Milo was a person whose future you could see clearly. Milo had looked for the house-sit. He planned. He wrote every day, he studied. He saw the world as it was and wanted no part of the ugliness, so he wrote or drank, or wandered until it was pretty. Nothing else suited him.

Murat’s papers and a journal were in the drawer where Milo’d kept the passports, along with several thousand drachmas he must have stolen before the police had come. He must have been afraid we’d be mentioned in them, and we were. I couldn’t read the Danish but I could read our names, and Declan’s.

I left before he woke, in one of the neighbors’ boats, so he wouldn’t be stranded. It was cold and windy and there was a light rain. The sky was glowing pink and orange when I shut the wooden door of the cliff house. It took hours to row to the harbor, sticking close to the coast. I used his money for food and a ferry ticket. Sat in the hold this time, rocked and slept above the roiling sea.

I loved Milo Rollock, and I loved leaving him where he was, lying beside his notebook, alone.