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 the same warning years ago, the night before that café—the night Deniz had called me. “Konuşmamız lazım,” she had said, and I had said yes too quickly. From somewhere inside myself, a voice had said maybe sleep on it, maybe wait. I hadn’t waited.
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 both children pretending to be adults. That’s all we’ve ever been. I had heard it as a confession about her and Şafak. A diagnosis I could use. I had not heard—had refused to hear—that she was sitting at a table with a third person, and that the sentence had three subjects, not two.
I had been the oldest person in that café. I had also been the youngest.
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. She couldn’t parse it this time because I didn’t know what I was waiting for. And she could tell.
The sun went down. The water turned from blue to gold to black. Somewhere on a road to the north, Şafak was walking toward a town whose name I didn’t know, carrying everything I’d broken in a bag too small to hold it.
I sat there until the stars came out. The car, parked behind me in the dark, waited—as it always did—for a command I no longer knew how to give.