AT ONE POINT in the summer that followed, Olga and I almost met.

Her school semester had ended. She was about to travel to see her dad. Helena had told me that she and Olga were going to Ermoupoli at the end of the summer, to get away from everything, they were going to stay there for several weeks together, and I felt lonely and embittered but still looked forward to a summer with her, summer in the city, she was going to be in town just like me. Olga wasn’t going back to school that fall. Nothing was working. Helena told me about the funeral, Olga hadn’t worn a black dress, she’d chosen an oversized suit instead and with her thin neck and shaved head she looked like she was playing dress-up, like a child standing on another child’s shoulders, Helena told me, not without pride, that her sisters must have thought she looked mad. Her nieces were in identical black wrap dresses, I think my sister bought them, can you imagine, she buys clothes for her adult children, she doesn’t let them find their own identity, Helena felt bad for them. They had cried more than anybody else, they had cried the way small children and abandoned people do, there was snot. She repeated: Olga wasn’t going back to school. Olga was going to come to Ermoupoli with her. She was going to figure something out, remote schooling maybe, a year off maybe, perhaps an evaluation, she’s not well. But sun is the best cure, and rest, and now, soon, both of them were going to get some good rest.

Sometime after this conversation, before Olga had left to spend time with her dad, Helena called and invited me over for dinner. Her voice was oddly quiet, as if she was concerned that someone was listening. Come keep us company, she said, why don’t the three of us have dinner together. It was the only time I declined an invitation from her.

I had no explanation for my hostility. None other than jealousy. It wasn’t rational; I couldn’t bear the thought of meeting her daughter. The thought of their intimacy was too frightening; it made the intimacy Helena and I had seem fragile. I said no.

I knew it made her angry that I declined, the only time I said no, because the next time we saw each other, after Olga had left, she was quiet, curt, I spent all night in her studio, looking at her books, I studied Herbert List’s photograph of two boys in cheap paper masks, side by side and superimposed on each other like a hologram, they were holding something in their hands, a crab or a shell or a rock, they might have been one and the same person. Their boundaries were at once sharp and dissolved; the only clearly defined part of their bodies was where they met.

I know that our bond intensified when I said no since it proved what I was capable of: I could leave her. I had shown her that she needed me. I had shown her that she’d miss me and I was the unavailable one, not her. Maybe this no was the precondition for my meeting Olga later, in Ermoupoli, for the invitation that came. Impossible to know, dizzying to imagine.

Later on I would think of this meeting that never took place, of another version of my life where everything could have gone differently. I could have met Olga earlier. I could have met Olga later. Each version had its own suffering, its own happiness. The few months that separated our first meeting from this hypothetical meeting stretched into a mass of time that made it seem like the Olga I met in early September was nothing like the Olga I could have met in early June. There might have been some truth to this feeling. In June she was still linked to phenomena I associated with childhood: time structured around school semesters, parents. But in September, when I met her in the garden in Ermoupoli, she was alone.