend down the street. She goes to see him every day. I asked her not to leave without playing with him.”

My phone buzzed before we’d cleared the city limits. Two notifications were stacked on the screen. The first: Lena has submitted a request—Grocery order (14 items). Review & merge? The second appeared below it like a footnote: Your sleep quality last night was 43% below baseline. Lena recommends postponing essential decisions today.

I dismissed the second one and opened the first. Lena—my assistant, though calling her that was like calling your lungs your breathing assistant—had drafted the weekly order. Mostly the usual: eggs, bread, that one brand of olives I liked but could never remember the name of. She’d swapped the regular milk for lactose-free. An annotation floated beneath the change: Based on your last three conversations about bloating. I approved it with a tap. Merged.

Şafak’s phone buzzed a second later. He looked at it, frowned, and put it back down.

“What?” I said.

“Atlas wants me to confirm the accommodation. I told it we’d figure it out when we got there.”

“So reject it.”

“I did. Twice. It keeps opening new requests.”

“Atlas sends an agent for each one,” I said. “You’ve been turning away the same intern all morning. That’s because you haven’t told it what you actually want.”

“I want it to wait.”

“It doesn’t know what waiting looks like if you haven’t defined the condition.”

He exhaled through his nose.

“Just tell Atlas to queue it until we’re thirty minutes out,” I said.

He picked up his phone. I heard him murmur something—the private tone people used with their assistants. A few seconds later, his phone went quiet.

I’d told Lena to wait a few weeks earlier. I was looking through a revised syllabus she’d drafted. Every assessment aligned too neatly with the rubric, and I’d typed: Don’t send it yet. Just wait. Lena had asked: Waiting for what? And I’d answered: I’ll know when I see it. She’d paused, then: Understood. Queuing request.

The highway opened up past Aydın. The Aegean light flattened the landscape into an overexposed photograph. Fig trees and stone walls lined the road. An old gas station sat back from the road, its pumps gone, its canopy stripped to rusted steel. The office was now a roadside tea stop with a hand-painted sign and a few plastic chairs under a sagging awning. The car pulled into a charging bay beside the office without asking. A notification: Charging session initiated. Estimated duration: 8 minutes. Payment merged.

No one got out.

We passed a truck carrying three white wind turbine blades on a flatbed that looked too small for them. The truck was in the legacy lane. An old man in a cap was driving, eyes on the road, his hands on the wheel. The car moved left, giving the truck a wide berth. I watched them shrink in the side mirror, like bones being carried away.

Şafak was talking about work. His team was designing a long-range strategy while Atlas ran the financial simulations and managed the regulatory filings. Şafak went with what felt right to him. His assistant handled what was right. When they disagreed, he would submit a revision, and Atlas would push back with a counterproposal backed by data and precedent.

“Sometimes it feels like I’m arguing with a very polite version of my father,” he said.

I laughed. “At least Atlas gives reasons.”

“That’s what makes it worse. You can’t storm out of a conversation with someone who responds in bullet points and cites compliance frameworks from 2023.”

He said “reject” instead of “refuse.” He said “I’ll draft something” instead of “I’ll think about it.” We all did.

Around noon the car suggested we stop for lunch. A notification appeared on both our phones simultaneously: Joint lunch recommendation drafted by Lena & Atlas. Coastal restaurant, 4 km ahead. Menu pre-filtered for your dietary preferences. Review & merge?

Şafak stared at his screen. “They made us a joint draft.”

“They coordinate.”

“I don’t want a joint draft. I want to decide what I eat when I see the menu.”

“There aren’t really menus anymore.”

“I know there aren’t really menus anymore.”

He rejected the draft. I watched him do it—his thumb pressing down on the screen with more force than the gesture required.

We didn’t stop for lunch.

The Anxiety

I don’t know what triggered it. Perhaps the familiar angle of Şafak’s arm, resting as it once had on the kitchen counter in his old apartment. Near Söke, a memory floated up like a body surfacing in still water.

Under the yellow, hazy light of the hood, the refrigerator humming. A Tuesday, or maybe a Wednesday. Şafak was leaning against the counter, holding his tea in one hand and rubbing the back of his neck with the other. He spoke piece by piece, emptying the room until nothing remained but the bare floor and the echo.

About her and the fights. About how every conversation had the same ending—raised voices, slammed doors, days of silence, and then a phone call at midnight that pulled everything back together like a drawstring. On and off. On and off.

I remember his face in that light. It usually made people look better, but that night he looked hollowed out, the shadows under his eyes deep enough to hold water. His phone lay on the counter. A WhatsApp notification lit up the screen and died. The radio was playing something low—a talk show, maybe. Someone else’s problems murmuring in the background behind his.

“I’m done,” he said, testing the sentence to see how it sounded in the air.

I listened. I nodded. I poured more tea.

And that night in that kitchen I made a decision that wasn’t mine to make.

The car said: “There’s a rest stop in four kilometers. Your hydration pattern suggests a break.”

“We’re fine,” I said.

“I’m noting that Şafak hasn’t had water in ninety minutes.”

Şafak reached for his bottle and took a sip to make the car stop talking about it.

“It also knows I slept badly,” he said. “Atlas sent me a thing this morning. Your sleep quality was below baseline. Consider postponing important decisions.” He put on a flat, clinical voice for the quote. “I rejected it.”

“I got the same one,” I said.

“From Atlas?”

“From Lena. Same message, more or less.”

“Did you reject it too?”

“Of course.”

He almost smiled. For a moment we were two men swatting away the same fly.

We passed an old eczane sign, the red E bleached to pink, mounted above a shuttered storefront.

The conversation had been careful so far. Two men circling the center of a room without stepping on the rug. I asked about his projects. He asked about my work. I told him about a student presentation that had come through so garbled Lena had flagged it as either panic or plagiarism—or both. He laughed. The sound was good. Warm.

Then we started talking about mutual friends and what they were doing.

“I saw Deniz last month,” Şafak said.

Her name landed between us like a coin on marble.

“How is she?” I said, and my voice came out exactly right, which is how I knew something was wrong.

“Good, I think. She’s in Bodrum now. Runs some kind of wellness thing.” He paused. “She asked about you.”

“About me?”

“She asked how you were. I said I didn’t know. We hadn’t talked in a while.”

The words lay face up between us—take it or leave it.

The second memory came faster. A café by the sea with exposed brick walls and too many plants, where they called the filter coffee “batch brew.”

Deniz sat across from me. She was wearing a jacket with the collar turned up and her hands were wrapped around a cup she wasn’t drinking from.

She spoke first.

“Şafak is a good person. I know that. But being a good person and taking responsibility for a relationship aren’t the same thing.”

I don’t remember the exact words. I’ve tried, over the years, and they won’t come back whole. Something like: “You two aren’t good for each other.” Or maybe: “This can’t go on.” Or maybe something worse, something more presumptuous, like: “He deserves better than this.” I hope I didn’t say that. But I might have.

She looked at me without any immediate anger; that probably surfaced later, in private. At that moment, her expression was closer to recognition. Then she said: “We’re children pretending to be adults. That’s all we’ve ever been.”

I didn’t understand it then. I thought she was talking about herself and Şafak—a diagnosis I could file away and use.

As we were leaving, I opened the door for her and she walked through it without turning around. I stood on the sidewalk for a minute, watching her go, feeling the weightlessness of something I’d just pushed past saving.

Şafak called me that week. “We had a fight,” he said. “But this time she won’t come back.” He sounded confused. They’d always fought—screaming matches that ended with doors and silence and midnight phone calls. They always came back. That was the deal. Fight and return, fight and return, the rhythm as predictable as a tide.

I said: “Maybe it’s for the best.”

I never told him what I’d done.

· · ·

A group message notification slid across my phone: 12 new messages in “Cove Trip” group. 2 relevant to you. Summary: Şafak shared a location pin for the cove. Atlas confirmed sunset time for your arrival window.

I didn’t open it. I’d noticed it around the second hour of driving: the music was changing in ways that didn’t match our requests. The Spanish guitar had given way to something softer, almost meditative. Lena and Atlas were reading our biometrics and choosing tracks to keep us calm.

The road was narrowing. We’d left the highway and were on a two-lane stretch that wound along the coast. The sea appeared in flashes between the hills.

“Can I ask you something?” Şafak said.

“Sure.”

“You always do that.”

“Do what?”

“Make decisions for other people.”

He spoke without surprise.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you have a pattern. You see a situation, you decide what’s best, and you act. You don’t ask. You don’t wait. You just—handle it. Like you’re everyone’s project manager.”

· · ·

The third memory. The one I had pushed the farthest down.

A torrential downpour that had turned the world into a single gray sound, erasing the line between air and water. Sokak. Gece. Şafak standing in the middle of the street in his sneakers, no socks, soaked through, lit up by a pair of headlights like a man caught in a searchlight.

I was watching from the window of the small bedroom—the room I’d retreated to hours earlier when she’d burst through the front door in her fur coat, tall and furious, looking like a queen arriving to burn down a castle. She’d screamed at me to move and I’d moved. “Çekil!” And I’d gone to that room and closed the door and listened to the walls absorb their war.

The screaming. Her hand at his head, one finger, striking the same spot again and again. He did not move.

“Benden ne istiyorsun?”

His voice low, steady: “Git. Sonra konuşalım.”

She sat. She stood. She sat again. But Şafak didn’t break. He opened the door and she left.

At midnight she was drinking rakı alone at a restaurant two streets away, at a table by the sea. I went with him to pick her up. The argument resumed. I walked home ahead of them.

And then the street. The rain. She was in the car and she turned it toward him and hit the gas. My hand went to the glass. A game. He knew she’d stop. She had to stop. But the rain—the road was wet, the car could skid, and Şafak stood there, feet planted, jaw set, a man refusing to move for a force he calculated wouldn’t kill him. “Gelsin ya,” I could almost hear him say. “Lanet olsun.”

The car screamed down the street and stopped. Zero distance. He opened her door. “Bizi öldüreceksen söyle, ailemi arayıp veda edeyim.”

The rest he told me himself, later. He left nothing out.

She put the car in reverse, pulled out to the main road—and turned into oncoming traffic. Horns and headlights tore through the rain as he screamed at her to pull over. Somehow they made it into a side street. She got out and lit a cigarette. He lit one too. They stood apart in the rain, the two orange tips the only warm thing in the scene. Then she got in the car and drove away without a word.

He called. She didn’t answer. He called again. Fifty calls later she picked up.

“Buraya gel,” she said. “Yaralarımı sar.”

He was in a taxi at two in the morning, going to her apartment. She locked the door behind him and hid the key.

Her nails were broken. She asked him to cut them. He couldn’t. She cut them herself.

They stayed there for two days. They ate very little, and never at the same table. Didn’t speak. On the third day, they made up.

That was the night I decided she had to go.

“I don’t make decisions for other people,” I said.

“You do. You always have. You see someone drowning and instead of throwing a rope, you swim out and drag them to the shore you picked.”

The car drove on. The guitar track had shifted to something in a minor key—the system reading the room, adjusting. I wished it would stop.

“Is this about something specific?” I said.

“You know what it’s about.”

I didn’t answer. The silence stretched until the car filled it with the soft hum of its own movement.

“Something changed in Deniz,” Şafak said. “Overnight. We’d fought a hundred times. Worse than what you saw. Much worse. But we always came back. Every time. And then one day she just—didn’t. The door closed and it stayed closed. I never understood why.”

The car spoke.

“I have access to communication records from that period. I can retrieve them if it would help establish what was said.”

“No,” I said.

The word came out too fast. I heard it and Şafak heard it and the car, in its silent way, heard it too.

Şafak looked at me with something worse than surprise: confirmation.

“Why not?” he said.

“Because it’s not about data. It’s not about timelines.”

“Then what is it about?”

The car waited.

“I thought I was helping,” I said.

“Helping with what?”

“With you. With—that whole situation. I saw what it was doing to you. That night, with the car, in the rain—I was at the window. I watched the whole thing. And I thought: this person is going to literally die in this relationship. And I—”

“What did you do.”

“I talked to her.”

Silence.

“I told her you two couldn’t work. I said it was destroying you. I said she needed to let go.”

The road curved. The sea appeared fully now—a long, unbroken line of blue stretching to the horizon.

“And she listened,” Şafak said.

“She listened.”

“And the next day, the door stayed closed.”

“Yes.”

He nodded slowly.

“The car offered to pull up the logs,” he said. “And you said no.”

“Yes.”

“Because the logs would show it.”

“Yes.”

“Messages. Calls. A meeting with her.”

“A café. Once. One conversation.”

He turned back to the window. The landscape was changing—the flat farmland giving way to low cliffs, pine trees leaning toward the sea, the road dropping toward the coast. We were close.

“You know what the worst part is?” he said. “It’s not that you did it. It’s that you were probably right. That relationship was going to kill me. I know that. I’ve always known that.” He paused. “The worst part is that you decided it for me. You merged the request without my approval.”

He looked out at the water for a long moment. “Deniz and I were never going to make it.” He paused. “There’s nothing I want to do with this. I’m not going to hold onto it. The world doesn’t balance itself out. Things stay where they fall.”

I waited for him to say more. He didn’t.

The car said: “You are twelve minutes from your destination.”

Şafak pulled up his phone and murmured something to Atlas. My phone buzzed: Şafak Karataş has submitted a request—Cancel accommodation booking. Review & merge?

I looked at it. Then at him.

“I’d like to stop here,” he said.

We were on a two-lane road. Olive trees on both sides. No town, no village. Just a faded bus stop sign leaning at an angle, half-swallowed by dry grass.

“Here?”

“Here.”

The car slowed. “There’s no public transport scheduled for this stop in the next three hours. The nearest town is six point four kilometers northeast. Atlas can arrange—”

“I’ll walk.”

“The nearest accommodation with availability is—”

“I’ll walk.”

He opened the door. A dry, herbal heat rushed in. He grabbed his duffel from the back seat. He hadn’t packed much.

I wanted to say something. An apology was too late. I thought about just saying his name, but it felt too heavy and too light at the same time, and by the time I’d found any word at all, he was already standing outside with the bag slung over one arm.

He looked back at me through the open door. His face had the finality of a document closed after the last review.

He was going to walk six kilometers to a town he’d never been to, carrying his own bag, making his own decisions. Like the old man in the legacy lane.

“Enjoy the cove, Hakan,” he said. He meant it.

He shut the door. The car waited, expecting me to call him back. When I didn’t, it asked:

“Shall I continue to the destination?”

I watched him in the mirror, walking north along the shoulder. Duffel bag slung over one arm. Getting smaller.

“Yes,” I said.

The car pulled away. The guitar was still playing—it had been playing this whole time, I realized, soft enough to forget, persistent enough to fill the silence. I reached over and turned it off. For the first time all day, neither Lena nor Atlas offered a replacement.

The road curved. Şafak disappeared.

A notification: Atlas’s logistics agent has arranged a taxi for Şafak Karataş. Pickup in 22 minutes. No action required.

No action required. I approved Şafak’s cancellation request. Merged it. The booking dissolved.

The Cove

The cove, when I reached it, was exactly as beautiful as he’d said it would be. The cliff faced west. The water was clear. The sun was an hour from setting.

I sat on a rock near the edge and looked out at the sea. Lena’s morning notification floated back to me: Your sleep quality last night was 43% below baseline. Lena recommends postponing essential decisions today. I’d dismissed it before we left. I’d dismissed my own warning years ago, the night before that café—the night I called Deniz. “Konuşmamız lazım,” I had said, and she had agreed too easily. I had told myself to wait. I hadn’t.

Lena buzzed: You seem to be alone. Would you like me to adjust the dinner reservation to one person?

I stared at the notification for a long time. And then Deniz’s sentence came back to me—the one she’d said in that café years ago, the one I’d walked out of thinking I’d understood. We’re children pretending to be adults. That’s all we’ve ever been. I had not heard that the sentence had three subjects, not two.

Then I typed the only honest thing I’d said all day:

Don’t do anything. Just wait.

Lena paused. Then:

Condition undefined. Queuing request.

Two years of learning me, and this was the one thing she couldn’t parse. She’d handled just wait before, that afternoon with the syllabus, with a simple understood.

The sun went down. The water turned from blue to gold to black. Şafak was in a town whose name I didn’t know.

I sat there until the stars came out. The car, parked behind me in the dark, waited for a command I no longer knew how to give.

The Ease

The garden door was open and the breeze was moving the curtain toward the living room. Deniz had her phone propped against the flour tin because the tripod was in the storage room, under a pile of things she would have to move to get at it. She had already filmed four recipes with the phone against the tin and it seemed to work well enough.

The dog was sitting on her left with his tongue out, waiting for something to fall. She was stuffing squash blossoms, which took a while, and it was difficult to show what she was doing because her fingers covered most of the flower while she was putting the filling in.

Her husband came in from the hall with the trash bag in one hand and the car keys in the other.

“What’s this one?”

“Kabak çiçeği dolması.”

“I meant the phone.”

She wiped her hands. “The videos are for the book. There’ll be a QR code under each recipe so people can watch me make it.”

“Oh, nice,” he said. “I’m getting her at four.”

“They said rain later.” She turned back to the tray. “Drive carefully.”

“It’s ten minutes. It hasn’t rained since May.”

“I know.” She pressed the filling down with her thumb. “I hate driving in the rain.”

He leaned in, kissed her cheek somewhere near the ear, and took the bag out through the garden door.

The dog had not moved. She tore off a piece of the filling, the plain part without the mint, and held it down. It was gone before her hand had opened all the way.

Outside, the lid of the bin. A car door. The engine.

The light coming through the garden door had thinned.

She looked at the phone, which had been recording the whole time.

She decided to keep it.

· · ·

The market smelled of melon and wet stone. She had come for herbs and had already been talked into a kilo of tomatoes she did not need, which happened most weeks.

She was pressing her thumb against a bunch of dill when she looked up.

A man four or five stalls down, on the other side, half turned away. The shoulders were right. So was the way he stood while he waited.

For a second it was Şafak.

Then he turned and it wasn’t him. It was a man about that age, buying fish.

She bought the dill. She bought the tomatoes she did not need.

Her phone rang while she was putting the bags in the back.

“I can’t get her,” her husband said. “They’re calling me in. I have to go.”

“Alright.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Go.”

It had started while she was inside, not hard, but enough to make the road shine.

She sat in the car for a moment before she started it.

It was ten minutes. She took twenty.

Handled

A silver laptop and a manila folder rested on the mahogany desk. He opened the laptop. He read.

The desk phone rang. He kept reading.

The second ring sounded. His fingers hit the keys.

The third ring echoed. He pressed send.

On the fourth, he raised his head and lifted the receiver.

“Speaking.”

A hurried voice spilled from the earpiece. He let it run.

“Step by step,” he said. “Do not confuse me.”

He listened. The voice slowed.

“Alright,” he said. “We will talk about this.”

He placed the receiver back in its cradle.

The door opened. His secretary stepped in. She carried a black leather planner. She did not knock; it was precisely four o’clock.

She stopped at the edge of the desk.

“The dinner reservation is confirmed,” she said. “For your wife’s birthday.”

He looked up from the screen. He looked at the open planner in her hands, then up at her face.

“Yes.”

She held his gaze for a second. She closed the planner.

“Thank you,” he said.

She nodded. She turned. She left.

The door closed behind her. He pressed his palms flat against the mahogany. He closed the laptop.

· · ·

Inside the car, the traffic was barely audible.

“The margin is too tight,” his friend said from the passenger seat. He loosened his tie. “If the quarter ends low, they will pull the funding.”

“They will not,” he said. He watched the road. His hands rested at ten and two on the leather steering wheel. “The projections are stable.”

His friend shifted. He slid down in the seat and lifted his left leg, resting the side of his shoe against the lower edge of the dashboard.

“Still,” his friend said. “It is a risk we don’t have to take right now.”

“It is a calculated shift,” he said.

He lifted his hand from the wheel. He extended his index finger. He tapped it against the side of his friend’s knee.

His friend dropped his foot back to the floor mat. He sat up.

“What did you get her?”

“It’s handled.”

“Calculated,” his friend repeated. “But they want guarantees.”

He returned his hand to the wheel.

“I will give them guarantees,” he said.

“Legacy lane in four hundred meters. Manual control will engage.”

“You’re taking the long way as usual,” his friend said.

Şafak did not answer.

His hands tightened on the wheel.

· · ·

His suit jacket hung over the back of his chair. He wore a white shirt.

He lowered his wine glass. A single drop of dark red liquid detached from the rim. It fell. It landed on his chest. The red seeped into the white cotton, expanding in a perfect, dark circle.

His wife stopped eating. She did not speak. She looked at the red mark on his chest. Then she looked up at his face. She waited.

He placed the glass on the table.

“Excuse me,” he said.

He stood up. As he walked across the dining room, a waiter stepped aside for him. Their eyes met for a second. The waiter inclined his head, almost imperceptibly. Şafak continued toward the restrooms.

Four minutes passed.

He returned to the table. He sat down.

His wife looked at his chest. The shirt was immaculate. There was no stain. There was no damp patch from scrubbing. A single faint line ran down the center, from collar to waist.

He picked up his fork.

“The flight is booked for Thursday,” he said.

She picked up her glass. They continued talking.

· · ·

He unlocked the front door. Laughter drifted from the living room. He walked down the hall. Four friends were on the sofas, holding drinks. He stopped at the threshold.

“Good evening,” he said. He nodded.

He did not wait for the conversation to resume. He turned and walked into the kitchen.

His wife stood at the stove. He took off his suit jacket and hung it on the back of a wooden chair. He unbuttoned his cuffs. He rolled the white sleeves up to his elbows. He turned on the faucet, washed his hands, and dried them on a towel. He stepped up to the counter beside her.

She hummed a low tune, tossing the vegetables in the pan with a flick of her wrist before turning smoothly to pull a stack of plates from the overhead cabinet.

He picked up a discarded garlic peel from the marble. He dropped it into the bin. He took a damp cloth. He wiped the invisible residue from the counter.

She reached across him for the olive oil, poured a thin stream into the pan, and tasted the sauce from the edge of a wooden spoon. “Almost there,” she murmured to the stove.

He turned the burner dial down by a fraction of a millimeter. He took the olive oil bottle from where she had left it. He placed it back in the pantry.

One of the men walked into the kitchen. He held a glass of red wine. He leaned against the island.

“Need any help in here?” the man asked.

She smiled over her shoulder. “No, we have it under control. Go sit.”

The man chuckled. He set his wine glass down on the marble island. He began talking about the traffic on the bridge, gesturing with his free hand.

He stood still. He listened. He looked at the base of the wine glass resting directly on the marble surface.

“Coming,” the man called out in response to a voice from the living room. He turned and walked out, leaving the half-full glass behind.

He stepped forward. He pinched the stem of the glass. He lifted it and moved it ten centimeters to the right, placing it dead center on a square slate coaster.

“Plates,” she said.

She spooned the food in fluid, generous arcs. He took the plates, two at a time. He carried them into the dining room. He set them down at each place setting. The guests moved to the table. Chairs scraped against the floor.

Before he pulled his own chair out, he stopped. He looked back through the open doorway. The stove was off. The counters were wiped clean. The olive oil was put away.

He sat down. He picked up his linen napkin and placed it across his lap.

“The quarterly reports are due on Monday,” he said.

She laughed at something a guest whispered, and passed the salad bowl down the table.

· · ·

Morning. The hallway was dim. He stood at the front door, briefcase in his right hand, keys in his left.

He turned to face the living room. The sofa cushions were straight. The throw blanket was folded. The coffee table was clear.

A single glass stood on the side table by the armchair. Half full. Water, by the look of it. Caught the light once as he turned.

He set the briefcase down. He set the keys down on top of it.

He walked to the side table. He picked up the glass. The watch moved on his wrist and he let it. He carried the glass to the kitchen. He poured the water into the sink. He rinsed the glass. He placed it upside down on the drying rack.

The house was silent.

He stood at the sink. He looked at the clean glass. He reached out and tightened the faucet handle, though no water was dripping.