By late October, the estate runs like a sun‑baked farce of a Swiss watch: tractors cough awake five minutes late instead of ten, the press growls on roughly the right hours, and every delay is absorbed into Marios’s colour‑coded schedule as if it were always meant to be there. He stalks the rows with a clipboard under one arm and a dented thermos in hand, radio clipped to his belt, eyes flicking from clouds to soil to harvest crew with the same measuring intensity.
To the untrained observer, he might have appeared merely busy. To anyone who had ever tried to move three generations of Theodorakis opinion in the same direction, he resembled a field marshal advancing on an enemy position made up entirely of cousins. He counted under his breath (not sheep, but kilos and moisture percentages) while he navigated around crates, shaking off greetings with a nod that passed for warmth during harvest.
“Morning, afentiko,” a seasonal picker called, the title, little master, sticking to him like burrs whether he wanted it or not.
“Morning, Giannis. Your row starts at the fig tree, not in the kafeneio,” Marios replied without looking up, pencil already ticking down the list of who had actually appeared and who was still a rumour.
The trees, at least, did not argue. Their silver leaves shivered in the light breeze, loaded nets sagged between trunks, and the air held that particular green, sharp scent of crushed olives and damp earth. He read the slight dulling of a branch here, the over‑eager sheen on another there, small clues that told him where to push the crew and where to tread more carefully. The sky offered him a thin veil of cloud that might mean nothing or might mean the difference between a clean harvest and a storm‑scrambled schedule, and he filed the information away with the same sober attention he had once reserved for exam dates and now devoted to delivery deadlines.
His radio crackled at his hip. “Marios? The small press is sulking again.”
He pressed the button with his thumb. “It is a machine, not a child, Thodori. Turn it off, count to ten, and turn it on again. If it still sulks, I’m coming.”
He clicked off before his uncle could reply, already altering the neat blocks of his morning plan. Somewhere between Block C and the old chapel he shifted two pickers to loading, one loader to the press, and tomorrow’s maintenance check to this afternoon, like sliding olives around on a plate to give the illusion of abundance. The colour‑coded boxes on his clipboard meant nothing to anyone but him, but they made sense; they were the only part of his world that still obeyed lines and columns.
“Don’t frown so hard, you’ll scare the trees,” Sofia had told him the previous evening, leaning in the kitchen doorway with flour on her cheek and the confidence of someone who believed, quite sincerely, that he could be improved by pastry.
He had grunted something unhelpful and gone back to his spreadsheets; now, as he passed the lower terrace, the smell of frying onions and fresh bread drifted faintly up from the farmhouse, and his stomach reminded him he had forgotten breakfast again. He took a swig from his thermos (strong, bitter coffee gone lukewarm) and told it sternly that this was all the sustenance it would be getting until the eleven‑o’clock break.
Above him, the hillside stepped down in orderly terraces that only hinted at how much coaxing went into their apparent calm. Below, somewhere, was the courtyard where, in a few short weeks, fairy lights and strings of paper lanterns would appear as if by miracle and the annual festival would attempt to disguise necessity as celebration. For now, all that flickered was the small, persistent thought at the back of his mind: if they did not hit his numbers this year, there would be fewer crates, fewer wages, fewer choices.
He tightened his grip on the clipboard, squared his shoulders, and turned toward the press house as if it were simply another misbehaving relative to be brought into line.
Each morning, the same ritual repeated with microscopic variations, as if the estate were determined to prove that predictability and mischief could coexist. A starter motor protested with a cough that suggested lifelong martyrdom; a net snagged on a stone wall that had been there since his grandfather’s time and would, evidently, outlast several more generations of human error; someone’s cousin turned up ten, twenty, thirty minutes late, clutching his phone and claiming a sick goat, a broken scooter, a grandmother who had fainted from worry about the sick goat.
Marios did not argue. Argument took time, and time had a price per kilo attached to it. Instead, he reshuffled tasks with the practised flick of his pencil while workers swore they heard him muttering yield projections under his breath like a farmer’s version of the Lord’s Prayer. By noon, the morning’s shambles had been compressed into neat stacks of green crates at the press door, and by evening his uncles were half‑joking in the yard that he must have swallowed a calendar and a calculator together, and possibly the family ledger for dessert.
The olive press itself possessed a personality everyone respected, temperamental but, on balance, dependable, its metallic growl echoing through the old stone mill as fruit surrendered to fragrant, viscous streams of oil. On a good day, it ran smooth as a hymn; the belt purred, the gauge needles sat exactly where they ought, and even Thodori claimed it was “in church mood.” On a bad one, a forgotten gasket or misaligned valve sent Marios into terse triage, hands slick with oil as he barked for spanners and rags while, behind the clipped orders, he silently totted up how much an hour of downtime cost in lost kilos, missed delivery windows, and the quiet, tightening curve of numbers on his balance sheets.
The festival hung over him like a storm cloud dressed in bunting. The village called it a panigyri and meant joy; the email invitations called it an “immersive estate experience” and meant leverage. Marios, counting bottles and electric sockets, saw only an audit in disguise, every meze plate and staged sunset another line in an account book that refused to balance.
Preparations bled into the workday until no one could say where harvest ended and spectacle began. Sofia, elbow‑deep in dough, sketched seating charts on flour‑dusted receipts; Marios triple‑checked inventory for tasting tables as if a misplaced crate might topple civilisation. The older generation alternated between nostalgia and dire prophecy. By the time word drifted to the village that “this year will be different,” the estate understood the stakes: some guests would arrive to be charmed, some to be courted, and a few to decide, quietly, definitively, who mattered most once the music started and the bargaining slipped in between the dance steps.
On paper, nothing had changed in decades: the harvest‑day hierarchy was as fixed as the terraces. Elder uncles stationed under the shade near the press, younger men orbiting the clanking machinery, women deployed in kitchens and between the trees. In the old ledger where his grandfather had once recorded weights by hand, the same surnames still appeared, marching down the page in neat, patriarchal columns. If a sociologist had visited, Marios thought, they could have copied last year’s diagram, changed the date, and no one would have noticed.
In reality, everyone moved according to an unwritten script that only looked like tradition if you squinted. The elder uncles, for instance, sat in thrones of plastic chairs, komboloi clicking and cigarettes burning, and were said to be “overseeing” operations. By which the family meant they reserved the right to shout advice the moment someone younger appeared to know what they were doing. Officially, they barked orders. Unofficially, Marios edited those orders on the fly, converting “You’re doing it wrong” into “Slow it by two notches; the fruit’s wetter this year.”
Then there were the people who must pretend not to bark orders at all. Sofia, for one, could reposition half the picking teams with a word and a raised eyebrow, and yet at every turn some aunt would declare that she was “just helping with the food,” as if the way she allocated trays and breaks did not directly determine whether the day ran on time. Seasonal workers learned quickly that if Sofia said, “Take your coffee now,” what she meant was, “In five minutes the tractor will need you on the lower terrace, don’t argue.”
And beyond them, a third category endured: those who pretended not to notice any of it. The younger cousins, drafted into carrying crates and wiping tables, perfected the art of selective deafness. They heard every contradiction, the uncles’ grand pronouncements, Marios’s quiet corrections, Sofia’s gentle directives, yet responded only to whichever voice currently held the most immediate power over their afternoon. If asked later who had been in charge, they would shrug and say, “Everyone,” which, Marios suspected, was another way of saying “no one you can argue with directly.”
The village liked to speak of “how things are done” as if the arrangement descended from Mount Taygetos fully formed. Watching the way a supposedly simple instruction, “move those crates”, had to pass through three different layers of ego, translation, and tact before the crates budged, Marios knew better. The terraces were ancient; the choreography upon them was being rewritten every ten minutes, and the only rule that never shifted was that no one would admit it.
The “serious work” happens where the diesel fumes hang thickest: men jockeying for position on tractors and at the controls of the modern press, trading opinions about yields, fertiliser, and the government with a volume calibrated less for communication than for performance. Here, sleeves are rolled, voices are raised, and every minor adjustment to a valve or lever is treated as a matter of masculine destiny. To stand in that circle is to be seen as part of the engine itself; to stand outside it is, allegedly, to be “helping.”
A few paces away, exiled to the edge like an afterthought, a plastic table has become the true command centre. Its surface is a small disaster of practicalities: battered notebooks, charging leads in tangled knots, half‑finished coffees acquiring a skin, a plate of biscuits slowly turning to dust. This is where truck arrivals are coordinated, which terraces get picked before the sun turns vicious, which cousin is rotated off the ladder before his back gives out. From here, Sofia conducts the day without ever appearing to conduct anything at all, her authority disguised as accommodation.
Her phone never leaves her hand; it might as well be another limb. She fields suppliers with honeyed firmness (“of course, Giorgo mou, but you’ll honour last year’s price, yes?”) while her thumb is already rearranging pickers on a scuffed spreadsheet. A sick cousin’s row is covered in three calls and two jokes, no pride dented, only the fiction preserved that everyone volunteered. She times snack runs like a field general, dispatching koulouria and iced coffee so that the surliest crews are fed five minutes before they begin to mutter. When an elderly uncle waves her off with “we’ve always done it this way,” she smiles, nods, praises his wisdom, and then, with a few messages and a lifted brow, quietly alters the plan anyway.
Around them, the estate splits into two worlds. Those with money, business cards, or foreign accents are welcomed like minor royalty. Given shaded seats, guided tastings, and carefully rehearsed tales about “heritage” and “sustainability.” Their progress is padded with flattery, cool water, and fresh‑cut bread; every sample poured is an investment, every nod weighed for its potential to become a contract.
Beyond that soft ring of hospitality, the seasonal workers move in fast, practised patterns, filling crates and vanishing between rows the way cicadas fall suddenly silent when a car passes. Their names are half learned and half forgotten, their jokes swallowed by engines and radio static. By the time the fairy lights are strung, they’ll have slipped away, leaving only full tanks, flattened grass where they rested at noon, and a few smudged fingerprints on the bottles the important guests will later admire as evidence of “artisan craftsmanship.”
Marios registers him first as movement where there should only be rhythm: a flicker of unfamiliar limbs and reflective glass weaving, inexplicably cheerful, between the methodical stoop-and-stretch of the pickers. For an instant he thinks it’s one of the university volunteers from last year, returned with new equipment and worse fashion sense. Then the newcomer lifts the camera, and the estate acquires, in addition to its usual burdens, a roaming eye.
He comes up the path at an easy trot, as if the incline were decorative rather than functional, long strides eating the distance with the careless stamina of someone who sleeps eight hours a night on principle. Sun has browned him to the same shade as the field hands, but nothing about him says village: the quick, assessing swivels of his head, the way he keeps angling the camera to catch not just the trees, but the hands in the trees; the half-English mutters into his microphone about “textures” and “narrative arcs” as if the olives have been waiting all their lives for their close-up.
Marios doesn’t have time for him. Which is to say, he mentally allots him thirty seconds, maximum, under “non-critical disruptions” and braces himself.
“Yásas!” the man calls, pitching his voice as if greeting a stadium. “I’m not late, am I? The light is perfect; it would be a crime.”
There is, Marios thinks, a category error in calling daylight criminal, but the words are swallowed by the stranger’s onward momentum. In two heartbeats he has swung the camera in a slow, reverent circle (terraces, sea, machinery, workers) like a priest offering incense.
“Introduce me to whoever’s in charge,” he announces to no one in particular and everyone at once. “And also” “to your most photogenic ladder. Trust me, it’s important. The soul of the harvest is in the climb.”
The nearest pickers smother grins. One of the older Albanians, halfway through filling his crate, mutters something that makes his row laugh outright. The stranger takes this as encouragement, of course; people like that always do. He angles his body to keep himself and the workers in the same frame, already narrating.
“See here,” he tells the camera, voice dropping into a conspiratorial murmur, “this is where tradition meets gravity. If you want to understand an olive grove, you have to start with how people get off the ground.”
Marios feels Sofia come up beside him before he sees her, the faint citrus of her soap cutting through the sharper scents of oil and metal.
“Friend of yours?” she asks, mouth quirking.
“If he starts climbing machinery, I’m pushing him back to Athens,” Marios says, too low for the mic to catch.
She huffs a laugh. “Relax. That’s Lazaros Delis. The vlogger. My cousin’s kids are obsessed. Apparently he’s ‘good for small businesses.’”
Marios watches as Lazaros, having secured a ladder and an indulgent victim, clambers halfway up, balancing with one hand and still somehow filming with the other. He asks the picker’s name, mishears it, demands it again with an apologetic wince that is, annoyingly, genuinely charming.
“Spell it for me, re file,” he insists, grinning down. “If I butcher your name, my followers will cancel me. And my mother. She watches.”
The picker, Dritan, Marios notes automatically, file updated in his head, spells it, slow and patient. Lazaros repeats it, nails the pronunciation on the third attempt, and whoops as if he’s just managed a summit.
Around them, work stutters, then resumes at a slightly altered tempo, like an orchestra accommodating a soloist who has wandered in mid-symphony. Some men straighten up a little taller when the camera passes; others turn their faces away with practised indifference. The estate, so familiar in its own skin, suddenly seems to be trying on a pose.
Marios exhales through his nose. The harvest has acquired a narrator, it seems. Now he will have to decide whether to treat him as an asset, a hazard, or (most exhausting category of all) both.
He announces himself at a volume more suited to a ferry loudspeaker than an olive terrace, a broad sweep of arm and camera encompassing three rows at once as if they were an expectant audience. The lens travels with priestly gravity from trunks to baskets to boots, then comes to rest on the nearest ladder.
“Right,” he declares, as though concluding a board meeting. “Who will show me your most photogenic ladder? The soul of the harvest is always in the climb.”
It is such an extravagantly foolish sentence that several pickers pause mid‑reach. One of the teenagers snorts; an older man crosses himself, perhaps on behalf of the soul in question. Lazaros takes this as assent. Of course he does.
Within minutes he has charmed a serviceable ladder and a mildly alarmed picker into collaboration. He scrambles up the rungs with an ease that suggests long acquaintance with questionable safety standards, bracing one palm against the trunk, the other steadying the camera.
“Name?” he asks, breathless but intent.
The man mutters it. Lazaros mishears, winces theatrically, and asks again, slower, then a third time, until he has the consonants precise. He repeats it once more, carefully, for the benefit of an invisible future audience.
“If I get you wrong,” he tells the mic, “the olives will never forgive me. And my mother will have my head.”
To Marios’ eye, he stitches himself into the fabric of the day with indecent speed. The older hands shake their heads and christen him a human drone (buzzing, hovering, always hunting the next angle) yet even they cannot quite keep their mouths from twitching when he replays a slow‑motion shower of olives on his little screen. The younger cousins adopt him as a shared project, flanking him like overexcited tour guides, pointing out secret footpaths, daring him toward the steepest terraces, coaching him through the local hierarchy of insults and which ones will require heroic censoring in the edit. By the time Sofia presses a plate of still‑warm tiropita into his hand, at least three aunts are referring to him, proprietorially, as “our Lazaros.”
Nerina appears in contrast like a brushstroke added after the scene is already sketched in: she steps out of the taxi with a single wheeled suitcase and a portfolio tube, introduced at the farmhouse door as “the illustrator” in the same tone one might use for “the electrician” or “the notary,” important but not yet woven into any story, her quiet “kaliméra” swallowed almost immediately by the day’s machinery.
Her room is cool and whitewashed, at the back of the house where the walls keep secrets. A folding table is found for her near the old stone mill, where the air smells of dust, olive pulp and old machinery oil. As she follows Sofia through the courtyard, every aunt and great‑uncle performs the traditional silent audit: ring finger (bare), shoes (sensible, foreign‑looking but not aggressively so), accent (Athens? Somewhere educated, at any rate), hemline (acceptable), posture (no immediate sign of scandal). Each verdict clicks invisibly into place: harmless enough to be left with paper, pens and the family’s most photogenic machinery.
By midday, her open sketchbook is both shield and passport. When she looks down, she is nobody in particular; when she looks up with the book in her hands, people come to meet themselves. Pickers linger on their way past the press, called by the scrape of pen: they watch rough hands, bent backs, a favourite cap or a crooked ladder materialise in ink, softened by her careful line into something almost dignified. The more superstitious cross themselves and laugh, “Don’t forget to make me thinner, korítsi mou, eh?”, while the shyest seasonal girl only dares approach once she has seen, from a distance, that Nerina has drawn the precise tilt of her head and the stubborn set of her shoulders without mockery. One of the uncles mutters that capturing faces is bad luck; another, studying his own profile, decides instead it is proof he still has hair. Somewhere between these opinions, she is quietly plotted onto the estate’s unspoken map of who belongs where: not quite family, not quite tourist, but a useful kind of in‑between.
From the bottling room’s small window, he watches crates arrive like an equation that never balances: kilos in, litres out, cost per bottle, margin per order. The men on the forklift see only weight and direction; Marios sees numbers marching in columns, lining up to accuse him. To everyone else, the clank of glass and hiss of the filling line is background noise; to Marios, each sound is a tick of an invisible metronome counting down to the festival deadline and the bank’s patience.
The first time he heard the new stainless‑steel filler run, he had felt almost proud. Now the steady ch‑ch‑ch of the pistons reads in his chest like an irregular heartbeat. Each pause in the mechanism is not a simple air bubble; it is an imagined machinery breakdown, a hypothetical lost day of production, a phone call to the service technician he cannot quite afford. The labels spooling neatly onto each bottle ought to soothe him. Their design already outdated in his mind, their slightly faded olive branches a reminder of the rebranding he has not yet commissioned and the invoices he has not yet paid.
He notes the small waste, three bottles underfilled, one cap slightly skewed, as if it were a personal moral failing. A smear of oil on the floor becomes a lawsuit waiting to happen the moment a buyer in loafers sets foot in the facility. He rearranges the clogged corner of cardboard offcuts and shrink‑wrap with an irritation that is mostly fear disguised as tidiness.
When a seasonal worker laughs too loudly near the conveyor, he wants to ask them if they have calculated, as he has at three in the morning, how many full pallets must leave this room before the bank manager’s tone moves from “understanding” to “concerned”. Instead, he checks the pressure gauge, adjusts a lever half a millimetre, and pretends he is merely ensuring quality.
When he finally escapes to the rough wooden table beneath the plane tree, ledger open and pen in hand, the shade feels less like refuge and more like a temporary command post. The fountain burbles decoratively for tourists who are not here, the cicadas drone, and opposite him the chair where his grandfather once sat remains stubbornly, accusingly empty.
He flips between columns, fuel, wages, packaging, overdue invoices, mentally shifting euros from one deficit to another with the mild sadism of a field surgeon deciding which limb to amputate to save the patient. In the margin, he has written “maintenance?” three times and underlined it, as if punctuation might conjure cash. The grove’s workers become pieces on a board in his head: move Giorgos from lower terraces to the press on Thursday; ask Sofia, if she isn’t already doing three jobs, to supervise the tasting table; stretch Manolis’ hours without calling it that on the payslip.
Once, chess with his grandfather had ended in olives, bread and a hand on his shoulder. Now there is no one across from him, only the soft, polite ring of his phone, announcing another “reminder” from the bank with the regularity of a metronome ticking towards some invisible checkmate.
In his planner, the festival appears as a line item (“post‑harvest event / buyers + press”) bracketed neatly between “final lab results” and “deep clean of press floor.” The village, however, insists on calling it “the big night,” as if it were a wedding or a coronation, loading it with meanings he refuses to unpack. When Sofia waves her notebook and speaks of seating charts, fairy lights and “atmosphere”, the uncles counter with toasts, priests and “doing it properly this year”, and even the seasonal workers speculate cheerfully about who will arrive on whose arm. Marios fields it all in quantities and schedules, replying with headcounts, delivery times and contingency plans, never with names, romances or the possibility of surprise.
Still, the vacant space to his right at the long outdoor table presses on his attention each time he drafts the festival dinner plan: chairs allotted to importers, local officials, possible partners, Sofia sensibly near the musicians, and, beside his own name, an entry the software politely suggests as “+1”. He deletes it, redraws, renames it “Reserved”, then finally leaves it stubbornly blank. It irritates him that the programme assumes pairing, assumes symmetry, as if an algorithm in some office in Athens has decided that a man who arrived without a date must be an error in need of correction rather than the person footing the bill.
He tells himself this is efficient, even strategic, no distractions, no village speculation about a girlfriend to complicate negotiations, but the lie frays a little each evening when he passes couples sharing cigarettes at the edge of the courtyard or hears laughter drifting from the kitchen, intimate and untranslatable. By the time he approves another online payment and shuts the laptop with more force than necessary, his conclusion is always the same: the festival is for contracts, not for hearts; the only proof that matters will be the numbers he can present to the family when the last buyer leaves and the lanterns burn down to their wires.
Marios moves through this web of wants like a field marshal dodging landmines. Each new enthusiasm is another potential explosion: investors who hear “heritage” and mean “rebranding opportunity”, villagers who hear “festival” and mean “public engagement announcement”, YouTubers who hear “authentic” and mean “free content”. Lazaros, with his camera and his charm and his promises of “exposure”, is merely the most visible of the hazards.
He grants the vlogger access as if issuing a restricted licence rather than a welcome: filming windows pencilled into the harvest schedule in tight blocks, coloured a warning orange. Mornings in the lower terraces, when the light is good and tempers not yet frayed. Late afternoons near the old stone mill, provided no one is covered in oil or swearing at the de‑leafing machine. No close‑ups of exhausted workers wiping sweat on their sleeves, no slow pans over leaking hoses or the temperamental press, and under no circumstances any footage of his uncles arguing by the forklift.
“You’re strangling the story, re,” Lazaros complains mildly, the camera strap looped round his wrist like a pet he’s forbidden to set down. “People like to see the cracks. That’s where the light comes in.”
“They’ll see enough light,” Marios replies, ticking off another task on his clipboard. “Sunrise, sunset, olive oil in bottles. Very poetic. Cracks we repair before you arrive.”
The compromise, such as it is, rests on arithmetic. A proper marketing firm in Athens would charge more than the grove can spare this year; Lazaros charges nothing except inconvenience and the right angle. If a few well‑edited shots of silver‑green canopies and calloused hands pouring liquid gold into stainless steel tanks persuade an importer in London or Berlin that the Theodorakis label is “story‑rich”, then the estate will have bought an advertising campaign with time instead of cash.
He tells himself that is why he allows the man to roam at all: because a wandering lens is cheaper than a glossy brochure, and because pixels, unlike people, can be reviewed before anyone signs.
Nerina, sketchbook in hand, becomes expert in the art of near‑invisibility. She learns the estate’s rhythms the way she learns the curve of an olive branch: by quiet repetition. Mornings find her in the press room when the light knifes in at an angle that flatters steel and stone alike and, more usefully, when Marios is too preoccupied with flow rates and acidity levels to do more than grunt in her direction. Questions, like spare parts, are luxuries he cannot afford before noon.
At midday she migrates to the kitchen table, a supposedly neutral zone which Sofia patrols like a benevolent general. There, under cover of clattering pans and rapid‑fire village gossip, Nerina can nod and smile and let Sofia’s running commentary deflect any conversational probes that begin with “And you, my girl…?”. Her pencil moves, her answers do not.
She is always gone a breath too soon whenever an uncle leans back and clears his throat with the tell‑tale prelude to “So, where is your family from, κορίτσι μου?”. By the time the question lands, only the damp ring of her coffee cup and a half‑finished sketch of an olive leaf remain to be interrogated.
The uncles orbit the work like minor warlords, hands clasped behind their backs, issuing commentary that begins in nostalgia and ends in arithmetic. “In your grandfather’s day we did it with half the machinery,” they say, while standing squarely in the shade, eyes sharp on pallet counts and half‑murmured estimates of what “a proper online platform” might pay for exclusivity. They spit the words “sell out” like an olive pit, always with a warning glance towards the road, as if an investor might materialise at the sight of weakness, yet in the next breath they urge Marios to push the trees harder, to squeeze another percentage point from olives already dulled by drought, and dismiss any proposal that requires spending before it yields.
Sofia watches all this with mounting impatience, her tone seesawing between banter and insurrection. One moment she’s telling Marios he needs a holiday before he starts pruning people; the next she has him pinned at the kitchen table with spreadsheets, hand‑drawn room layouts, farm‑to‑table brunch ideas and Lazaros‑bait “experiences”, insisting that if they don’t author the estate’s story, an Andreas type will.
Around them, even the supposedly neutral spaces take sides: the kafeneio owner quietly nudging Lazaros for hints about what he’s filming and whether “Netflix will see the church,” the taverna offering discreet discounts if the estate will funnel future tourists their way, the baker testing harvest‑themed pastries “for influencers.” The square’s gossip pipeline already rehearses two parallel endings to the festival. One where Marios signs a glittering export deal, and one where a romantic catastrophe provides consolation entertainment, complete with projected pairings and imagined arguments, should the contracts fail to materialise.
By midweek, the festival’s logistics have become the village’s favourite spectator sport, a serial drama in which the plot is rearranged hourly and no one admits to being the author. Sofia cannot cross the square for onions without being intercepted mid‑step by at least three aunties, who materialise like a heavily perfumed committee of inquiry.
“Karí mou, you cannot put the Germans next to the Athenians,” one insists, brandishing a shopping list as if it were the seating plan itself. “They complain differently; it will echo.”
“And which foreigner gets the good chairs?” another demands. “The cushioned ones. We must not look cheap on the internet.” The word “internet” is pronounced as if it were both a disease and a sacrament.
Sofia, juggling her basket and her temper, offers a tight smile. “The good chairs go to whoever helps stack them after, Theía.”
“So the English woman will stand,” comes the brisk verdict, to nods all round.
Across the square, Lazaros discovers that even his technology is not exempt from community oversight. Each attempt to launch his drone is politely “supervised” by a semicircle of pensioners, hands folded on walking sticks, who offer solemn, deeply considered advice on the most photogenic angles of the bell tower.
“From above, eh?” one says, squinting at the tablet screen. “But not too much above. We don’t want God seeing the roof of the taverna; he will know we haven’t painted.”
“Make sure you show the church first,” another adds. “Then the sea. Then, if there is time, the people.”
Lazaros, who had planned an earnest segment about regenerative agriculture, nods gravely and adjusts his shot list to include an extra slow pan over the plane tree, aware that any misstep here will not only offend the algorithm but, worse, the men who feed it with commentary over coffee.
Nerina, meanwhile, slips into the bakery believing, perhaps naively, that flour and sugar might still be neutral territory. She emerges disabused. A single purchase of koulouria becomes the occasion for a full character assessment.
“So, our mysterious artist from Athens,” the baker’s wife says, weighing out sesame rings with exaggerated care. “You like it here? Not too quiet for… creative people?” The pause before “creative” contains entire scandals, both hypothetical and remembered.
Nerina blinks. “I’m not that mysterious,” she attempts, instantly aware that this is precisely what a mysterious person would say.
“Of course, of course.” The woman nods, eyes sharpening with satisfaction at having drawn a defensive answer. “Still, it is good for the estate, eh? To have someone making it beautiful. You stay long?”
There is a rustle from the queue behind her: the unmistakable lean‑in of ears. Nerina feels heat rise in her cheeks, as much from the open oven as from the sudden realisation that her carefully constructed smallness has been misfiled as intrigue.
“I… it depends on the work,” she replies, aiming for casual and landing somewhere closer to cryptic.
“Work, naturally,” the baker’s wife says, already slotting this into some internal ledger of motives. “We must let you focus. Only, if you need more… inspiration, my cousin’s son does very good tattoos.”
By the time Nerina escapes with her paper bag, the label “mysterious artist from Athens” has lodged firmly in the square’s vocabulary, acquiring embellishments with every retelling. By evening it will include a tragic ex‑lover, a secret exhibition, and, inevitably, an opinion on whether she prefers serious men who work too much or charming ones who film everything.
Informal committees spring up without anyone admitting they have enrolled. At one table in the kafeneio, a rolling summit of retired olive growers and amateur economists tracks rumoured wholesale prices with the gravity of a central bank, debating in low, scandalised tones whether Marios will “finally stop being proud and take serious money,” as if pride were a weather pattern he could simply switch off. Another table devotes itself entirely to the question of Andreas (the “shipping prince” glimpsed in town in suspiciously clean shoes) and whether his presence signals salvation, disaster, or, most thrillingly, both in sequence.
A third, presided over by an auntie with a biro and a devotional notebook, keeps a handwritten chart of who was seen talking to whom at the estate gates, arrows and underlinings turning chance conversations into draft engagements, business conspiracies, or, in extreme cases, political statements. Each scrap of observation travels faster than the delivery van, refined and re‑seasoned at every stop, accumulating into a running commentary that everyone swears they are ignoring, right up until they quote it verbatim, source footnoted as “people say.”
Inside this swirl of opinions, the estate’s daily rhythm accelerates: crates are stacked higher, temporary lights tested and retested on the Harvest Terrace, and Sofia drafts menu options with one eye on the pantry and the other on the weather forecast. Marios, notebook in hand, walks irrigation lines and power cables with the same stern focus he once reserved for exam timetables, calculating how many samples, how many chairs, how many potential futures can be fit into one evening without the whole thing collapsing. It is, he reflects dryly, rather like arranging a wedding without a bride.
Nerina shadows him at the edges, sketchbook tucked close, trying to decide which lines to ink. The lines of the trees, or the worry etched into his jaw, that small muscle jumping each time he redraws a number. When he pauses to check a fuse box, she pretends to be studying the stonework, but her pencil betrays her, tracing the angle of his shoulders as if the tension there were another branch in need of pruning.
Even the olive trees become unwilling co‑conspirators in the village narrative. When a sudden gust rattles their silver leaves during an evening test of the sound system, an onlooker in the square claims the grove itself is “whispering a warning about investors.” By the time the story reaches the mini‑market, it has swollen into a full prophecy involving international supermarkets, broken hearts, and a DJ whose music will personally offend Saint Demetrios. Sofia laughs it off in front of the workers, “If the trees start requesting laïká, we’re finished”, but later, alone in the pantry with her phone, she quietly adjusts the playlist anyway, as if not tempting fate might shave off one potential disaster in an already crowded field.
By the time the first festival flyers appear in shop windows, Agios Dimitrios has already drafted three versions of how the story will end: a triumphant export contract and tasteful photo spread, a last-minute romantic twist that keeps Marios rooted in the grove, or a spectacular double failure that will at least give everyone something to analyse all winter. Sub‑variations abound, Sofia installed as domestic goddess, Lazaros exposed as heartbreaker, Nerina revealed as something more than “the quiet girl with the pens”, but all agree on one point: whatever happens, it will not be boring. It’s into this charged, half‑imagined future that the gleam of Andreas’s SUV and the name “Katerina Kyriakidis” will shortly be inserted, like fresh tinder into a fire that was already burning hot.
The subject line blurred, sharpened, blurred again as though his eyes refused to admit the letters into reality. K. Kyriakidis. As if there might be another. As if the polite, chirpy body of the email (We’re thrilled to confirm attendance, delighted to explore synergies, looking forward to experiencing your family’s heritage up close) were not, in fact, a hand reaching back from a life he had watched get on a bus to Athens and never return.
He read it twice, then a third time, as if repetition might reveal a prank. The logo at the bottom, sleek, minimal, expensive, sat like a fingerprint on his screen. Her company. Her new self, neatly vectorised. At the very end, in smaller font, the confirmation of two attendees: Katerina Kyriakidis and fiancé.
The word might as well have been written in petrol.
He became aware of the press’s whine next door, a thin mechanical complaint that had started the moment he’d switched the machine on that morning and never quite settled. Like the estate itself: running, but not smoothly. His thumb hovered over the phone, tempted to forward the email to his uncle with a bland note, Potential buyer, confirm guest room?, as if his heart were not pounding hard enough to rattle his ribs.
Instead he set the device face down on the table, as though the message might seep back into it and disappear.
The light on the veranda was too bright, throwing the whitewashed wall opposite into glare. Heat pressed against his neck, dampening the collar of his shirt. He rolled his shoulders, trying to shake off the old, stupid rush of images: Katerina in his kitchen in Athens, bare feet on cold tiles; Katerina at the bus station, jaw set, suitcase handle white-knuckled; Katerina not coming back even for Christmas.
He had told himself, for months now, that this was all settled. That he could talk about her with the detached amusement of a man commenting on a bad investment made in his twenties. That the ache which had followed him back to the grove, heavy as the boxes he’d hauled from the moving van, was no longer waiting in the corners of his days.
Apparently, no one had informed his nervous system.
As if conjured by the thought of investments, the sharp cough of an engine cut across the yard. An unfamiliar one. Too smooth, too deep. Not the stuttering pickup of a supplier or the elderly Panda from the village. The sound rolled up the stone walls, settled under his skin. He frowned, instinctively pushing his chair back to stand, but stayed where he was, hand splayed over the silent phone.
Let someone else see who it was. Let the estate, just for once, receive a visitor without him standing at attention like a doorman.
In the next room a chair scraped; muffled voices rose, then lowered again with that curious, elongated hush that meant: something worth watching. The engine idled, then cut; the sudden absence of it made the cicadas roar impossibly loud. The olive press whined on, ignoring all human drama.
On the veranda’s threshold, the strip of shade wavered, broken by Sofia’s silhouette and the balancing act of her tray.
He did not at first connect the fresh grind of tyres with anything to do with him. The sound threaded itself through the cicadas and the thin mechanical whine of the press, just another demand on a day already overfull. It became real only when Sofia, halfway through the doorway with a tray of tiny coffees and a plate of koulourakia balanced on her hip, stopped so abruptly a spoon chimed against porcelain.
Her gaze slipped past him to the courtyard. “Παναγία μου,” she breathed, not quite under her breath. The sleek black bonnet nosed into view, paintwork so polished it threw back a warped fragment of the farmhouse wall. An SUV, city-plated, tyres chewing the familiar gravel into unfamiliar patterns.
Marios’s jaw tightened before he could school it; he felt rather than saw Sofia’s eyes flick to the movement, filing it away. Behind her, two seasonal workers had abandoned the bottling line to lean in the side-door, elbows braced, grins already sharpening.
“Λένε πως είναι γιος εφοπλιστή,” one murmured, loud enough for the echo. “Ήρθε, επιτέλους.”
The words skated across the yard, the promise of spectacle already being tallied against the week’s gossip shortages. Marios flattened his palm more firmly over the dark screen of his phone, the email beneath it burning like contraband.
The SUV door opened with a soft, expensive thunk, the sort of sound that suggested its manufacturer believed in reassuring the rich at an acoustic level. A long leg in immaculate chinos emerged, followed by the rest of him: Andreas Vlahos unfolding himself from the driver’s seat like a man alighting at a boutique resort rather than a working farm. He paused just long enough to flick an invisible speck of dust from his leather loafer, gaze travelling up the stone façade, across the verandas, out to the terraces of olives with a look that mixed admiration with arithmetic.
By the time his eyes found Marios, the assessing glint had been replaced by a smile polished for press photos. He strode forward, hand already extended. “Andreas,” he said, first name only, as if introductions came with a non‑disclosure agreement, “Vlahos. We’ve exchanged a few emails, I think. Your family’s estate is even more impressive in person. Really: extraordinary asset.”
Marios slid the phone into his back pocket, Katerina’s name pressed literally against his spine, and stepped forward to meet the offered hand. The grip that closed around his was warm, firm, calibrated to suggest easy superiority. He returned it with just enough pressure to refuse the role of grateful supplicant. Over Andreas’s shoulder, Sofia’s brows lifted: You? He gave her the barest nod, Later, before the watching yard swallowed them.
On the veranda, Nerina’s sketchbook lay open, its half‑finished line of olive branches forgotten as the scene below arranged itself with the inevitability of composition: the polished intruder in immaculate linen, the heir with dust on his boots and his shoulders braced, Sofia frozen mid‑step. As the SUV door’s cushioned thunk settled, she knew the quiet, useful anonymity she had bargained on had just been edited out of the frame.
Andreas opened the folio with a little flourish that suggested he fully expected applause. The long wooden table, usually home to invoices, cracked mugs, and his uncle’s newspaper, became at once a boardroom: smooth leather, a silver pen, card stock that had never known dust. He slid the first glossy sheet between the coffee cups and the bowl of figs Sofia had dumped there on her way past, arranging it so that the sunlight fell just so on the image.
“Picture this,” he said, voice slipping into a practiced cadence, and tapped the rendering with the back of his pen. On the page, the upper terraces were threaded with fairy lights and glass lanterns; yoga mats unrolled in precise, pastel rows between trees that had outlived empires. “A sanctuary for high‑end guests who want authenticity: with proper linens and good Wi‑Fi, of course. People are desperate for roots, you know. Roots, but with turn‑down service.”
Marios swallowed a mouthful of coffee that had gone cold without his noticing. Behind Andreas’s head, through the open window, the same terraces lay in their usual scruffy dignity: nets bundled at the base of trunks, a tractor parked skew‑whiff, a stray bucket forgotten in the grass. The fairy lights belonged, in his mind, to name‑days and harvest feasts, not to something one booked with a wellness code.
Sofia, leaning back in her chair with her arms folded, reached without looking and plucked a fig from the bowl Andreas had pushed aside. Her eyebrow twitched as she studied the image. “And the olives?” she said lightly. “Do they get yoga as well, or just the guests?”
Andreas smiled as if indulging a charming child. “The olives,” he said, “become part of the story. People don’t just want to buy oil anymore; they want to buy a feeling. A life. This”, his pen tapped again, harder now, “is how we package what you already have.”
He moved briskly through mock itineraries and revenue projections, the pen in his hand conducting neat circles around phrases like “sunrise vinyasa among the heritage trees,” “chef‑hosted olive oil pairings,” and “curated weekends for select influencers.” Each tidy bullet point slotted some portion of Marios’s life into a time‑boxed “experience”: arrival cocktail under the plane tree, guided walk through “your ancestral terraces,” optional upgrade to a private sommelier session in what Andreas had the nerve to label “the Old Press Lounge.”
With every turn of the page, another polished fantasy overlaid itself on the slopes outside the window. The nets became “textural elements”; the muddy tractor track, a “rustic pathway”; the workers sweating under the noon sun, reduced to a line item called “local colour and storytelling.” By the third package tier, “Immersive Heritage Weekend, price on request”, the grove on paper resembled a lifestyle catalogue more than the stubborn, sometimes unprofitable land Marios had grown up coaxing into yield. The numbers glittered in the margins; the roots beneath them did not.
Andreas flicked to the next sheet with a little snap of card on wood. A single image dominated it: a sleek monogram in inky green, “VLAHOS x Theodorakis” swept across the centre in looping script. The V was a flourish the size of a tractor tyre; the rest of Andreas’s name followed generously, while “Theodorakis” appeared in a chastened, well‑behaved line beneath, the typographical equivalent of an obedient younger cousin.
“Your story,” Andreas said, as if unveiling a philanthropic foundation rather than a logo, “amplified by my reach.”
He sounded pleased with the symmetry; Marios’s molars clicked together. The imbalance on the page was small, almost tasteful, but it pressed on an old bruise: how easily a family name could be shifted into the fine print.
Andreas’s figures marched past in tidy columns: advance capital to quiet the bank manager, guaranteed occupancy from his network of tastemakers, a campaign that, on paper, might double their direct sales in twelve months. For a few treacherous seconds Marios let the vision run. Overdue invoices dissolving, the press humming after midnight without him flinching at the meter, his uncles dozing instead of muttering over which supplier to appease and which cousin’s wages could safely be delayed.
Then, as Andreas talks about “aligning the estate’s narrative with the Vlahos vision,” the pages blur into something sharper and uglier in Marios’s mind: strangers laughing through staged sunset shots in trees his grandfather had pruned with arthritic fingers, the Theodorakis name shrinking to a tasteful footnote on bottles that once bore only their crest. What Andreas calls partnership feels, suddenly, like absorption. The offer hardens into a forked path: swift rescue on someone else’s terms, or a stubborn, solitary defence of a threatened independence that might yet drag the grove under with him.
From her place near the shade of the fig tree, Nerina pretended to study a crooked line of empty crates while Andreas’s voice drifted across the courtyard, smooth and assured. The crates listed slightly to one side, stacked in a tower that offended her eye for balance; normally she would already have been rearranging them in her mind, turning the disorder into some pleasing rhythm of lines and negative space. This afternoon, the skewed geometry suited her too well. She kept her gaze pinned to it like a guilty student copying from the blackboard.
The words themselves, “elevated rural experiences,” “immersive storytelling,” “exclusive access”, floated past like overdesigned copy on a lifestyle blog, all gloss and no olive dust. She could almost see them in a tasteful sans‑serif, superimposed over a desaturated photograph of the very courtyard she was standing in. Yet it was not the phrases that made the back of her neck prickle so much as the ease with which he strung them together, the casual fluency of someone for whom other people’s lives were raw material for a campaign.
Every polished term brushed up against an older, sour memory. “Storytelling” used to mean a gallery curator assuring her that the narrative of the collection would “benefit” from a few small adjustments to the credit lines. “Exclusive access” had once come with a non‑disclosure agreement and a promise that her name would appear prominently, until, miraculously, it did not. Back then, she had told herself that the language was ugly, but survivable. She had not understood how fast a phrase could become a verdict.
Now, with Andreas’s baritone folding the estate into the same vocabulary, the courtyard seemed to tilt the way the crates did. Wild thyme, diesel, crushed olive leaves: the familiar scents pressed against something colder and air‑conditioned in her mind. She shifted her weight, letting the heady rural warmth soak through her sandals as if that could anchor her more firmly here and away from any camera, any caption, any tag that might recognise a face she was trying very hard not to own.
When he pivots to “our PR team in Athens” and drops the name of a boutique agency she has only ever seen in the header of emails she tried not to reread, her fingers lock around the sketchbook she has been carrying like a shield. The textured cover bites into her palm.
Behind her lowered lashes, the courtyard dissolves into white walls and echoing heels on polished concrete. She can smell the citrus diffuser in their reception, hear the receptionist’s bright laugh flatten into a professional murmur whenever a scandal was mentioned. There, her portfolio had once been laid out like evidence on a conference table, every page scrutinised, annotated, and, finally, quarantined.
She remembers the exact afternoon when her name slipped from the front of a brochure to the parentheses of a legal dispute, when assistants began lowering their voices as she walked past, when “working with her” turned into a risk rather than an asset.
Now that same machine is being invoked over Marios’s kitchen and stone yard, as if nothing in its history could possibly be dangerous.
“We’d handle logistics, distribution, lifestyle press: bring in the right journalists, influencers, photographers,” Andreas continues, as if he is ordering a coffee rather than summoning, item by item, the apparatus that once dismantled her career. He speaks of “flying people in,” of “controlling the narrative,” with the bland cheerfulness of a man who has never had a narrative turn on him. Each casual reference. A shipping magnate who sponsors gallery openings, a food‑magazine editor who “adores a scandal‑turned‑redemption arc”, a PR fixer who “specialises in reputational turnarounds”: drops like a pebble in her chest, setting off widening rings of remembered emails, clipped phone calls, and headlines that refused to die. Redemption for him is a marketing angle; for her, it was supposed to be disappearance.
She eases farther into the yard’s margin, shifting until a pergola post neatly bisects Andreas’s line of sight and, more crucially, any casually raised phone. In her head, an old, unwelcome muscle memory wakes: sketching escape in concentric circles, Which journalists still file her under “cautionary tale”? Which publicists could recognise her hand in a line drawing? How fast could one tagged image sprint from cheerful festival hashtag to the inbox of the lawyer who once copied her on every veiled threat, every “without prejudice” that sounded like a verdict?
By the time Marios’s voice cuts in Nerina has quietly halved the number of days she can safely stay and doubled the vigilance she’ll need to survive them. She adjusts her hair to shadow more of her face, rehearses refusals to “just one photo,” charts escape routes between kitchen, studio, and trees, and steels herself for the possibility that protecting her second chance here might mean vanishing from it the moment Andreas’s city world presses too close, leaving only unlabelled sketches behind.
On the shaded veranda, Sofia lingers by the doorway, half in, half out, as if the threshold itself might cast a vote on her future. Her phone buzzes again against her palm; her thumbs hover over the screen, not quite committing to a swipe, while Andreas’s polished voice drifts from the sitting room: “brand ambassador,” “VIP tastings,” “urban pop-ups in Kolonaki.” The phrases float out through the open doors like perfume from a department store she can’t quite afford, familiar from job listings she’s bookmarked at midnight, from glossy LinkedIn posts with motivational hashtags, yet faintly ridiculous set against the creak of the old ceiling fan and the faint clatter of Yiayia in the kitchen, muttering at a pot that refuses to come to the boil any faster.
“Urban pop-ups,” she mouths silently, glancing at the scuffed tiles beneath her feet. Out here, “pop-up” means Uncle Thanasis appearing unannounced with a crate of overripe figs and a complaint about property taxes. “Influencer dinner” is her cousins at the taverna arguing about football, influencing only who gets the last sardine.
Inside, there’s a low murmur as a chair scrapes; Marios must have shifted his weight. She can picture his expression without looking: polite, intent, that slight frown-line he gets when someone tries to dress something simple in too many adjectives. Her chest does an odd little twist of solidarity and irritation. He needs these people, she thinks. Then, in the same breath: He deserves better than to be turned into a backdrop for some rich boy’s rebrand.
Her phone shivers again in her hand, insistent. Athens Interview – Final Round, the subject line she refuses to read properly, flashes through her mind like a subtitle. She tilts the device, watching her own reflection blur over the dark screen (loose bun, sun‑brown skin, a faint sheen of olive‑oil kitchen work on her forearm) and wonders, not for the first time, whether the woman in the recruiter’s imagination looks anything like this.
She wakes the screen with a thumb‑swipe, just long enough for the Athens interview reminder to flare up like a small, rectangular conscience, date, time, video link, the recruiter’s name she’s practised saying in a brighter, smoother voice than the one she uses to shout over tractors. Her stomach gives a brief, traitorous swoop. She presses the phone dark again, as if she might also dim the requirement to choose, to become the sort of woman who fits neatly into calendar slots and corporate onboarding sessions instead of harvest schedules and whose-turn-is-it-to-drive-to-the-mill.
From the sitting room, paper whispers over wood; Andreas must be sliding something across the table. Sofia edges nearer to the doorframe, the better to hear.
“Here’s a first draft of the concept,” Andreas is saying, his tone all reassuring gloss. “Of course, we’d refine it together.”
There’s a pause, then the quiet, dangerous flex of Marios at his most controlled. “And in this model,” he asks, “how much decision‑making stays with the estate? Who actually owns the story you’re selling? And the profit split: how does that work in practice?”
Sofia feels her shoulders straighten involuntarily, a pulse of fierce, almost familial pride. This, she thinks, is why she stays up past midnight doing spreadsheets he never asked for and why she bites her tongue when his uncles grumble about “new ideas.” He is asking the questions the estate needs him to ask.
But pride is twinned, as always here, with a thin thread of apprehension. For every calm, precise query Marios voices, she can hear three unspoken battlegrounds: him versus his uncles, him versus Andreas’s velvet‑glove clauses, him versus the creeping fear that saying no to money now might mean no estate later. Her own heart seems to perch between rooms, half with him at the table, half with the unread email in her hand, equally at stake in answers neither of them has yet given.
The longer Andreas speaks (“influencer packages,” “chef collaborations,” “exclusive harvest retreats for executives”) the more her inner choice-line hardens, as if someone is drawing it in ink instead of pencil. On one side: Athens, brushed steel lifts and curated lobbies, HR onboarding slides about “company culture,” a badge with her name in a clean sans‑serif font, salary arriving on the same day each month regardless of weather, yield, or whose tractor has broken. On the other: this veranda, the grove’s dust patterned up her calves, Yiayia’s voice floating from the kitchen, and the exhausting, unbilled work of persuading uncles that change can smell like oregano and engine oil, not designer candles; that modernising needn’t mean handing their story to a stranger with a logo.
From her post at the doorway she sees Marios rub the bridge of his nose as Andreas neatly inks “Theodorakis by Vlahos” at the top of a pad, as if ownership could be assigned with a flourish. In her mind she slides into the empty chair (Calm down, we can do this another way) and the counter‑proposal blooms uninvited: weekend workshops that smell of crushed oregano and diesel, cooking classes with stubborn village grandmothers who refuse to measure salt, sunset tastings on the Harvest Terrace with mismatched glasses and bees in the thyme. All of it vivid, coherent: and nowhere but in her head. The distance between her imagination and that blank paper makes her throat tighten with a very unglamorous sort of panic.
A gust of wind lifts the curtain and carries in the smell of olives and sea salt, wrapping around her like a reminder and a warning both. The grove sharpens into two overlapping pictures: a launchpad she could help turn resilient and quietly magnificent, and an anchor that might keep her orbiting the same square in Agios Dimitrios while former classmates post promotions and airport lounges. Andreas’s laughter overlaps with Marios’s measured replies; Sofia pockets her phone, no closer to choosing, but with the new, unnerving certainty that whichever way she jumps will redraw not only her own life, but the estate’s story. And possibly her place in his.
In the courtyard, as Andreas’s confident voice carries over the clink of coffee cups, Marios stands half‑turned toward the house, nodding at figures he barely hears. Behind his polite smile, columns of numbers march in quiet formation: projected yields, last season’s shortfall, the line in the bank statement that made his stomach lurch last week. He calculates how far he can let Andreas talk without promising anything, which uncle he can count on not to be dazzled by the phrase “premium brand showcase,” how to phrase “no” in a way that does not quite sound like no at all.
“…cross‑promotional content with the resort on Spetses,” Andreas is saying, as if the estate has already agreed to become a footnote in some glossy brochure. Marios hums, noncommittal, eyes on the pattern of tyre tracks in the gravel rather than the pad where “Theodorakis by Vlahos” gleams in ink.
He rehearses, silently, the alternatives he might offer: a trial season, a limited collaboration, anything that would give them breathing space without signing away the grove’s name. Can he ask for time to “consult the family” without sounding small‑time? Which phrase sounds less desperate. Yiayia’s muttered verdict on “rich boys with soft hands” hovers at the back of his mind like a Greek chorus.
Uncle Nikos stands near the shade of the veranda, arms folded, expression somewhere between wary and tempted. If Nikos wavers, the others will follow, and Marios will be the one accused of “blocking progress” if he pushes too hard. If he doesn’t push at all, the grove becomes a set piece in someone else’s story.
And all the while, he notes the way Andreas’s gaze flicks, now and then, toward the house. Toward the unseen festival, the unpicked olives, the invisible price of every easy promise.
At the edge of the gravel, Sofia props one shoulder against the fig tree, the bark pressing into her back, phone cool in her palm, screen dark. Andreas’s voice rolls across the courtyard in polished waves (“infinity pool,” “wellness retreat,” “exclusive experiences”) as if he were ordering a set menu rather than rearranging someone’s inheritance.
In her head, a different brochure writes itself.
Not an infinity pool, but the old stone terrace scrubbed clean, mismatched chairs borrowed from half the village. Long tables dressed with linen that’s seen more Easters than influencers, platters of roast lamb and horta, Yiayia complaining loudly about “tourists who don’t eat fat” while they lick their fingers. Dawn harvests where guests are given baskets and bad instructions, where their backs ache just enough to understand the price of a tin of oil. Twelve people, maximum. Fifteen if she really likes them.
Afternoons in the press room, the air thick with fruit and metal and effort; Saturday mornings where old men teach pruning, not mindfulness. If she can turn these scraps into a plan with bullet points and projected revenue instead of daydreams, perhaps she can walk back into that courtyard, set it on the table between “Theodorakis by Vlahos” and Marios’s tired eyes, and prove that “small” is not the same as “stupid.”
By the bottling room door, Nerina learns the exact angle of the lintel that will conceal her whenever Lazaros lifts his camera. Each time his lens swings her way she is already half‑turned, a blur behind a crate, a hand setting down a bottle and vanishing. When he jokes, “You, with the good handwriting, come closer, I need authenticity”, she laughs, the agreeable background character, and lets Sofia or a cousin drift into focus instead.
In her mind, she begins redrafting herself into absence: labels signed only with the estate’s crest, no initials curling in a corner; no tagged posts, no smiling group shots. If the grove is to step onto a larger stage, it will do so while she lingers firmly in the wings.
Andreas, vaguely aware of people slipping just out of range, only brightens his smile and lengthens his stride. He sketches, with a few careless flourishes, a full rebrand: new labels (“heritage meets haute”), a launch party in Athens with chefs and influencers, a lifestyle magazine that “owes him a favour.” Each glittering offer lands on Marios like another thread tightening round the grove, even as a murmur ripples through the younger pickers about “real salaries” and “proper resort contracts” once the Vlahos magic touches this tired hillside.
By late afternoon, invisible frontiers have been quietly surveyed. Marios has annexed the olive‑press office (door half‑shut, spreadsheets and old ledgers marshalled like troops) as his private war room. Sofia, outwardly joking with the pickers, is already planting her flag on the terrace and village square, the places where any future “experience” must pass inspection by Yiayia, the priest, and the gossiping aunties.
Nerina, moving between bottling room and storeroom, discovers that anonymity itself can be territory: she maps vantage points, shadows and doorframes that keep her just beyond Lazaros’s lens and Andreas’s speculative gaze. Out in the courtyard, Andreas walks its perimeter with the practised air of a man pricing vistas, not histories. None of them names what they are defending, but beneath the clatter of plates and the smooth slide of negotiations, something wordless settles. That the festival will not simply display olives and custom; it will adjudicate whose vision of the estate, and of themselves, is to take root and which must quietly wither.
By the time the sun slips behind the upper terraces, tension has seeped into every corner of the farmhouse like damp. In the kitchen, two of Marios’s uncles lean over the oil‑stained table, one jabbing a nicotine‑stained finger at Andreas’s glossy prospectus, the other slapping it away as if it were a persistent fly.
“We take the money, we breathe,” says Uncle Petros, breath wheezing a little with the effort of conviction. “No more begging the bank manager, no more praying to the weather.”
“We hang his name over our gate, we lose our father’s blood,” snaps Uncle Giannis. His palm comes down on the paper with a flat smack. Andreas’s mock‑up logo (sleek, foreign, mercifully inanimate) buckles under his hand. “We are not a nightclub to be ‘rebranded’.”
From the sink, Marios says nothing. He has been pretending to scrub the same pan for so long the metal has begun to squeak in protest. The pan is clean; his thoughts are not. Every raised voice tightens a cable from his neck to the base of his skull. He keeps his back turned, as if the soapy water might shield him.
“Look,” Petros persists, stabbing again at the prospectus. “Infinity pool, spa, those yoga women. “They drink coloured water and call it health.”
“We are drowning, re malaka,” Petros hisses. “Let the rich boy throw us a rope.”
Marios’s grip slips; the pan clatters against the sink. The uncles swivel toward him together, brothers at war suddenly united by the hope of an arbiter.
“Well?” Petros demands. “You are the manager. You like numbers. Do the numbers say we can refuse this?”
The soap suds slide down Marios’s forearms, cooling on his skin. In his mind the grove rearranges itself into columns and rows: last year’s yield, the bank’s terse emails, the extra hands they cannot afford but will need if the harvest is good. Over it all, a vision unspools, uninvited: a sleek metal sign at the road, chrome catching the sun: VLAHOS HERITAGE EXPERIENCE, in English first, Greek an afterthought beneath.
He swallows. If he closes his eyes, he can almost see his grandfather’s reaction: a slow, disbelieving blink, the way his fingers used to worry at his komboloi when offended by the evening news.
“The numbers say,” Marios replies at last, rinsing the pan as if he might rinse the answer with it, “that we can’t afford mistakes.”
“Exactly,” Petros crows.
“Exactly,” echoes Giannis, with an entirely different meaning.
“And marrying the ship‑owner’s son is not a mistake?” Giannis adds. “Tomorrow that girl from Athens arrives with her fiancé and his millions. Today this one”, a jerk of his chin towards the courtyard, where Andreas’s car had settled like a visiting spaceship, “waves papers in our faces. Since when do we let strangers decide our land?”
Strangers. The word lands heavier than Marios expects. Once, Katerina had not been a stranger at all. He feels his thumb drift, of its own accord, to the faint pale groove where a ring never sat. An old habit of a future that did not happen.
“There is no decision tonight,” he says, more sharply than he intends. The uncles fall back a fraction, surprised into silence. “We listen. We think. We host the festival. Then we decide.”
He places the pan on the rack with exaggerated care, as if demonstrating that some things can be put in order. Behind him, the prospectus lies on the table, glossy pages winking up at the low kitchen light like a promise or a threat, depending on where one stands.
Out in the courtyard, Sofia hears the argument drift through the open windows in uneven gusts as she organizes crates for the festival stalls. She makes sure each wooden box lands with a decisive thud on the trestle tables, deliberately loud so the workers see her moving, in charge, not rattled like the plates inside. Seasonal pickers cluster by the trucks, cigarette smoke and speculation curling together as they trade half‑heard “facts” about Andreas’s offer.
“Eh, he’ll put an infinity pool right there, above the lower terrace,” one insists, pointing his cigarette toward the olives.
“Don’t be stupid,” another laughs. “Two pools. One for normal people, one for the Instagram ones.”
Someone claims Andreas will fly in influencers by helicopter “so they don’t get dust on their shoes.” Laughter ripples, edged with something like hope.
When a younger picker jokes that soon they’ll all have uniforms with Andreas’s initials on their chests, Sofia’s smile snaps.
“This isn’t some Mykonos beach bar,” she says, sharper than she means to.
The group falls briefly silent, the joke souring in the dust between them. A crate slips in her hands; she steadies it, then adds, more levelly, “Until anything is signed, it’s still our grove. Remember that, at least until Saturday.”
By four o’clock the bakery has turned into a small‑scale news agency with worse fact‑checking and better pastries. Over trays of warm koulouria and the hiss of the coffee machine, the baker’s wife recounts (for the third, improved time) that “the famous ex, now practically a celebrity in Athens,” is returning to bless the festival, “like those stars who support their poor villages on TV.”
By the time the tale completes its lazy orbit of the square, Katerina is arriving by private helicopter with a TV crew, her fiancé recast as a benevolent prince of start‑ups. Their engagement becomes a fairy‑tale merger of tech money and olive roots. The printed festival flyer taped to the window turns into an unofficial noticeboard, every passer‑by pinning on another theory in flour‑dusted, conspiratorial murmurs.
Back at the estate, small tells begin to betray what words won’t. Crossing the courtyard with a crate on his shoulder, Marios pauses when someone mentions Katerina’s name; his thumb automatically circles the pale groove at the base of his ring finger where nothing has ever rested, as if reassuring himself there’s still no mark, still no promise broken in public. On the veranda, a farmhand’s phone flash pops as he snaps a casual photo of the bustle for his stories; Nerina, passing behind, startles so sharply she smears a line of ink across her sketchpad. She laughs it off but her grip on the pen tightens, knuckles blanching, as she angles herself away from any future lenses, calculating sight‑lines with the precision of someone who cannot afford to be recognisable.
Later, rinsing dust from crates at the outdoor sink, they run through to‑do lists until an older cousin, tired of tension, mutters about “finally cashing in, selling everything to the ship‑owner’s son.” The chuckle dies halfway. For Sofia (already raw from hearing about “big chances” and “people who know better than us”) it lands like a slap.
“We’re not for sale,” she says, too fast, too hard.
The clatter of water on metal swallows the aftershock. Someone coughs, pretends to study a clipboard. Andreas, drying his hands with unnecessary care, notes who will not meet his eye; Nerina quietly catalogues which faces brighten at the word “selling”; and Marios, feeling the air tilt off‑balance, recognises how these small, misread flinches will feed a comedy of errors the festival lights will only amplify.
The words hit him sideways. “Bad for. For an absurd second he wants to demand who on earth has put that thought in her head, as if insecurity were a specific culprit he could eject from the estate.
Instead he exhales through his nose and stares past her at the line where the trees dissolve into sea. “This isn’t about you being…bad,” he says, and the word tastes clumsy, insufficient. “It’s about the fact that some people come here to take. Footage. Stories. Whatever will get them more clicks.” His gaze flicks, involuntarily, to the lower terrace where Lazaros’s figure is outlined against the afterglow, camera raised. “They don’t care what they break open in the process.”
Nerina swallows. She follows his glance, sees only the harmless shape of Lazaros’s tripod, the easy set of his shoulders. “It’s just an olive harvest,” she murmurs. “I can stay out of the way. I always do.”
That lands sharper than she intends; Marios’s shoulders pull even tighter. Always do. As if disappearing were an admirable life skill.
“You’re not supposed to be out of the way,” he says, more sharply than planned. “You’re part of this. The labels, the sketches, the way everything looks. “People will notice you. They already do.”
Her pulse jumps. Not in the satisfying, flirtatious way stories promise, but in the cold, trapped way of a rabbit hearing brush move behind it. Being noticed has historically not gone well.
“So we’ll pretend,” Marios goes on, forcing his voice down, missing the flinch that “pretend” causes in her. “That this is all perfectly simple. Just a local artist helping a family grove. No one needs to know anything else.”
Nerina’s fingers worried the edge of her sketchbook, working the cardboard back until it began to fuzz, her knuckles pale against the dusk. The word “dig” lodged in her stomach like a stone; it conjured not curious bloggers but lawyers’ letters and headlines she had stopped letting herself read. When Marios added, almost clinically, “We have to think about image, about control. What they see, what they don’t,” the careful cadence slid over old bruises. To his ears, it was strategy. To hers, it was the prelude to being trimmed, edited, made less inconvenient.
He stood with his arms folded, brow furrowed against the glare, and the set of his mouth looked like someone bracing for embarrassment. Of her. Of whatever might trail behind her if anyone pulled hard enough at the loose threads of her name.
The thought burned. “If I’m bad for your image, you can just say so,” she heard herself blurt, the words tripping over each other, softer than she intended. Heat climbed her throat and coloured her cheeks, shame and defiance vying for space.
Marios let out a breath that felt scraped from the bottom of his lungs, misreading the tiny recoil in her eyes as camera-shyness rather than dismissal. “That’s not what I said,” he answered, but the thin impatience threading his tone tugged the meaning sideways. His gaze flicked again to the path, to the possibility of cousins, workers, Lazaros (anyone) with their ears pricked. “Listen,” he said, lower, as if they were already half-overheard, “for now we keep it simple. We act like this is just work, nothing…complicated. A local artist, a family grove. No questions.” He hesitated, then added, “No one needs to dig into your past or…anything else. It’s safer for the estate.” To him it was pure logistics; to her, the careful wording tasted like deliberate distance.
A few metres back, half-hidden by an olive trunk, Lazaros has his camera lifted, lens wide to drink in the molten strip of sea and sky. The shotgun mic, fussing at every gust, still snatches fragments. He grins, thumb tapping an imaginary timestamp on the air, already stringing the overheard lines into a slow-burn narrative.
Marios checked his watch as if the time, not the tension, had run out. “We’ll talk after the festival,” he said and strode toward the path without looking back. Nerina stared at the space he left, certain he meant: after the cameras, after the risk, after you.
Lazaros finally lowered his own camera, satisfied he had dusk, distance, and two unreadable profiles framed against the sea. In his mind’s edit suite the moment sprouted its own title card, Terrace: secret lovers, argument about going public, ready to be teased in a voice-over. Later, in the courtyard, that offhand remark about a “charged little scene up there” would drop neatly into Sofia’s waiting fears like oil into a hot pan.
The courtyard, at that hour between heat and dusk, had the air of a room somebody had tidied in a hurry and then abandoned. Crates of empty bottles and stacked harvest bins made improvised walls, hosepipes looped like sleeping snakes across the gravel. The press hummed somewhere inside, a steady metallic heartbeat beneath the shriller sounds of cicadas and distant laughter from the kitchen veranda.
Marios stepped out of the press room, rubbing the back of his neck with an oil-slicked wrist, already rehearsing figures and delivery schedules in his head. He had three metres of relative freedom before the labyrinth of crates narrowed, and there, exactly in the bottleneck life provided, stood Sofia.
She wiped her palms down her flour-dusted apron as if she were about to lift something heavy rather than merely open her mouth. A wisp of hair had escaped her bun and clung to her temple; there was a faint smear of tomato on her forearm. It made her look harried, domestic, and uncharacteristically hesitant, which in turn made him wary.
“You can’t keep doing this, Marios,” she said, stepping into his path with that deceptively light tone she used before a storm. “Locking everything in that thick skull and letting the rest of us find out from gossip or, ” her gaze flicked, almost involuntarily, toward the terraces “, from people who don’t actually live here.”
He stilled. “Doing what?”
“Making decisions in the dark. About the estate. About…all of it.” Her chin lifted a fraction. “When people who actually care about you are left guessing.”
Her words came out low, for him alone, but they struck the surrounding clutter like a dropped plate. Somewhere near the olive shed a worker’s laugh rose and fell; a hosehead dripped steadily into the dust. Marios heard none of it. The emphasis on “people” and “guessing” slid neatly into the groove his brain kept ready for payroll worries, seasonal contracts, loans.
He felt his jaw set of its own accord. Arms folded across his chest, shoulders unofficially armoured, he answered the only way he knew.
Marios, shoulders still wired from the unresolved terrace conversation, heard the emphasis on “people” and “left guessing” and, with the efficiency of long practice, channelled it straight into the familiar ledger of worries: overtime hours, seasonal contracts, who might be quietly looking for work elsewhere. The emotional layer (the one trembling just beneath Sofia’s words) he filed under “later,” which, in his life, usually meant “never.”
His jaw tightened. He crossed his arms, unconsciously putting his chest between her and the bottling room as if she were threatening the machinery rather than his defences.
“I’m not. “Look, I am working on it. On all of it. Andreas’s proposal is just one option, nothing’s signed. I’ve run the numbers, I know what we can and can’t afford.” His voice came out clipped, managerial. “You don’t all need to be dragged into every half-conversation with every outsider who passes through. That’s my job. You just. ”
“I’m not asking about your spreadsheets, re maláka,” Sofia shot back, the endearment colliding with the insult and landing closer to a plea than an attack. The word cracked through her usual warmth; conversation at the far end of the courtyard thinned. A couple of workers, midway through loading bottles onto a pallet, found fascinating reasons to linger within earshot while pretending not to.
She took a breath, flour dust ghosting off her apron. “This half-truth routine? It’s not fair. Not to the people who’ve broken their backs for this place, who keep saying ‘next year will be better’ because they believe you.” Her gaze sharpened. “And not to the friends who stand next to you every night, wondering what, exactly, they are to you in this grand plan.”
He heard only a demand for figures, for advance notice of signatures and clauses. His gaze slid past her to the pallet jack and the men loading bottles, and when he spoke his tone had the careful neutrality he reserved for banks and auditors. Whatever happened with Andreas, he said, “isn’t about feelings, it’s just strategy.” The sentence shut like a file. Even as it left his mouth, some traitorous instinct tugged his eyes sideways, to the far wall where Nerina, half-hidden behind a column of crates, was quietly stacking plastic in neat, anxious towers, shoulders hunched as if braced for impact.
Sofia caught that flicked glance and, with a small, soundless “ah” that tasted like humiliation, assembled the rest. Lazaros’s lazy remark about “the charged scene at the terrace” slotted neatly into place; of course. Marios had already made an exception (for the mysterious artist with the guarded eyes) while keeping the drawbridge firmly up for everyone else. Including, spectacularly, her. She stepped back, apron crinkling, and withdrew into the bustle with brittle, overbright efficiency.
Lazaros balanced his laptop on the low stone wall beneath the farmhouse window, its aluminium edge wobbling against lichen and old mortar. The glow from the screen threw his face into uneven relief, blue-white against the faint, buttery spill of kitchen light that leaked from above. Cicadas droned in the terraces, a constant electric hum undercut by the occasional clink of glass from the bottling shed and a distant bark from the village road.
He should, strictly speaking, have been concentrating. The export of “heritage authenticity” required editorial rigour, or at least passable continuity. Instead, he was half-listening, half-editing. An admittedly risky division of attention, but he prided himself on multitasking where gossip and footage were concerned.
On his screen, Marios and Nerina appeared in miniature at the Harvest Terrace, framed by sunset and silvered leaves. Lazaro’s fingers hovered on the trackpad as he scrubbed back and forth, shaving off seconds the way a chef tidied a plate.
“Okay, too long on the back of his head, my friend,” he muttered. “We get it, he broods.”
Click. The shot tightened: Marios turning slightly toward Nerina, the hard line of his jaw softening, her profile caught in that unguarded half-smile she rarely let loose in daylight, when more practical expressions (concentration, wariness) seemed to arm her face.
He nudged the slider again, trimming off a clumsy start where she almost walked into frame. That left him with something better: Nerina already there at the low stone wall, sketchbook balanced on her knees, Marios joining her as if drawn by the same gravitational pull that guided the olives downhill toward the sea.
Mute, the scene became absurdly eloquent. He had turned the sound off to keep the farmhouse noises from overlapping with his edit, but also (if he were honest) because it let his imagination supply the dialogue. In silence, their conversation looked less like logistics and more like confession. Marios’s hand, briefly brushing the corner of Nerina’s sketchbook as he leant in to see; her quick, embarrassed laugh; the way they both glanced away at exactly the same moment, as if caught.
“This,” Lazaros murmured, tapping the space bar to stop on a frame where the last streaks of sun painted Nerina’s curls copper, “is money. This is your hero shot, Kyrie Vlahos. Brooding heir, secretive artist, tragic ancient trees. Vlog thumbnail writes itself.”
He tugged one earbud out, more from habit than intent, letting it dangle against his collarbone while the other played a tinny loop of cicadas from the captured audio. It meshed uncannily with the real insects in the grove, doubling the sense that he was sitting between versions of the same evening: one lived, one stored in pixels.
Above, a window creaked open another fraction. He glanced up automatically, but the interior remained a rectangle of shifting shadow and warm light; the kitchen, if his mental map of the farmhouse was right. A pot thudded onto a surface, metal against wood, followed by the low murmur of voices. Too blurred to distinguish words, but sharp enough in cadence to make his storyteller instincts twitch.
He flicked back to the terrace footage. In this take, Nerina’s eyes were tracking something beyond the frame, the barest tension in her shoulders: beautiful, yes, but it suggested there was a second narrative line he hadn’t yet captured on camera. Something else tightening the air around her besides the general anxiety of harvest and investors.
His cursor hovered over the “favourite” star. He clicked it. Whatever that “something” was, he could work with it. Audiences loved a secret.
Inside, Nerina’s voice slipped through the shutters more cleanly than the steam and garlic, a taut thread cutting across the clatter of plates and the slap of cupboard doors. She had not raised it; if anything, she spoke lower than usual, but urgency sharpened every syllable. “If anyone finds out who I really am, it ruins everything,” she said, the words landing in the small kitchen like dropped crockery.
Her fingers were hooked into the oilcloth at the table’s edge, knuckles pale against the patterned lemons, sketch-stained nails digging crescents as if she meant to anchor herself to the plastic. One foot jittered against the tile, heel ticking an irregular metronome under the hum of the fridge.
Below, on the wall, Lazaros’s thumb stilled on the trackpad. His loose, half-ironic focus snapped taut; the dangling earbud knocked once against his collarbone and hung there, forgotten. He did not look up immediately, years of practising nonchalance in hostels and train compartments warned against it, but his whole body seemed to lean, inwardly, towards that sentence, ears pricking like a hound catching scent.
Marios’s reply came out in the same tight, level register that half the village cheerfully mislabelled as indifference. “Andreas is already sniffing around for a pretty story to hang on this place,” he said, jaw working, “and the last thing we need is to hand him one gift-wrapped.” He meant glossy PR packages and lifestyle-page fantasies, not romance; surface narratives that would flatten the estate into a backdrop for some curated “journey” of redemption. He went on, about investors, about leverage, about how even Nerina’s sketches could be twisted into branding, but the rest of his worried explanation was chewed to pieces by the crunch of tyres on gravel as a late delivery van rattled past, engine coughing, radio blaring static and laïka.
The overlapping noises splice the moment into disjointed clips in Lazaros’s head: Nerina’s “who I really am” floats free of context, bumping up against Marios’s grim “Andreas,” then dissolving into a blurred shuffle he obligingly populates with imagined closeness: bodies leaning in, hands brushing, eyes darting to the door. It is, to his storyteller’s brain, ready-made B-roll for a forbidden subplot: earnest farmer, enigmatic muse, circling rich heir, all conveniently framed by heritage stone and moonlit shutters.
By the time he shuts the laptop and stretches feeling in his fingers, Lazaros has already sketched the episode in his notebook: a shy artist hiding her true self, a brooding estate heir shielding her from a predatory investor, and a picturesque grove caught between love and money. In the margin he writes, with professional satisfaction, “Just observe. Don’t interfere,” sincerely believing he’s documenting, not distorting, what’s there.
The courier had been running late since Sparta and leaking patience since Kalamata. By the time his dented white van ground up the last bend into Agios Dimitrios, the square was already beginning its slow contraction toward siesta: awnings drawn half-way, chairs scraping in that particular pre-nap drag, voices lowering instead of rising.
He double-parked by the mini-market in a spray of gravel that made the old men at the kafeneio glance up over their tavli boards. Sweat had glued his shirt to his back; a stack of padded envelopes slid on the front seat every time he braked, like a paper avalanche threatening mutiny. He grabbed the one on top, the one that had skittered off the neatly sorted pile when a crate of peaches had shifted, and barely registered the weight of it in his hand.
Inside, the shop smelled of detergent, ripe tomatoes and the faint, comforting dust of shelves that had seen more summers than the courier had. The owner, Kalliopi, was half-hidden behind a pyramid of oranges, counting out change to a grandmother who was, with equal concentration, counting out gossip.
“Gia ton Theodoraki, apo Athina,” the courier rattled off, already angling his body back toward the door. He slapped the envelope on the counter with the brisk confidence of a man who believed that surnames were an adequate postal system in a ten-kilometre radius.
“Poion Theodoraki?” Kalliopi called after him, but the bell over the door was already jangling in his wake, and the van’s engine coughed back to life before the question finished leaving her mouth. He raised one apologetic hand through the open window, he had three more villages and a petrol stop before the depot closed, and was gone in a puff of exhaust that drifted lazily across the square.
Left on the counter between the chewing gum and the weekly lottery forms, the padded envelope sat like something that had arrived with more intention than it actually had, its printed Athenian return address and bold black typeface incongruously formal against the faded price labels and hand-written IOUs pinned behind the till.
Kalliopi wiped her hands on her apron and turned the envelope so the light from the doorway fell cleanly across it. The Athenian law firm’s logo meant nothing to her; the name beneath it did. Not “Theodorakis” the way you saw it on oil tins and church donation lists, but some other, foreign-sounding surname, perched awkwardly beside the grove’s address like a guest at the wrong name day.
She mouthed it once, twice, testing its shape, then snorted softly.
“Dikaogorika,” she pronounced, folding unknown people and fonts into the comfortable drawer marked legal-things-one-ought-to-worry-about-later. “Kai apo Athina akrivos. Nothing good ever comes in bubble wrap from there.”
The bell over the door jingled and one of the Theodorakis cousins – the one who drove the pickup with the crooked tailgate – ducked inside for cigarettes.
“Re, Kostaki,” she said, already reaching for the packet, “this is for you. From Athens.” She tapped the envelope with a fingernail. “Some paper about the estate, I’m sure. You take it up, eh? Right away. Before anything starts, na min vroume kanena mpelo.”
She slid it into his hands with the solemnity of passing on both post and potential disaster.
Kostas made it three steps out of the mini‑market before Aunt Eleni materialised, plastic bags swinging like censuring bells.
“Ti kratás eki, re?” she demanded.
“Xartia apo Athina,” he shrugged, angling the padded envelope just out of her reach and just into everyone’s line of sight.
By the time a neighbour’s “Ela, kathise gia ena grigoro kafe” hooked him toward the kafeneio, the words had grown weight. At the table under the plane tree, the envelope lay between the sugar sachets and the backgammon dice, acquiring the status of communal property.
“Na doume poios mas trehei sto dikastirio,” one of the old men muttered, tugging at a corner. The glue gave with a sigh. No one opened it, not officially. They merely let the flap gape, purely for safety, while eyes “accidentally” brushed the letterhead, the legal phrasing, the unfamiliar surname from Athens, and began stitching their own, much more entertaining version of events.
By the time the half‑open envelope reaches the estate’s main kitchen, it has been baptised in village evidence: flour‑dusted fingerprints, a faint crescent of olive oil, the crumple of having been read “only to make sure it’s nothing serious.” The phrases “hearing postponed” and “Athens art tribunal” are skimmed, misread, then confidently repackaged as Marios “getting dragged into court for some woman from the city who paints.” Two aunts tut, one crosses herself, and all agree he’s been far too secretive lately.
By the time the notice lands on Marios’s cluttered office table (shed of its bubble wrap, softened by fingerprints and conjecture) it is no longer paper but plot. At the kafeneio, between backgammon slaps and the clink of small glasses, they have promoted him to tragic hero: secretly entangled in an Athenian court case over a mysterious painter, hiding a grand, disreputable drama behind his precious trees.
The gossip did not so much climb the hill as arrive already panting at the top, having shed facts like extra clothing on the way. By the time it reached the Harvest Terrace it had become something leaner, juicier: Marios, poor thing, in trouble over a woman with paint under her fingernails and lawyers at her heels.
Sofia heard the version that mattered (“Marios… dikastírio… mia zográfos apo tin Athina”) and felt her stomach dip. Of course. Of course the quiet girl who drew leaves like prayers had trouble lurking behind her, and of course Marios, idiot that he was, had decided to carry it alone.
She found Nerina not on the terrace but down by the bottling room, sleeves rolled up, hair caught back with a bulldog clip, adding labels in a neat, looping hand. The industrial hum around them gave the illusion of privacy; in reality, half the estate’s women passed that doorway in any given ten minutes.
“Nerina,” Sofia said, too brightly, stepping into the rectangle of shade. “Koukla mou, you have a minute?”
The painter’s shoulders went very still before she turned. “Of course. Is something wrong with the labels?”
“Oxí, oxí,” Sofia rushed. “The labels are perfect. Really, we should put your name on them more loudly so all of Athens can see.” She laughed, a shade too high. “That is. Well. That depends what you want people in Athens to see, I suppose.”
A flicker crossed Nerina’s face. “What people in Athens? I don’t know anyone there,” she said, the lie so practised it almost sounded casual.
Sofia leaned against the doorframe, folding her arms in a way meant to signal sisterly confidence. “Listen. People talk. You know how it is here. Someone hears ‘Athens,’ they hear ‘dikastírio,’ they see ‘zográfos’ on a piece of paper, and suddenly they’ve written a whole Mega channel drama. But you should know, Marios is a good man. He won’t let anyone here make your life harder. He’ll stand by you. No matter what silly things are being said.”
There it was: the sentence dropped between them like a stone into a very shallow pool. Nerina heard only the splash.
Her fingers tightened on the roll of labels until the cardboard creaked. “I… don’t understand,” she managed. “Why would he need to stand by me?”
Sofia hesitated for half a heartbeat (naming the scandal would feel like confirming it) then took the more generous, and far more confusing, path. “Because that’s who he is. He takes responsibility.” She smiled, bright and brittle. “Even when other people have… pasts. Or mistakes. Or… you know. Things they’d rather not see on a church noticeboard.”
Colour slowly drained from Nerina’s cheeks, leaving two bright flags high on her cheekbones. “I see,” she said, in the careful tone of somebody testing ice. “So everyone… knows there is something to… stand by.”
“Everyone knows nothing,” Sofia said quickly. “They only think they know everything, as usual. And they can think whatever they like.” She reached out as if to touch Nerina’s arm, then thought better of it. “I just wanted you to hear (from someone) that you aren’t alone in it. Whatever it is.”
“Whatever it is,” Nerina repeated, the phrase folding sharply inside her. Her alias, her pretty, borrowed surname; the edited childhood; the non-existent exhibitions, tightened around her like a dress a size too small.
She made herself smile, a thin, courteous curve. “It’s kind of you,” she said. “Really. But there isn’t… it’s nothing. Just a misunderstanding.” Her English word sat oddly in the Greek air.
Sofia, mistaking deflection for shame, nodded with vigorous sympathy. “Of course. And misunderstandings pass. Meanwhile, you’re safe here. With us. With him.”
With him. The possessive clung.
“Efcharistó,” Nerina murmured. Her feet were already edging backward, deeper into the cool, humming room, toward the comforting anonymity of jars and machinery. “I should finish this batch before the afternoon heat.”
Sofia lingered a second, misreading the retreat as embarrassment. “If anyone says anything stupid, you tell me, eh? I have a loud voice when I need it.”
“I know,” Nerina said, almost a whisper. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
But she smiled again, a polite little mask, and when Sofia stepped away from the door, Nerina slipped behind her alias as neatly as closing a door on a draught, feeling, with a small, sick twist, that the house on the other side had just grown narrower and far more crowded.
Lazaros had chosen the flattest stone he could find and turned it into a makeshift dolly track, crouched low as his lens drank in Nerina’s bent head, the quick, precise movements of her hand, the gnarled twist of the old olive trunk she was sketching. The late light made a halo of loose curls at her neck; cicadas provided a professional‑grade soundtrack.
“Look at this,” he murmured into the mic, half to himself, half to his imagined subscribers. “Pure Kalamata mythology in progress.”
Sofia’s shadow arrived before she did, sliding across Nerina’s page. A second later Sofia herself leaned jauntily into the frame, forearm braced against the tree, grinning at the camera.
“Na, here she is,” she said. “Our city girl with the complicated past. Careful, Lazaros, if you film her too much you’ll end up in court as evidence.”
Her tone was light, but her eyes flicked between Nerina and the lens, gauging every flinch.
Lazaros, delighted, took it as an invitation. “Ah, complicated pasts are my speciality,” he declared. “Meet my mysterious muse, friends. Our secret Athenian legend, hiding here among the olives.”
Nerina’s pencil jerked; a line went astray. Heat climbed her neck. “Please don’t,” she said quickly. “I’m nobody’s legend. And I don’t want to be on your channel.”
“Shy,” Lazaros told the camera, amused, zooming closer on her hand regardless. “The best stories always start with someone shy.”
To the viewers he imagined, it would read as teasing chemistry; to Sofia, a confirmation that the poor girl was mortified; to Nerina, every joking “mysterious” rang like a tap on thin glass, testing how soon it would crack.
Andreas first heard the phrase over sticky metal tables and sweating beer bottles, the square’s plane tree dropping the occasional leaf into his ashtray. The kafeneio owner, who had introduced himself as Manolis and the rest of the village as “my extended family,” leaned on the back of a chair and lowered his voice just enough to make the neighbouring tables lean in.
“Re, o Vláho,” he said, with the oily camaraderie reserved for men in loafers, “the painter is lucky the Theodorakis boy is covering for her lawyers. Athenian papers, you understand.” His shrug did the heavy lifting: scandal, expense, intrigue, all in one economical roll of the shoulders.
Andreas sipped his beer, considering. Damaged but marketable. A shy, pretty artist with a whiff of legal drama, a brooding farmer already cast as her protector. The narrative practically storyboarded itself: he arrives as enlightened patron, offers her visibility and “support,” turns her redemption into a soft-focus campaign, #SecondChances, tagged with sun‑drenched olive trees and soulful portraits. Her image rehabilitated, his own reframed from spoiled heir to compassionate visionary.
By the time Manolis wandered off to wipe an already clean counter, Andreas had mentally titled the feature spread and assigned them both their roles.
The next morning, in the cramped estate office that smelled of dust and printer ink, Nerina paused in the doorway as two seasonal women shuffled invoices and gossip in equal measure.
“Pánta tou áresan oi diskóles,” one snorted. “Especially the ones with papers in Athens.”
“Na, first that start-up kyriá and now this zográfos. Poor Marios.”
The words slid under Nerina’s skin like cold water. Papers in Athens; difficult women; poor Marios. In an instant Katerina’s rumoured return, her own buried scandal, and the village’s “secret woman with lawyers” fused into a single, ugly narrative with his name nailed to it. Heat pricked her eyes. If she stayed close, she would only confirm their story. So she folded the hurt small, filed it beside all her other fictions, and decided she would give him nothing else to defend: only clean labels, finished sketches, and a polite, professional distance.
That evening, Marios registers Sofia laughing a shade too brightly at something Lazaros says and, moments later, Nerina’s sketchbook snapping shut the instant he steps into the doorway. To him it is all of a piece: everyone else rearranging themselves into new orbits while he stays fixed, the dutiful centre of gravity. Resolving not to intrude he retreats behind lists, yield projections, and a practised, noncommittal smile. The quieter he becomes, the more each of them reads his distance as confirmation: Sofia of his unavailable heart, Nerina of his embarrassment, Lazaros of hidden passion, Andreas of artful discretion.
As the week wears on, those unvoiced explanations harden into private certainties, the way unpicked olives shrivel on the branch. Marios’s clipped answers about invoices and delayed payments, meant to spare his relatives fresh anxiety, acquire a life of their own in other people’s heads.
When Sofia corners him by the bottling line with a towel over one shoulder, asking, “Na voithíso me ta xartía, at least for the festival budget?”, he only half looks up from the spreadsheet.
“It’s fine, Sofi. I’ve got it,” he says, more tired than unkind, and taps the screen as if the numbers might behave better under his finger. “Don’t worry about this.”
She hears: you are decoration, not decision. The conversation is mentally filed under “he doesn’t trust me with the hard parts,” and each subsequent deflection, “later,” “I’ll explain when it’s clearer,” “it’s complicated”, becomes another line in that ledger.
Andreas, hovering benignly in doorways with the practised idleness of a man who has never had to stack crates, compiles a different balance sheet. Those same evasions, “some suppliers are…slow,” “the bank is being cautious this year,” “just a small cash-flow issue”, slot neatly into his preferred column: estate ripe for “adult” intervention, as he phrases it in a discreet voice note to his London PR contact. “They’re proud, but they need guidance,” he murmurs, and the word guidance stretches to cover capital, branding, and a convenient human-interest love story.
Meanwhile, Nerina tends to her own, more fragile fiction. Over afternoon coffees on the terrace, when Lazaros swings his camera down and starts asking the questions any friend might, “So, which galleries have you worked with?” “How long were you in Athens?”, she offers careful, sanded‑down versions.
“I was…between studios,” she says lightly. “I almost did a residency in Exarchia, but the timing was wrong.” Cities become places she “passed through,” exhibitions are things she “helped with a little, nothing official.” Names of institutions hover on her tongue and are replaced at the last second by vague phrases: “a space in Metaxourgeio,” “a collective near Psyrri.”
Lazaros, editing even as he listens, drops these half-facts into the mental timeline of his next series. An artsy, elusive-romantic narrative unfurls: the sensitive illustrator who never quite fit the big-city scene, who wandered from almost‑opportunities to this sunlit hillside where, perhaps, both her art and her heart might finally root. His followers adore a mystery with good lighting. Every “almost” she utters becomes, in his mind, a deliberate withdrawal from a world too harsh for her, not a scramble away from a scandal with paperwork attached.
By the time he hikes back up to the Harvest Terrace at golden hour, he already knows which slow pans of Nerina’s ink‑stained fingers and stolen, guarded smiles will overlay her voice saying, “I like it here. It’s…quiet.” In the gaps where her real history should sit, he lays his own subtitles, convinced he has captured the truth.
In side glances and unfinished sentences, each person stitches these fragments into a pattern that flatters their fears. At a crowded Sunday lunch, when an aunt leans in too brightly (“Kai esý, korítsi mou, apo poio scholeío tis Technís?”) Sofia watches Marios step in, voice mild but firm.
“She works with us now, Thía. That’s the important part,” he says, shifting his shoulder just enough that the question glances off Nerina instead of landing.
To the assembled relatives it is nothing, merely Marios being polite. To Sofia it is a small, decisive gesture: he has already chosen where his rare softness goes, and it is not toward the girl who can hand out plates and jokes in equal measure. The twist in her chest is familiar, catalogued silently under “reasons to call the Athens recruiter back.”
Nerina, catching only the tail end, Sofia’s quick, shuttered look, the way her laugh turns a touch too bright as she tops up water glasses, reads the moment differently. She sees condemnation, not casualty; rivalry, not hurt. Heat crawls up her neck. The safest path, she decides, is to fold herself further into the alias: small, helpful, forgettable, leaving nothing real for anyone to resent or defend.
Meanwhile, Lazaros, crouched behind his camera on the Harvest Terrace, composes an entire subplot out of lens flare and half‑caught gestures: the stoic heir, the secretive artist, a love story ripening in the shadows of old trees while a flashy outsider circles below like an ungainly seagull. He notes the way Marios stands half a step closer when Nerina speaks, the brief touch to her elbow as she misjudges the uneven stones, her quick, embarrassed smile when she realises he has seen her stumble.
Each time he replays a clip to check his light, the imagined romance feels more documentary than fantasy, nudging him to nudge the truth. He lingers on shared glances, trims away Sofia’s bustling figure at the edge of frame, excludes the clatter of cousins and crates. What doesn’t serve the narrative is quietly sacrificed to the cutting-room floor, until his viewfinder holds only what his followers will want to believe.
On his phone, terrace light flattering every shot, Andreas scrolls with a curator’s eye, workshopping taglines that turn flickers of discomfort into curated mystique. Nerina’s bitten lip becomes “enchantingly private”; Marios’s tightened jaw, “old‑world honour under pressure.” A neatly orchestrated faux‑courtship, announced just so, would rehabilitate his own image while advertising the grove as both authentic and irresistibly romantic.
By the time rumours of Katerina’s impending arrival drift up from the square, “the ex with the rich fiancé,” “the platform that will put them on the map”, the emotional stage is fully mis‑set. Every silence now carries an invented backstory, every sidelong glance is weighted with the wrong meaning; even absences are read as tactics. So when villagers and family alike start gaming out which outsider will “save” the grove, they do it on top of this warped scaffolding, building strategies and alliances on misunderstandings no one has yet dared to test out loud, because clarity would cost them their favourite, secretly comforting illusions.
The rumours did not so much travel as ferment, acquiring flavour and thickness with each retelling until, by the time they reached the farmhouse kitchen, they could be sliced and served with the koulourakia. What had begun as idle speculation in the village square arrived at Marios’s table as fully formed positions, complete with slogans, anxieties, and carefully pre-chewed facts.
Over morning coffee, his uncles and older cousins arranged themselves like a makeshift council of war around the scrubbed wooden table. Someone banged a sugar spoon for order. They lowered their voices, not so much for secrecy, walls in an old farmhouse heard everything, as for gravitas, rehearsing talking points the way other families might rehearse hymns.
“Andreas means security,” one uncle declared, as if reading from a pamphlet only he could see. “Upgrades. Finally doing things properly.” The phrase caught on with suspicious ease, repeated with the satisfaction of men who had found a way to dress fear as pragmatism. Doing things properly meant stainless steel, not patched hoses; consultants instead of cousins paid in olive oil and favours; a forecast you could print and show a bank.
They pictured, in affectionate detail, a future none of them would admit frightened them: a gleaming spa tucked by the old stone mill, infinity pool reflecting the same sky their grandfather had checked for rain. Wellness retreats where people in white robes sipped detox water beneath heritage trees, tours booked months in advance by an online calendar no one here quite understood. Influencers photographing their breakfast bowls where once the press-room floor had been slick with olive pulp.
Their name would feature prominently on brochures and websites, embossed on glass bottles in minimalist fonts. It would travel, that name, further than any of them had. The possibility glittered like Andreas’s watch in the sun. Yet spoken only in terms of “branding,” it somehow became less theirs: no longer shouted across terraces, muttered in arguments, sung half-drunk at Easter, but printed, packaged, export-ready.
No one said aloud the quiet clause tucked under each argument: that survival, under Andreas, might require surrender. Instead, they circled back to the safer refrain (security, upgrades, doing things properly) as if intoning it often enough might convince the stones of the farmhouse they were not, in fact, contemplating selling pieces of their own reflection.
Down in the village square, beneath the plane tree that had presided over three generations of arguments, the “Katerina platform” contingent preferred to call themselves sensible. Romanticism, they implied with pursed lips and lifted brows, belonged to poets and bankrupt farmers. They, by contrast, spoke of “scalability” and “distribution channels,” terms picked up from nephews back from Athens and now rolled around like unfamiliar but promising sweets.
Over tiny cups of coffee, they rehearsed the case: no outsider setting foot on the land with surveyors and architects, no bulldozers near the chapel, no spa menus printed in three languages. Just contracts, percentages, and the grove’s oil travelling quietly out into the world in handsome bottles someone else had paid to market. The hills would remain as they were; only the invoices would change.
Katerina, in this telling, ceased to be the woman who had once broken Marios’s heart and became instead a necessary bridge: fluent in apps and algorithms, yet still “one of ours.” Through her, they argued, the estate might step into the future with its boots still firmly planted in familiar soil.
Around the same table, sometimes in the very pauses between arguments for apps and infinity pools, the traditionalists dig in their heels as if they, too, were rooted in the terraces. Older relatives, a few long-time workers, and the priest’s formidable sister trade cautionary tales of families who “sold their souls” to investors and came back from the notary’s office with shinier tractors and emptier eyes. They speak of chapels left locked, old trees uprooted “for parking,” grandchildren who no longer visit in harvest season because “it’s all guests now.” Their rallying cry is simple and much repeated and every time a storm cloud crosses the sun, someone murmurs that even God has taken a position.
Quieter, but no less determined, a smaller circle forms around the idea that the answer is already on the estate: Sofia’s instinct for people and Nerina’s eye for beauty. A couple of younger cousins, one of Marios’s aunts, and even the bottling-room supervisor begin to savour the phrase “our own brand” like a daring spice, wondering aloud what might happen if the women who already keep the place from collapsing were granted actual authority, and a budget, rather than just another list of favours and unpaid overtime.
Marios threads through these pockets of opinion like a man walking through uneven patches of sun and shade. In the kitchen he feels a flush of optimism he doesn’t trust; on the terrace he meets a wall of wary stares and conditional blessings; in the square he overhears his own name tied to “last chance,” “mortgage,” “don’t ruin it.” He files it all under background weather, irritating, unpredictable, but not yet a storm, never quite grasping that everyone else believes a match has already been struck and placed in his unsuspecting hand.
Sofia clocks the way conversations tilt when Marios walks into a room, how the air seems to lean with them. In the kitchen, spoons pause mid-stir; on the terrace, arguments about irrigation or Instagram fall half a note flatter. Eyes flick from him to Nerina and back again, like spectators following a rally they’re certain will end in a decisive point. By the third day, she can tell who has already decided they’re secretly engaged and who is drafting more elaborate theories involving foreign investors, repentance, and fate.
She decides the smartest response to all this new static is orchestration, not confrontation. You did not scold the village choir for singing off-key; you started a different song and made it catchier.
She starts her campaign in the grove. She all but pries Lazaros’s drone remote from his hand and drags him away from the kind of footage any algorithm could dream up: rows of trees, scenic sun flares, a token shot of Marios brooding picturesquely against a trunk. Instead she steers him toward the old stone mill, its wheel scored with grooves from a century of pressing, toward the weather-cracked hands of Marios’s uncle deftly sorting olives by touch alone, toward the tiny chapel door polished dull by generations of thumb-crosses and whispered bargains with God.
Lazaros, amused, lifts his camera but arches a brow. “You know if I post too many old stones, the under-thirty crowd defects to videos of cats eating watermelon.”
“This isn’t content,” she tells him lightly, adjusting his angle so the uncle’s hands fill the frame instead of the machinery behind. “It’s proof these people exist nowhere else. Let them see what can’t be copied.”
He studies the shot, then gives a low whistle. “You’re wasted as front-of-house, you know that?”
“Tell Marios,” she says, already scanning for the next detail the world cannot steal.
As they move between terraces, she feeds him lines the way a good cook seasons a pot: never dumping, always sprinkling. Here a mention of how Yiayia still insists on hand-picking the olives from the oldest tree “because she remembers when it was planted for her wedding,” there a note about how every christening in the family ends with oil from one particular row, “for luck and stubbornness.” She steers him past a newer irrigation pipe without comment and lingers instead by a scar on a trunk where lightning hit in ’78, offering only, “They kept the tree. They said it had survived worse than electricity: my grandfather.”
Lazaros, catching the pattern, lowers the drone remote and starts filming closer, tighter. He abandons the wide, swooping shots and crouches beside grandfather under a tree, letting knotted fingers and weathered faces fill the frame. His commentary shifts, almost in spite of himself, from “hidden gem ripe for development” to “fragile inheritance that shouldn’t be tampered with,” the phrases tasting unfamiliar on his tongue but sitting right once spoken, like a shirt that unexpectedly fits better than the one he bought for the camera.
Between takes, Sofia drifts back toward the bottling room where Marios and Nerina keep orbiting the same tasks but on different schedules, like planets that refuse to line up. It offends her sense of choreography. One “accidental” smudge of a sleeve across the kitchen chalkboard becomes an excuse to redraw the rota entirely: suddenly their names bloom together in neat loops beside labelling, tasting sessions, late-afternoon deliveries to the village.
When Nerina hesitates Sofia only snorts and presses a box into her arms.
“You work better together,” she says, brisk, almost careless. “Buyers like a story with two faces, not one exhausted martyr. Anyway, he needs someone to tell him when his shirt is stained with olive paste.”
The more Sofia engineers these collisions, the more the village notice: Marios and Nerina bent over the same notebook sketching label ideas, shoulders almost touching; Nerina passing him a mug of coffee on the terrace just as Lazaros’s camera pans past; a shared umbrella in a sudden drizzle on the path from press to farmhouse, his hand briefly, very briefly, at her elbow. Sofia tracks the micro-reactions (Nerina’s startled, almost guilty smiles, Marios’s instinctive retreat followed by a fractional softening) and files them under both “useful optics” and “dangerously promising,” the kind of subplot no sensible manager would encourage and no born orchestrator can resist.
By the time Lazaros’s first clips reach his followers and the kitchen staff are quietly betting on “the artist and the agronomist,” Sofia can almost taste the shift in the air. She’s nudged the story a few degrees: not a distressed asset awaiting rescue, but a living inheritance braided through particular hands. In that charged, half-scripted atmosphere, as alliances begin to crystallise around what they think they see, Nerina finally decides she has to speak to Marios directly. Better to own the rumour, shape it, than keep flinching every time someone lowers their voice as she walks into a room.
Nerina times it with the precision of someone used to catching light before it changes: not at the height of chaos, when ten people are shouting Marios’s name, and not so late that he’s already vanished into spreadsheets and obligations. She waits until the bottling room thins to a hum, the clink of glass, the low whirr of machinery, and watches him peel off his gloves, forearms slicked and speckled with oil, sleeves rolled to the elbow in the way that makes every line of strain in his shoulders visible.
He’s half-turned toward the office when she steps into his path, heart beating far too loudly for the politeness of her voice.
“Do you have five minutes?” she says, then hears herself and adds, with painful nonchalance, “For a bit of air. On the upper terraces.”
It hangs there between them, heavier than the words deserve. His gaze flicks, involuntary, towards the open doorway where two of his cousins are arguing over pallet space, then back to her. A walk at dusk is never just a walk, not here; the village specialises in turning footsteps into narratives before the dust has settled.
His jaw works once, a visible calculation. She watches him reach, almost reflexively, for the safest possible version of the truth.
“Irrigation,” he calls over his shoulder to a waiting cousin, lifting the clipboard in his hand as if it were proof. “Going up to check the valves on the upper line. If the delivery from Kalamata comes, stall them with coffee.”
There’s a muttered joke about him finally delegating, a ripple of amusement that buys them cover. No one questions the man who talks to pipes and trees as if they’re on the payroll.
He falls into step beside her without further comment, and they slip out through the side door, past the stacks of labelled boxes that still smell faintly of fresh ink and peppery oil. The stone path rises ahead of them in a pale ribbon, edged by thyme and wild fennel; above, the terraces climb toward the sky, already softening at the edges with evening.
Nerina is acutely aware of every potential pair of eyes until the curve of the hill takes the estate out of sight. Only then does she let her shoulders drop a fraction, matching his stride as they begin the ascent, two small figures threading their way up between the trees toward a conversation that will not fit inside the usual village script.
The climb steals his breath just enough to file the edges off his thoughts; hers are already running ahead, tripping over consequences. Dust whispers under their boots, small stones skittering down the slope, and the evening folds around them in layers: dusk laying a copper rim along the olive leaves, the sea below sliding from blue to slate, the first cicadas tuning themselves in the distance. For a few blessed metres they walk in parallel silence (his hands in his pockets, shoulders loosening by degrees; her fingers worrying the strap of her sketchbag) accompanied only by the crunch of gravel and the faint, occasional clang of goat bells from some unseen ravine.
It would be easy, Marios thinks, to let the quiet stand and pretend this is merely about valves and water pressure. It would be easier still, Nerina knows, to smile, make some joke about the light, and go back to drawing labels that tell a simpler story than her own.
Instead the words spill out, abrupt and unpolished, startling even herself. She says she is tired, bone-tired, of feeling like a character in other people’s stories every time someone catches them in the same frame.
She says it without flourish, as if reciting a set of measurements: standing by the low stone wall, fingers following the pitted line of stone, she unfolds the argument in a low, even voice. If they step into the outline everyone has already drawn, if they nod, politely, to the village’s favourite conclusion, then the tale runs out of novelty. A “yes, of course” where gossip expects denial; the rumour loses its teeth. In that version, Andreas’s speculative charm becomes a side-note, Katerina’s shared past an irrelevant footnote. What remains, for outsiders with chequebooks and camera crews, is a coherent, contemporary story: land and labour and affection apparently braided together, not a besieged bachelor ringed by competing claims but a partnership that looks, from a distance, intentional.
Marios listens, jaw working, eyes on the rows of trees slipping away beneath them like ledger lines. The idea speaks to the part of him that colour-codes harvest shifts and supply orders (clean edges, controlled variables, one move neutralising three fires at once) yet the word “relationship” makes something old and raw flare under his ribs. He circles the proposal like an unfamiliar tool, testing load-bearing points, asking what happens when they “break up,” when Katerina arrives, when Andreas decides to spin his own angle. Each objection, turned over between them, keeps collapsing back into the same, irritating conclusion: as a brand story and as armour, the thing is unnervingly, almost indecently, efficient.
When he finally agrees, it is with a brief, workmanlike nod and a list of terms: they will not manufacture scenes for cameras, will not dangle each other as bait before his relatives, will not lie beyond omission. Yet as they draft this modest fiction (how close they stand at the festival, what they say if asked) relief unknots his chest and exposure prickles his skin. They seal it with a dry-palmed handshake that wobbles, absurdly, on the edge of something like a promise. He tells himself he is only lending his name and height and habit of standing slightly to one side of the frame; what he does not confess is the treacherous, almost adolescent hope that rehearsal might coax back a capacity for wanting he no longer rates himself safe to exercise. Across from him, Nerina’s smile holds, but her fingers tighten around the strap of her bag as she silently counts the parts of herself this convenient story may quietly, irrevocably, spend.
The next afternoon in Agios Dimitrios, Andreas does not so much arrive at the kafeneio as appear in it at precisely the right moment, like an ad placed by a particularly targeted algorithm. Sofia is already there under the plane tree, a freddo sweating on the table beside her open notebook, pen tapping against the margin in time with the clack of tavli dice nearby.
He pauses at the counter just long enough to order, to be seen greeting the owner by name as if he’s always done so, then drifts towards her table with the casual assurance of a man who has never in his life been told a seat is taken.
“Every time I ask about anything in this village,” he says, sliding into the opposite chair without waiting for invitation, “your name comes up within three sentences. I’m starting to think you’re the unofficial mayor.”
Sofia snorts, half-amused, half-wary. “If I were the mayor, the wi-fi would work and the bakery would stay open past two.”
“Even better,” he counters, smiling. “You’re the mayor of the things that actually function. Festivals. Guests not getting lost. People leaving with more friends than they arrived with.”
He doesn’t push; he coaxes. A question here about who really organises the harvest festival, there about how the estate manages tour groups, how many visitors end up booking because of her Instagram posts or her recommendation at the taverna. Whenever she deflects, “oh, it’s a team effort,” “Marios does the hard part”, he gently steers her back, asking what happens when she’s not there, how chaotic last year’s wedding booking became until she “sorted it out.”
Gradually, enumeration replaces modesty. As she talks through schedules, menus, emergency bedding improvisations, he leans in with apparent fascination, supplying little murmured translations of her work into his language: “operations,” “brand touchpoint,” “customer journey.” The more she speaks, the clearer the invisible map becomes. Threads of logistics and emotion all converging on her.
He lets silence fall just long enough for the conclusion to surface: that if the estate runs on anything like order, it is, inconveniently, because of her. When she flushes and reaches for her coffee, he smiles as though merely confirming a fact he has known all along.
They stroll a slow circuit of the square, plastic cups sweating in their hands, the afternoon heat blurring the edges of the church and the kafeneia into something almost cinematic. Andreas lets the small talk drain away before he begins, as if merely thinking aloud rather than presenting a pitch.
He sketches, with an easy, conversational brush, a different horizon: weekends that sell out three months ahead, guests flying in from London and Berlin for “Sofia Retreats”: three days of harvest rituals, market visits, her cooking classes, sunrise walks to the chapel, sunset circles under the olives where she “holds space,” as he puts it, like a priestess with an Instagram account. He threads in details that sound suspiciously like flattery disguised as logistics: how people don’t remember brands, they remember the person who looked after them; how her laugh would carry better in videos than any drone shot of trees.
Between sips he drops names of lifestyle magazines, influencers, wellness platforms he could “easily call,” wrapping her in a narrative of international visibility and tasteful fame, as if all that were waiting only on whether she chose to step into the light.
A few days later, he engineers his timing with the same care he applies to term sheets, drifting into a small group of visitors just as they set off through the groves at golden hour. The light does most of the work for him, glazing the terraces and turning dust motes into something that looks like opportunity. Marios, summoned by a supplier’s call, falls behind; Andreas lengthens his stride until he is at Sofia’s elbow, all relaxed curiosity and admiring glances.
He gestures around not like a guest but like a man mentally laying out blueprints: this broad terrace as a dawn yoga deck, that weathered stone shed reborn as a massage room with copper basins and beeswax candles. “The bones are perfect,” he muses. “All it needs is focus. A story with a face.”
He allows the next line to hang between them as if it has just occurred to him, rather than been polished on the drive over. “What a place like this doesn’t need,” he says lightly, “is another serious-faced agronomist explaining soil acidity. It needs a recognisable, camera-friendly soul people feel they already know before they arrive.”
He glances at her, lets his smile tip conspiratorial. “Someone like you.”
She scoffs, calling it a nice daydream. He talks of “liberation” from seasonal shifts and gossip cycles: no longer the girl everyone phones in a crisis, but the name on the brochure, the reason guests book flights. Almost idly, he sketches Marios into the background solid, necessary, and conveniently dimmer beside her curated glow.
By the time they pause on the ridge, heat shimmering above the silver leaves, he has dressed the offer in the vocabulary of emancipation: her chance to script, not wait; to host, not hustle for an unanswered email from Athens. He skims neatly past clauses, equity, image rights, how her face would be trademarked optimism attached to his capital. Instead, he murmurs, almost lazily, “Imagine what you could build if nobody could file you back under ‘just the village girl’,” and then has the good manners to fall silent, letting the view and the old ache of her own ambitions argue his case for him.
Word of Andreas’s interest spreads faster than a summer brushfire; by the time the afternoon shadows have shortened over the square, Uncle Thanasis has installed himself as its appointed prophet. He occupies his usual plastic chair outside the kafeneio with the gravitas of a man assuming a throne, elbows braced on the rickety table, worry beads clicking an urgent rhythm against the saucer of his thick, bitter coffee.
“Listen to me,” he declares, voice pitched to carry over the scrape of tavli pieces and the low mutter of the television inside. He punctuates each proclamation with a sharp clack of his cup against porcelain, as though he means to drive the point physically into the stone of the square. “Real men take risks. You think the old Theodorakis came up here and planted olives because it was safe? Ha. He bet everything on rock and sun.”
A pair of retired farmers at the next table nods, entertained if not entirely convinced; a teenager pretending not to listen pauses in scrolling his phone. Thanasis leans back, letting the suspense ripen, then leans in again.
“Only a fool,” he pronounces, “turns away shipping money when it comes knocking on a dusty farm road. You know what that is? That’s history knocking. That’s the world saying, ‘Your time has come.’” He taps his temple. “Some of us see the pattern. Some of us understand opportunity.”
No one needs him to name the “some of us.” His glance makes the distinction plain: visionaries on one side of the kafeneio table, cautious, soil-obsessed nephews on the other. By the third retelling, Andreas has already become “the boy from Piraeus who understands heritage,” and Thanasis, effortlessly, the man who saw the future walking up the track before anyone else had the sense to offer it a coffee.
At Sunday lunch he resumes the performance in a gentler register, as if the tablecloth and the smell of lemon potatoes demand civility. Between bites of roast chicken he unspools the same phrases he has already tested on the kafeneio steps, sanded now of their roughest edges. Andreas becomes, in his telling, not merely a rich outsider but a providential “bridge between our grandfather’s trees and the modern world,” a man who understands “heritage” and “branding” with equal reverence.
He raises his glass toward the old photograph of Papou on the wall, folding piety into promotion. “This is how we honour him,” he says, “by making sure his work is tasted in New York, in Tokyo, not just at this table.” The younger cousins, seated midway between the elders and Marios, are his true audience; he makes certain they hear that he was the first to recognise the grove’s “global potential,” the one who saw an empire in the dusty track long before contracts or numbers appeared.
Across the table, Aunt Eleni holds court with the women, retelling Katerina’s polished presentation as if it were a fairy tale, complete with chapters and morals. She embellishes the slides into scenes: the estate’s oil gleaming on glossy websites, nestled in curated gift boxes tied with tasteful ribbon, perhaps even lined up in airport boutiques where “important people” would pause and think of their little village. Every hypothetical click, every imagined unboxing, becomes another stitch fastening her own name to the story of the grove’s salvation. “You’ll see,” she says, tapping the table for emphasis, bangles chiming. “One good partnership, and the boys will thank us for insisting on the internet, not just soil under the nails.”
In the square she seasons her errands with asides, telling neighbours how “that clever girl from Thessaloniki” still has a soft spot for Marios and “never forgot where she came from.” A contract with Katerina, she hints, would not merely rescue the books; it would vindicate Eleni’s much-mocked insistence that salvation arrives through screens, not rosaries.
They rehearse these lines as carefully as a priest rehearses a sermon, trotting them out over coffee cups and mezze plates, watching faces tighten or soften. If anyone demurs, they only smile more sweetly and lower their voices, as though confiding hard-won experience rather than campaigning for the future footnote they hope will attach to their name.
In one such “private” moment on the farmhouse veranda, with the afternoon heat pressing the scent of basil from the pots, Uncle Giorgos leans back in his chair and jabs a thumb toward the lower terraces as if they personally offended him.
“Mark my words,” he grumbles, voice pitched just loud enough to carry through the open shutters, “if that Andreas fellow buys in, next thing you know there’ll be yoga mats between the trees. Foreign women in tights doing…breathing exercises where your grandfather used to plough. Hah.” He spits the last sound like an olive pit over the rail.
Marios’s pen pauses above the ledger, the ink trembling in a tiny black pool. He follows his uncle’s gesture to the neat lines of trees and, for half a second, actually imagines them dotted with pastel mats and imported serenity. It is so absurd it almost makes him smile. Almost.
Before the faintest hint of humour can surface, Giorgos clears his throat and, with the speed and flourish of a magician revealing a card, slides a glossy proposal across the table. The folder bumps the ledger, knocking Marios’s pen from its balance.
“Anyway,” his uncle continues, in the falsely casual tone that means he has rehearsed every word, “no harm letting a man like that take some of the weight, eh? Look, they prepared everything. Very professional. All we need is your signature. Better to sign quickly, before they change their minds. These opportunities, they don’t wait.”
The papers gleam under the striped shade from the awning: pages of dense English, diagrams of “Heritage Wellness Retreat Concept,” discreet bullet points promising capital injections and “brand repositioning.” Marios’s name is already typed beneath a neat, expectant line.
“Don’t worry about the details,” Giorgos adds, patting the folder as if soothing a restless child. “Andreas has his own lawyers. We are simple people. We know olives, not contracts. That’s why you must trust the ones who know. We would be fools to send him away after he’s offered so much.”
Marios hears the distant clank of machinery starting up by the press, a sound that usually steadies him. Today it only sharpens the pressure behind his eyes. He looks from the terraces to the waiting signature line, feeling the familiar squeeze of duty closing like a fist around his chest, while his uncle watches him with the bright, anxious smile of a man who has already decided what gratitude should look like.
On another sun-flared afternoon in the village square, Sofia sits on the low wall by the plane tree, parcel of bread on her lap, while Uncle Giorgos holds court at the kafeneio as if it were parliament. He slaps his worry beads against his palm for emphasis, voice booming over the clack of tavli pieces.
“I tell you,” he declares, jabbing the air with a knotted finger, “I won’t live to see love turned into advertisement.” Laughter ripples obligingly around him. “All this nonsense in the papers: fake engagements, actors kissing for cameras, these…how do they call them? Influencers.” He spits the word like a seed. “Love is sacred. Family is sacred. Not a costume you put on for tourists.”
The old men nod, tut, suck thoughtfully at their cigarettes. Someone mentions a television show with a sponsored wedding; Giorgos snorts so violently his coffee sloshes. “Our grove,” he proclaims, thumping his chest and then gesturing vaguely in the direction of the terraces, “will never stoop to such theatrics. We are not a circus. We are Theodorakis.”
From her spot in the shade, Sofia watches the performance with narrowed eyes, filing every word away.
Hours later, back at the estate, with coffee rings blooming on the oilcloth and papers breeding across the kitchen table, Sofia leans in the doorway and watches the second act of Giorgos’s morality play. The same man who had spat “circus” in the square now claps Marios on the shoulder so heartily the younger man’s ledger jumps, his eyes bright with inspiration.
“Let them think you and Nerina are…you know,” he says, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial wheeze. “It’s good for the story. Foreigners love a romance. Shows stability, modern thinking. Harmless illusion, re maláka mou. For the buyers.”
He spreads his hands, as if arranging invisible headlines above the table, already rehearsing how pious it will sound when he later insists they never sold anything but olive oil.
Bone-tired and ringed by contradictory advice, Marios feels the floor tilt beneath him. The same uncles who once scolded him for “thinking like an entrepreneur” now roll foreign phrases on their tongues like new sweets, parroting Andreas’s “lifestyle synergy” and Katerina’s “brand alignment,” then thumping their chests and swearing they are merely safeguarding the Theodorakis name from corruption.
As Sofia quietly clocks each reversal, the sermons in the square, the whispered urgings in the kitchen, the eagerness to dress vanity and fear as sacrifice, she and Marios both begin to realise the estate’s real fault line runs less between locals and outsiders than between the values everyone invokes aloud and the image-driven bargains they’re secretly, almost eagerly, willing to strike. It leaves Marios with the sour sense that, without a word signed, something older and far less replaceable is already being traded away.
Marios realised the exact second the evening slipped out of his control. It was not, as he might have hoped, a gradual fraying, but a clean snap. Like an olive branch breaking under too much weight.
One moment, the Harvest Terrace was merely crowded: lanterns swaying, glasses clinking, Lazaros’s camera glinting discreetly as he caught “authentic atmosphere”. The next, Andreas’s laughter cut through the murmur, a little too loud, a little too rehearsed.
“Of course, you’ve heard the rumours,” Andreas was saying to the lifestyle blogger, angling his body so the camera framed them and the glowing grove behind. “About Nerina and me.”
Marios heard her name first, then saw her: at his side, where he had very deliberately placed her, her hand looped through his arm. She went still, the way a hare does when a shadow passes overhead.
“Rumours?” the blogger repeated, eyes bright, already composing the headline.
“My… new inspiration,” Andreas said, with a gracious little half-bow in Nerina’s general direction, as though unveiling a product line.
Marios felt every pair of nearby eyes swivel. The neat story he and Sofia had agreed on, Nerina introduced as the estate’s artist and, incidentally, his date, crumpled soundlessly between them. For a heartbeat, no one spoke. Then Katerina arrived.
She did not so much enter as skim across the terrace, fiancé and investors in tow, like the prow of a very well-financed ship parting a sea of villagers and second cousins. Her gaze landed on Marios’s linked arm, flicked to Andreas, paused (just long enough) on Nerina’s face, and something sharp and privately satisfied flashed in her expression.
“Oh,” she said brightly, the word carrying further than any microphone. “I seem to be late to a… development.”
The nearest uncle seized the opening, clapping Marios on the shoulder with the cheerful brutality of a man who smelled both free wine and imminent signatures. “Perfect timing! Marios, paidi mou, you can settle everything now (business, romance, the future of the estate) before the dessert.”
The uncle’s hand was still on his shoulder when the circle convulsed and split. Private conversations – those careful little fires Marios had hoped to tend one by one at the edges of the evening – roared together into a single blaze.
An investor with cleverly distressed trainers was asking, loudly, about “scaling capacity” over the strains of the violin. Another, already two glasses past polite, leaned towards Marios’s uncle. “So he’s signing with the shipping prince or the startup princess? We should know where to park the money, eh?”
“Nerina, agapi mou, you must tell them how I inspired the new labels,” Andreas interjected, still stage-facing the blogger. “You see, we share a vision.”
“I thought she shared it with him,” Katerina remarked to no one in particular, eyes on Marios’s linked arm. Her fiancé laughed thinly. “It’s very… rustic,” he said, which in his mouth sounded like “unbranded”.
From the far side, Lazaros called, “Can we get the passionate disagreement closer to the olive trees, please? Better light.” A cousin dragged a speaker nearer; someone shushed the music; three aunts spoke simultaneously about grandchildren, tradition, and whether Nerina was Catholic.
Screens bloomed in every direction, Lazaros’s live feed, the blogger’s Stories, half the village on video call to the other half. Each angle caught a different version of the same train crash: Marios’ jaw tightening as yet another question landed, Nerina’s fingers loosening imperceptibly on his arm, Sofia’s eyes narrowing when Andreas’s hand drifted too familiarly towards Nerina’s waist. Pauses that might have passed unnoticed in a quiet room became, under LED glare, damning silences. A sideways glance was a snub, a flinch a confession. Someone zoomed in on Marios and Nerina together just as Andreas mentioned “chemistry”; another caught Sofia stepping between them and Andreas, expression sharp. The grove, usually so forgiving, suddenly felt like a stage with nowhere to exit.
Every hasty clarification breeds two new misconceptions. Names are swapped, roles blurred, alliances redrawn in real time for the benefit of a dozen cameras. Marios reaches for the sensible version of events and finds it slipping like oil between his fingers; each reasonable sentence, arriving three beats too late, sounds to the watching phones like a rehearsed lie.
He could almost hear the grove itself wince. This was supposed to be controlled theatre: curated tastings, soft-focus photographs, a gentle nudge towards the future. Instead, it had become a village trial conducted under ring lights, with Nerina, Sofia, Andreas and Katerina all unwilling witnesses. One misstep and he would not only botch a contract, but scorch his family’s name.
“Λοιπόν, Marios.” Uncle Thanasis’s voice cracked like a starter pistol over the terrace hum. “We are not children at the kafeneio. Enough dancing around. Are you taking the gentleman’s offer or not?”
Conversation faltered in ripples. The nearest circle of guests turned first; beyond them, faces swivelled like sunflowers hunting light. Or in this case, scandal. Even the cicadas seemed to mis-time their chorus.
Marios felt the prickle along his neck before he registered the silence. The lanterns, kindly a moment ago, now revealed too much: his uncle’s flushed cheeks; Andreas’s perfectly relaxed half-smile; Nerina’s fingers on his forearm, the lightest anchor, tightening then very carefully easing away as if prepared to let go at any sign of sinking.
“This is not, ” he began, but Thanasis, emboldened by an appreciative murmur from two cousins and a hovering investor, pressed on.
“We have investors here.” A sweeping gesture took in Andreas’s entourage, Katerina’s polished party, even the lifestyle blogger, who obligingly raised her phone for emphasis. “Tomorrow the wind may change, the price may fall, the trees may, phou!, decide to sulk. Tonight we have a chance. The whole village wants to know if you are man enough to take it.”
Lazaros’s camera caught Marios square on: the set jaw, the faint flare of his nostrils. On the little screens in the square below, someone typed, “Uncle calling him out LIVE 😂,” and hearts fluttered up the side of the broadcast like rising smoke.
Marios’s tongue felt thick with all the things he could not say. That Andreas’s glossy proposal was more leash than lifeline. That heritage did not fit neatly into a shareholder slide deck. That his uncle’s generation had mortgaged futures on pride; he was being asked to mortgage soul on spectacle.
And above all, that this conversation belonged at the kitchen table with coffee dregs and receipts, not under lanterns while strangers tallied his hesitation as weakness.
He drew breath, aware of Nerina’s stillness beside him, of Sofia’s sharp intake of air somewhere to his left, of Katerina’s professional, vaguely hungry attention.
“Thano,” he said, keeping his tone low, almost conversational. “With respect, this isn’t the moment, ”
“The moment is when money is on the table,” Thanasis cut in, a practised line he had no doubt been polishing all evening. Laughter scattered, nervous and eager. “Or would you rather keep waiting for miracles from Instagram and fairytales about ‘slow growth’?”
The word “miracles” snagged on Lazaros’s mic, pinged straight into the digital ether. In the square, an elderly aunt sniffed at a phone, “He thinks he’s above money, that boy,” while her neighbour countered, “No, he’s just stubborn like his grandfather. That saved them before.”
Up on the terrace, Marios felt the argument narrowing around him like a noose. Any answer here would not simply be a business decision; it would be a performance, instantly clipped, captioned, and replayed. A yes would look like capitulation under pressure, a no like reckless pride. Either way, the grove’s fate would be debated in comments sections before he had finished washing the tasting glasses.
He tried to imagine the sensible version of himself, calm, measured, saying something deft about due diligence and long-term strategy. That man seemed to exist two steps to his right, just out of reach.
“Marios?” Andreas prompted smoothly, pitching his voice to carry without seeming to. “Your uncle is only asking what everyone’s wondering.” His smile invited agreement, as if they were co-conspirators rather than opposing sides of a balance sheet.
Marios met his gaze and, for a moment, saw the future flattened into a brochure: “Theodorakis by Vlahos,” infinity pool where the old stone mill stood, heritage trees as tasteful background props. The breath he had drawn stayed trapped under his ribs.
He could feel the olive grove watching, the weight of generations pressing as heavily as the expectant eyes. This, then, was what it meant to fail in public: not a single mistake, but a thousand people deciding what his hesitation meant before he himself did.
Sofia moved before Marios could marshal a sentence, sliding into the narrow gap between Andreas and the nearest investor with the unhurried confidence of someone topping up water glasses in a crowded taverna. Her smile was bright, hospitable; her stance was immovable.
“Since everyone is wondering,” she said, as if picking up Andreas’s line, “maybe we should be clear what exactly they’re being asked to applaud tonight.”
Lazaros’s camera swung towards her instinctively. The little red light blinked as she tilted her head at Andreas.
“You’ve said ‘partner’ three times, kyrie Vlahos,” she went on, voice carrying neatly to the terrace edge, “but I haven’t heard ‘community’ once. Is this a partnership where the old ladies who pick herbs on the boundaries still recognise their own land? Or just one where the logo looks pretty on the bottle in London?”
A murmur rolled outward. On phones in the square below, comments began to stack: “Sofia 🔥,” “Village girl schooling rich boy,” “Ask about prices!”
“And authenticity,” she added pleasantly. “Will we still press our oil here, under these roofs? Or just pretend for the brochures while the real work moves somewhere cheaper?”
Katerina did not so much step into the circle as materialise at its edge, glass in hand, timing as precise as any pitch. Her smile, when it found Marios, was all professional warmth with a fine crack of something older running through it.
“Oh, Thanasi,” she said lightly, eyes never leaving Marios’s face, “you make it sound like this is new for him.” A polite ripple of laughter; investors leaned in. “Marios has always been very clear about his priorities. Remember?” She tilted her head, voice dipping into something almost fond. “He’s always chosen the grove over the person standing next to him.”
The words might have passed for nostalgia, but they settled with the dull weight of a verdict. A couple of cameras twitched closer. Sofia’s jaw tightened; Nerina’s fingers slipped entirely from Marios’s arm.
“Did you hear? That illustrator from Athens who stole half a gallery,” someone stage-whispered, the word “stole” slicing cleanly through the chatter. Nerina’s smile snapped, then wobbled, colour draining as if on cue. Lazaros’s lens found her just as Andreas, lazy and possessive, slung an arm along the back of her chair. “My new muse,” he announced, to appreciative, hungry laughter.
Down in the square, screens reflected the terrace like a broken mirror: Nerina looped on Marios’s arm in one clip, lounged against Andreas’s possessive reach in the next; Katerina’s fiancé surveying the crowd like a buyer at auction; an uncle jabbing the air. Each fragment arrived without context, inviting its own neat headline.
Marios reached for Nerina’s hand on instinct, fingers brushing the linen at her wrist rather than the skin he meant. Her eyes flicked to his, wide and glassy under the lanterns, as if she had been yanked between scenes without a script.
“Nerina. “We need to, ”
“Ah! There he is, our golden boy!” Uncle Thanasi’s baritone boomed over him, cutting clean through the music and chatter. A meaty arm clamped across Marios’s shoulders from behind, turning his half-step of retreat into a stagger forward. “Don’t run off now, re. You must make a toast.”
“Later,” Marios said through his teeth, twisting to look past Thanasi at Nerina. She had taken a half-step back, straight into Andreas’s line of reach; Andreas, ever helpful, shifted as if to close the gap.
“Now,” Thanasi overruled, with the expansive certainty of a man three ouzos past diplomacy. “For the future partner!” He flung his free arm wide, encompassing the terrace, the investors, the glowing bottles on ice. “Come, Marios, lift your glass. Our friends from Athens must see you are not afraid of success.”
There was a cheer. Too eager, half of it for the word “partner” rather than any contract. Phones lifted. Somewhere, Lazaros’s camera dipped closer.
“Uncle, I have to. “The young man from the ships,” he jabbed his chin toward Andreas without quite naming him, “has made a very generous proposal. We drink to that. To Theodorakis–Vlahos!” The invented hyphen cracked through the air like a shotgun.
Laughter, sharp and speculative, ricocheted around the circle. Someone whooped. Someone else hissed, “Partnership or sale?” near enough for the microphone on Lazaros’s lapel to catch.
Marios’s jaw locked. He could feel Nerina’s presence behind his uncle like a change in weather, but not see her. The last image he had burned at the backs of his eyes.
“Lift it,” Thanasi murmured, suddenly low and urgent by his ear. “Do you want them to think we’re desperate? Smile, for God’s sake. One glass. One word. Then you can go back to… whoever.”
The pause before “whoever” was microscopic and vicious. Marios’s gaze snapped to him; Thanasi’s expression was all avuncular pride, for the benefit of the watching phones.
“Uncle,” Marios said, very quietly, “she is not ‘whoever’.”
The declaration hung there, swallowed by the roar of another drunken cheer as someone thrust a glass into his free hand. Thanasi’s brows shot up, then flattened into something like satisfaction.
“Even better,” he announced to the crowd, seizing the remark and twisting it. “He already speaks like a man who has chosen. To the future partner. Business and otherwise!” His grin was beatific; the terrace erupted.
Marios felt the trap close: if he refused, he humiliated his family in front of money and cameras; if he complied, he stamped Andreas’s narrative with his own unwilling seal. Out of the corner of his eye he finally caught Nerina: a slim figure held in the no-man’s-land between them, Andreas’s shadow falling over her shoulder, her face caught between flight and frozen.
He raised the glass, not in assent but as a shield, buying the seconds he could not afford.
Sofia slid between Andreas and the semicircle of men in linen jackets with the practiced ease of someone topping up wine. “Careful,” she said brightly, refilling a glass without asking, “if you ‘rebrand’ any more tradition, it will forget its own name.”
Andreas turned, smile already dialled to charming. “On the contrary, kyria Sofia, we honour it. We simply… curate the story for a modern audience.”
“Is that what we are?” She tipped her head, curls escaping their knot. “Curated? Like a shelf in Kolonaki? One bottle of ‘authentic poverty’, one of ‘picturesque labour’, and a nice ribbon saying ‘sustainable’?”
A couple of investors chuckled uneasily. Andreas spread his hands. “Branding is just telling the truth in a way people will pay for.”
“That depends whose truth you’re selling,” she returned. “The trees’? The family’s? Or yours, with a good haircut?”
Lazaros, caught by the rise in her voice, swung his camera their way. The mic picked up only Sofia’s sharp cadence, Andreas’s indulgent laugh, and the phrase “good haircut,” delivered like an accusation. On-screen, it played as a village girl scolding a patient prince; the nuance of loyalty and warning bled out in the glare of the lanterns.
Katerina caught the way Nerina’s knuckles had whitened around the stem of her glass, the way Marios kept losing his thread mid-sentence whenever his gaze snagged on her. A familiar irritation (at him, at herself, at the whole stubborn hillside) curled her mouth into something like a smile.
“See?” she said lightly to her fiancé, pitching her voice just high enough to skim the nearest circle of relatives. “Some people never learn to choose love over land. They’ll marry the grove before they marry a person.”
Her fiancé gave a polite, non-committal chuckle. The relatives, primed by a decade of half-remembered rumours, heard only “never choose love” and “marry” and “before.” Within a heartbeat it became, in three different whispers, confirmation that Marios had once been engaged. And not to the woman on his arm now.
A cousin already too far gone on village wine flung an arm round Lazaros’s shoulder and bellowed into the live feed that “everything is for sale tonight.
Someone at the edge of the group laughed about “that art scandal in Athens last year,” and Nerina’s hand jolted, a dark crescent of wine leaping against the rim. Her face emptied of colour; her shoulders locked. Lazaros’s lens, greedy for reaction, hung on the sudden stillness. Comments flooded his screen, who is she, what does she know, just as surrounding conversations frayed into simultaneous, unintelligible quarrels.
The sound built not so much as a murmur as a rising tide. Snatches of English from Andreas’s investors, broad village Greek from the uncles, Lazaros’s running commentary floating above it all like a particularly intrusive seagull. Lanterns swayed in the breeze, throwing everyone’s faces into restless light and shadow.
Marios realised, with the unpleasant clarity of a man watching a tractor slide towards a ditch in slow motion, that the circle had closed around him. Uncle Thanasis had wedged himself between Marios and the path, broad shoulders forming a human gate. On his other side, one of Andreas’s sleek-suited companions had drifted closer, clutching a tablet as if a signature might materialise by proximity alone.
“Listen, Marios,” Thanasis insisted, already flushing with the effort of being reasonable in front of strangers, “you don’t get this kind of offer every day. You shake hands now, they say it on camera, the whole world hears the Theodorakis name. “A symbolic gesture. A moment. One clip, and suddenly you’re on every lifestyle feed from London to Dubai. We’re not talking about signing your life away, just…” He made a graceful little looping motion with his hand. “A partnership.”
Someone thrust a branded folder towards Marios as if summoned by the word. He stared at it, then at the faces surrounding him. The eager investors, his hopeful uncle, the phone lenses glittering like extra eyes. A small, precise headache began to pulse behind his right temple.
“Symbolic,” Thanasis echoed, nodding vigorously. “You say yes, we drink to it, they take their little pictures. The tablet-holder froze, folder half-extended. Thanasis’s mouth fell open. Somewhere beyond the ring of lanterns, a group of teenagers whooped, having caught “signing away the estate” and nothing else.
The echo of his own voice, sharper than he’d intended, made Marios acutely aware of who stood just within his peripheral vision. Nerina. She had been at his elbow a moment before, light hand hooked in the crook of his arm; now there was a fractional space between them, as if the words themselves had forced it.
He turned just enough to see her face. The colour had not yet returned to her cheeks after the stray remark about “that art scandal in Athens.” Her fingers, still clamped round the stem of her glass, were so tight the knuckles shone pale against her skin. Wine clung to the bowl in a dark crescent where it had jolted.
Her eyes flickered, not quite meeting his. “For a photo op.” In this whirl of curated images, staged romances, invented narratives, the phrase landed with a private, ironic precision he had not meant to give it.
Guilt pricked. Was that what this looked like from the outside? Him with Nerina on his arm, letting Sofia and the others present them as a reassuring tableau for the investors’ benefit. A neat, photogenic answer to everyone’s questions. A gesture.
Her mouth pressed into a thin, controlled line. If she felt the parallel, she gave no sign beyond the way her shoulders had gone very straight, as if bracing against impact. The softness he’d grown used to in her expression (when she talked about labels, or the way the light hit the old stone mill) had been replaced by something shuttered and remote.
“And who said anything about signing it away?” Andreas protested smoothly, though there was a crack of annoyance under the polish. “Marios, really. You make me sound like a villain. We’re talking about elevating what you already have. A little visibility, some curated storytelling. “You can’t bottle a life and slap a label on it.”
Lazaros, delighted, swung his camera between speakers like a conductor encouraging a particularly unruly orchestra. On the screen in his hand, comments raced faster, fragments of the scene breaking off and replicating down the hill as every watching phone in the village square birthed its own version of events.
Marios kept his gaze on Nerina for a fraction longer than was wise in front of so many witnesses, trying to soften the blow of his words with a look he could not quite articulate. I’m not talking about you. I don’t want you to be a prop in this.
Her lashes flicked once; if she understood, the knowledge only made the mask on her face fit more tightly. She stood in the middle of a storm of stories, some false, one dangerously close to the truth, and for the first time since she’d arrived on the estate, she looked not like an observer sketching from the edge, but like someone pinned to the page.
Andreas’s smile did not falter; it merely thinned, acquiring a sheen of injured magnanimity that played beautifully for the lens.
“My friend is a purist,” he told Lazaros’s camera, voice pitched to carry just enough. “You have to admire it, no? Two stubborn men, one beautiful estate. Of course we argue. It means we care.” He laughed, the sound half-charm, half-warning, and with a practised ease slid one hand in a light, proprietorial curve behind Nerina’s back.
She didn’t move towards him so much as allow herself to be redirected, the subtle adjustment of a person conserving energy in the middle of a storm. To anyone not watching her hands she appeared merely reserved, a shy new element in a glamorous story Lazaros’s followers were already typing into being: #unexpectedcouple, #shippingthis.
“You see?” Andreas went on, angling them both towards the phone. “Passionate negotiation, that’s all. This place deserves nothing less than passion.” His fingers brushed Nerina’s bare elbow as if by accident; the contact made her flinch so slightly that only Marios, crushed between relatives and investors, seemed to notice.
Across the lantern‑lit crush, Sofia saw the circle closing and did what she had done since childhood: she inserted herself. One firm hand on Thanasis’s forearm, the other braced against Marios’s shoulder, she levered a gap in the wall of older male certainty.
“Excuse me, the grove isn’t livestock at the weekly market,” she said, smile bright and teeth bared. “Maybe we let the people who actually pick the olives speak before the suits decide our soul looks better in their brochure, eh?”
Thanasis spluttered; an investor murmured, “colourful,” to his neighbour. Before Sofia could press the advantage, a cool voice slid in like a knife.
“That’s Marios for you,” Katerina remarked lightly. “He’s always chosen obligation over the people who love him.”
For a heartbeat he merely stared, heat roaring in his ears. Then something old and carefully buried tore loose.
“And you,” he said, too loudly, “walked away from all this. From me. You don’t get to lecture me about love and duty.”
The naked hurt in his voice made Nerina’s skin prickle. She startled back, straight into Lazaros’s shot, where comments instantly christened her the “homewrecker artist,” complete with speculative emojis and gleeful question marks.
The air thickened with accusation and spin; alliances splintered in real time, visible even through Lazaros’s jittering livestream. Marios felt himself detach, an orbiting body, as Sofia and Andreas squared off with thin smiles and sharpened politeness. Katerina’s fiancé’s jaw hardened by degrees. Hemmed in by whispers of “scandal” and “Athens artist,” Nerina understood how precarious every fragile bond she’d dared to form had become.
“Enough.”
It came out rougher than he intended, but it did the job. The pockets of conversation around them faltered; even the cicadas seemed to pause between pulses of sound. Lantern‑light threw the fine cracks in his composure into sharp relief.
“I have heard,” Marios said, very clearly, “quite enough about visions tonight.”
Thanasis made a warning sound in his throat. “Marios. “You want to talk business, Uncle? Fine. But let’s stop pretending this is anything except what it is. You don’t push me in front of investors like a bull at a fair and then call it ‘family duty’.”
A ripple went through the older men; someone half‑laughed in disbelief. Marios turned, taking in Andreas’s careful, sympathetic frown, the glittering interest of Katerina’s entourage, the phone screens held high like tiny, unblinking moons.
“You all have your visions,” he went on, bitterness sharpening each word. “Luxury villas. Lifestyle brands. Engagement stories for the internet. Wonderful. Only. This place is not a backdrop for anyone’s rebranding. My grandfather bled into this soil. My father died still calculating fertiliser costs in his head. I’m not about to sell the grove’s soul so some brochure looks more ‘authentic’.”
Andreas raised his hands, charm flicked to its lowest setting. “No one is talking about selling your soul, Marios. We’re talking partnership. Opportunity.”
“Your opportunity. Your narrative.” Marios’s gaze skewered him for a moment before sliding, inexorably, to the women beside him. To Sofia’s taut jaw. To Nerina’s white‑knuckled grip on her sketchbook, held like a shield.
“And apparently,” he said, softer but far more dangerous, “everyone here knew more about this than I did.”
Sofia stiffened. “That’s not. “You,” to Sofia, “have been whispering logistics with him for days. And you,” he added, turning to Nerina, feeling the hurt lance deeper for being so new, “let him introduce you as his…whatever that was, while standing on my arm like nothing was wrong.”
Nerina flinched as if struck. “Marios, it wasn’t, ”
“Do you have any idea,” he demanded, words tumbling past the point of recall, “what it feels like to be the last to know in my own home? To watch deals, stories, relationships being arranged over my head while I’m out there counting crates?”
He flicked a hand toward Lazaros’s phone, where hearts and laughing faces cascaded over their tiny reflections. “Strangers know more about what’s happening to my life than I do. My ex turns up with a fiancé and a camera crew. An investor parades my. “: my guest as his rumoured conquest. And my supposed…” He tasted “friends” and found it suddenly too fragile. “My supposed allies keep me in the dark, because what? I’m too busy? Too serious? Easier to handle once the decisions are made?”
Sofia’s eyes flashed. “That is not fair.”
“No,” he said, chest heaving. “What’s not fair is all of you playing games with my family’s land and my name, while I stand here like some useful prop. If you wanted to treat me like a figurehead, you could have at least had the courtesy to warn me.”
The last word cracked in the cool night air. For a moment, no one spoke. Lanterns swayed on their hooks, casting restless shadows over faces: some stricken, some avid, some already composing tomorrow’s version of events.
Sofia’s laugh came out short and disbelieving. “Figurehead? Are you serious?”
He didn’t answer, which only seemed to feed something already smouldering in her.
“You think I enjoy ‘whispering logistics’ behind your back?” she shot back, stepping closer, lantern‑light catching the flush along her cheekbones. “Do you know why people come to me with ideas, Marios? Because every time something really matters, you disappear into your spreadsheets and your trees and you shut the door.”
A murmur rolled through the crowd. Thanasis muttered her name in warning; she ignored him.
“I am not just staff you can turn on when it’s harvest and off when it’s over,” Sofia went on, voice climbing with each word. “I am not your shock absorber for uncles and tourists and whatever mood you drag back from the fields. I am your partner in this, whether you ever say the word or not.”
Her voice snagged on the last syllable; she swallowed hard, eyes bright. “I stand in the middle and smooth everything so you don’t have to break. That doesn’t mean I don’t break too.”
Andreas recovered first. Of course he did.
He turned slightly, angling himself towards Lazaros’s still‑live phone and the cluster of bloggers like flowers to the sun. “Just to be clear,” he said lightly, voice pitched to travel, “any talk about me and Nerina is a bit of playful PR that’s clearly been misunderstood. We were brainstorming stories, not announcing an engagement.”
A few laughed uncertainly; the word PR did its usual anaesthetic work.
Then, without moving his smile, he leaned in so close Nerina could feel the cool brush of his breath. “Smile,” he murmured, teeth barely parting. “If you flinch now, we both look like liars. You walk this back tonight, it’s your credibility and mine that burn. Is that really the story you want?”
Nerina’s throat tightened. The word “scandal” skimmed the terrace like a stone across water, sending out rings of hungry silence. Andreas’s hand, light on her elbow, felt suddenly like a manacle. “I am not your prop,” she said, voice low but carrying. “Not for PR, not for rumours.” Colour rose in her cheeks. “And I am very tired of men deciding my story for me.” A murmur swelled; someone near the lantern hooks hissed, “Athens, you heard?” Nerina’s fingers dug into her sketchbook. “There are things you don’t know,” she managed, gaze fixed on the dark trees rather than the phones. “But I won’t unpack my whole life here for your spectacle.”
For a long second, even the cicadas seemed to pause. Phones hovered, mid‑record; an uncle’s protest died half‑formed. Marios felt every gaze like heat on his skin. “This isn’t a market stall,” he said, each consonant clipped. “No contracts, no announcements, no… arrangements are being made tonight. Not about the grove, and not about anyone’s hearts.” The word hung, sharp as broken glass.
The music did not so much end as collapse, sliced off mid‑bouzouki riff as if someone had yanked the night itself from the plug. For a beat, the terrace existed only in the rasp of cicadas and the tinny delay of Lazaros’s livestream echoing up faintly from phones in the shadows and, more ominously, from the village square below.
Marios became aware, with a sort of detached clarity, that his hand was still on Nerina’s back. He let it fall, flexing his fingers once as if releasing a branch that had cut him. Faces swam into focus: his uncle Dimitris flushed and damp, investors blinking like owls in the lantern‑light, bloggers angling for better shots, Sofia at the edge of the crush with her jaw set and her eyes on him as if willing him to do something, anything, that was not surrender.
“I think,” he said, and heard how flat his own voice sounded in the sudden quiet, “that’s enough for tonight.”
A rustle ran through the crowd, half confusion, half appetite for whatever came next. They were used to him speaking about rainfall totals and milling schedules, not… this. He steadied his shoulders, tasting copper at the back of his throat.
“The harvest continues tomorrow,” he went on, each word measured, “but the festival is over. Now.” He let the last word land. “I’d ask everyone who isn’t family or staff to give the estate some space and make your way down.”
It was not loud, but it carried. Over the clink of glasses arrested mid‑toast, over the soft protest of a violinist still holding his bow aloft. Somewhere near the lantern hooks, a blogger mouthed, “He’s serious,” to her camera.
From the lower path came a faint cheer. Someone in the village, misreading the silence as the prelude to fireworks. Above it, the cicadas resumed their relentless chorus, as if reclaiming the night from human drama.
“It’s adorable you think you can just. Turn off a launch,” one of the investors began, half‑laughing as if someone had mistimed a product reveal. A blogger, phone aloft, called, “Just one statement, Marios, then we’re out of your hair, promise,” already zooming in on his face. Andreas lifted both hands, smile re‑strapped on.
“Come now,” he said lightly, angling his body to block a couple of lenses. “Everyone’s over‑excited. We can spin this as rustic authenticity, yes? A passionate family moment, very, Mediterranean. Give him five minutes, we pour another round. “We were told there’d be an announcement,” he muttered to no one and everyone. “My driver is waiting in Kalamata.”
Marios did not raise his voice. He did not need to. “Giorgo,” he said to the DJ, each syllable clean as a cut, “σβήστο. Now.”
The speakers died with an embarrassed pop. “Bar’s closed,” he added, without looking at Andreas. “No more drinks. No more filming. This is finished.”
For a heartbeat, all that moved were the lanterns, shivering in the suddenly audible wind.
Around him, the air curdled. The elder uncles, those who still measured success in the thickness of a handshake and the weight of a cash envelope, began to hiss to one another about “lost opportunities” and “city people who won’t know how to grab a chance if it slaps them.” A couple were careless enough to let the Greek carry clearly. Marios caught the word “ανεύθυνος” and felt it land between his shoulder blades.
The younger cousins, by contrast, had gone very still, their gazes flinty and openly hostile: not at him, but at Andreas’s polished smile and Katerina’s neat little entourage. One of the boys shifted as if to step forward.
Sofia got there first. She slid into the narrow space at Marios’s side with practised ease, one palm light on his forearm, her other hand lifted just enough to suggest a barrier rather than a welcome. Her chin came up, eyes hard and bright.
“Όποιος έχει δουλειά με τον Μάριο,” she said, voice low but carrying, “θα το πει ήρεμα. Σαν άνθρωπος. Otherwise, you talk to me.”
Her stance was not dramatic, no flung arms, no raised volume, but it was unmistakable. She placed herself directly between him and the most insistent uncle, shoulders squared, a hostess turned bouncer. When Andreas drifted a fraction closer, charm smoothing over impatience, she angled her body so that he, too, had to address her first.
“No one,” she added, in English now for the benefit of the investors and bloggers clustered like gulls, “bullies the family into decisions on a festival night. Not for money, not for headlines, not for… romance. You want contracts, you come back in daylight.”
The nearest cameras wavered, uncertain whether this, too, might be content. Sofia’s gaze swept over them, sharp as olive leaves in a north wind, and for once, even the gossips thought twice.
Nerina, still nominally on Marios’s arm yet suddenly weightless, caught the phrase “that art scandal in Athens” hissed between two investors. The words sliced clean through the lantern‑glow; her vision funnelled, sound thickening to wool. She managed a polite, strangled, “Excuse me: too warm,” before slipping towards the terrace’s darker edge, spine straight, panic carefully caged behind an expression of faint, ladylike fatigue.
The crowd began to leak down the narrow path in ragged clumps: offended uncles, exhilarated cousins, dazed bloggers already drafting captions. Lazaros, late to remorse, thumbed his livestream shut; the final hearts and “🔥” froze on‑screen before winking away. What remained on the overlook was a taut, echoing hush in which everyone bound to the grove understood, unwillingly, that tonight had split open more than a contract.
For a moment he could hear only his own breathing, ragged and too loud in the hush that had fallen over the terrace. Lantern-light swung gently in the breeze, throwing the gathered faces into brief, wavering relief: uncles with folded arms, workers still in dusty shirts, villagers in their Sunday-best-for-a-Saturday-night, Sofia rigid by the bar, Andreas with his jaw clenched, Katerina porcelain-still beside her fiancé. Lazaros’s camera light burned a small white hole in the darkness, red recording dot accusing and unblinking.
Marios dragged a sleeve across his forehead and found his hand shaking. So much for being the calm one. When he tried to speak, his throat refused; the first word came out as little more than a rasp.
“I can’t, ” He stopped, swallowed, tried again. “I can’t keep pretending.”
There was the smallest ripple through the crowd, the sound of people leaning closer without moving their feet. He felt it like pressure on his chest.
“You all wanted a story,” he went on, voice hoarse but gaining steadiness. “The…perfect couple. The romantic picture for the brochures, the Instagram, the investors. ‘Look how stable the estate is. Look how settled he is.’”
His gaze flicked, almost against his will, to where Nerina stood near the edge of the terrace lights, her profile caught in gold and shadow. He forced himself not to look away.
“That was never real,” he said, the words landing with an audible intake of breath from somewhere near the fountain. “I asked her to play along. I let you all believe it. Because it was easier for you to talk about our supposed wedding than to ask how close we are to losing this place.”
He exhaled, a rough sound that was almost a laugh and not at all amused.
“I thought if I looked…complete,” he said, groping for the word, “no one would see the cracks. Investors would stop sniffing for weakness. Andreas would stop assuming he could buy his way into everything, including my life. And the village, ” His mouth twisted. “The village would have something sweeter to gossip about than whether the Theodorakis grove is one bad harvest away from being carved up for villas.”
There was the faint clink of a glass against stone. No one spoke.
“I’m tired,” he finished, the confession landing quieter than his earlier defiance but somehow heavier. “Tired of smiling for cameras while I calculate which bill I can delay. Tired of wondering if any offer of help comes without a price I can’t afford. So I built a shield. Out of her. Out of us.”
His eyes found Nerina fully now, and for the first time that evening he did not try to arrange his expression into something reassuring.
“It wasn’t fair,” he said, the admission tasting like salt and metal. “To her. Or to any of you. Whatever else happens tonight, you should at least know this much was a lie.”
For a heartbeat Nerina did not move, though she felt the heat of a hundred looks slide over her skin like sun at noon. Then, with a stiffness that betrayed the effort it cost her, she stepped forward into the fuller circle of lantern-light. Her fingers were ink-stained even tonight; they curled and uncurled against the skirt of her dress.
“Marios isn’t the only one who lied,” she said, her voice soft but somehow carrying. “I did say yes to the pretending. I encouraged it. Because your attention” “was safer on a fake love story than on me.”
A murmur fluttered at the edges. She drew a breath that trembled.
“The woman you’ve welcomed as Nerina Kalogirou… that isn’t the name on my ID. It isn’t the one my parents gave me.” Her throat worked. “I came here under a different surname because the one I was born with is tied to a scandal. An art-world mess in Athens. Contracts, accusations, lawyers. The sort of thing,” she managed a brittle half-smile, “that makes any sensible business think twice before trusting you with its future. Or its brand.”
It was Katerina who broke first.
“Since we’re trading truths,” she said, and the brightness of her voice sat oddly beside the sharp colour in her cheeks, “let me correct the official version.”
Her fiancé turned a fraction towards her; she did not look at him.
“I didn’t ‘outgrow’ Marios,” she went on, gaze fixed somewhere over the crowd’s heads. “I left because I was certain he would never choose me over this place. Over these trees, this… duty.” Her mouth curved, not quite a smile. “So I chose for both of us. I told myself it was ambition. That Athens and investors and platforms were the braver path.”
At last she glanced at Marios, something raw and unvarnished breaking through the poise.
“Ask me now,” she said quietly, “if I’m still sure.”
It was Lazaros who moved next. The little white glare of his camera dipped, beam sliding off Andreas’s face as if even the lens were embarrassed. He cleared his throat. “For the record,” he said, angling the camera so the mic still caught him, “this wasn’t exactly spontaneous romance. Andreas pitched me a series. Rustic Greek estate, heritage olives, and (his words) a ‘visually coherent love-interest arc.’”
He gave a humourless huff. “The plan was to find whichever woman played best on screen. Sofia with the village-queen angle, Nerina as the mysterious artist, even Katerina for the ‘full-circle’ ex. Rotate the casting, keep the brand story constant.” His eyes, for once, weren’t laughing. “The only non-negotiable part was that it had to make Andreas look like a saviour.”
Andreas actually blinked. The practiced half-smile wavered; for a moment he looked not cinematic but merely cornered, a man who had misjudged his audience. “This is… how branding works,” he said, a shade too quickly. “Storytelling. Positioning. It’s just business.” But under lanterns and phone screens, with other people bleeding real truths, the phrase sounded paltry, exposing how coolly he had costed out their histories (and their hearts) from the beginning.
For a moment Nerina didn’t move. The crowd’s restless murmur lapped at the edges of the terrace; somewhere a phone chimed and was hastily silenced. Then she took one step forward into the spill of lantern-light, as if the ground itself had tilted and left her no choice.
“If we’re… telling whole stories now,” she said, and her voice failed on the first word. She swallowed, tried again. “My name isn’t. “The name you know me by isn’t the one I was born with.”
A flutter ran through the onlookers, hushed but unmistakable. The village was hearing the magic words: not what she seems.
“I studied illustration in Athens,” she went on, the words coming more quickly, as if she might outrun her own shame. “I was recruited by an older artist, very established. He said he wanted to mentor me. In practice, he wanted sketches he could sign.” A brittle smile touched her mouth. “I let him. I was flattered, scared, naïve. Take your pick. And when a major commission came in, he used work I’d done under his ‘guidance’. When I protested, he called it collaboration. When I wouldn’t back down, he called it plagiarism.”
She lifted her chin, but her fingers were clenched white around the strap of her bag. “His friends sat on the panel. His lawyer wrote the letters. By the time it was over, the story was that I’d stolen from him. Galleries stopped answering my emails. Clients, too. My own family suggested I apologise and be sensible.”
There was a hard little silence.
“So I changed my name,” Nerina said simply. “Left Athens. Took whatever commissions I could get, as someone else. When I saw the posting for work here, I thought, ” Her gaze swept the terraces, the hanging lights, the faces. “I thought maybe, in a place this small, I could disappear in plain sight. Just… draw trees. Label bottles. Pay my rent. No scandals, no lawyers, no articles with my picture.”
Her breath hitched; she forced it level. “When Andreas started circling, when people began asking if I was with Marios… saying yes wasn’t only about helping the estate. It was convenient. Investors and journalists tend not to look too closely at the quiet girlfriend in the background of the story.” Her eyes met Marios’s, apology written as plainly as ink. “I told myself it was a harmless lie. That I was borrowing his name the way I’d once watched my work borrowed: except this time I was the one doing the using.”
Her shoulders dropped on the exhale. “It wasn’t harmless. It protected me. It also meant I was lying to all of you, and to the one person here who kept telling me the grove deserved honesty.”
Marios became aware, absurdly, of the way the lantern nearest him swung on its hook, throwing his own shadow against the stone wall like a man about to be hanged. His throat felt raw, but his voice, when it came, was level.
“She’s not the only one who used a lie,” he said. “No one forced me into this. Andreas dangled money and exposure, Katerina talked about ‘narratives’ and ‘positioning’ but I was the one who decided that if selling olive oil required selling my private life, then that was just another line item in the budget.”
A ripple went through the crowd; someone shifted, a glass clinked.
“I told myself it was practical,” he went on. “The grove needed investment. A tidy romance made the spreadsheets prettier. I told myself everybody lies a little for business. And every time Nerina looked uncomfortable, or my uncles asked questions, I filed it under ‘cost of survival’.”
He drew a breath that seemed to square his shoulders from the inside. “It isn’t survival. It’s rot.” His gaze locked on Andreas. “Whatever contract we discussed, whatever partnership. Consider it dead. The grove will not be a backdrop for anyone’s scripted love story, including mine.”
It was Katerina who broke the silence next, though for once she did not look stage-prepared. Her fiancé’s jaw had set in a banker’s line beside her; the village stared at her as if waiting for tonight’s final course.
“Marios isn’t the only one who did calculations,” she said, and the gloss of her voice faltered. “When I left, I didn’t just go to Athens for a startup. I asked him to come with me. To sell, to lease, to… choose something that wasn’t this hillside.”
She laughed once, without humour. “He hesitated. Of course he did. This place is his spine.”
Her hand tightened on the strap of her designer bag. “So I chose for both of us. I walked away. I built a company and an engagement that proved I didn’t need this life: or the man who wouldn’t follow me. I told myself that made me stronger, smarter, freer.”
Her eyes flicked to Marios, and the gloss fell off entirely. “But standing here, listening to him burn a contract in public instead of selling himself, ” Her voice thinned. “I’m no longer sure I was the one who chose well.”
Lazaros, who had been circling the edges like any other documentarian, stepped into the lantern-light and turned the camera on himself first, then on Andreas. His voice, when he spoke, was stripped of flirtation. He quoted, word for word, leaked messages about a pre-planned “authentic love story” campaign. How any suitably photogenic woman could be slotted in as a “relatable fiancée” to humanise a luxury brand. “You weren’t looking for a partner,” he said clearly, every syllable captured by a dozen phones. “You were casting a bride-shaped logo.” The phrase landed like a stone in a bowl of water, sending ripples through the guests and, beyond them, through whoever was already watching the livestream. The fantasy of the benevolent billionaire patron shattered audibly, in little gasps and the soft, incredulous swearing of men who had once envied Andreas’s life.
For a second, Andreas looked as if he might brazen it out; then, under the white glare of a dozen tiny screens, something in his expression simply gave way. “All right,” he said hoarsely. “I don’t know how to build worth, only how to frame it so people pay more.” The confession hung there, ugly and naked, throwing Marios’s plainspoken, mud-under-the-fingernails honesty into almost indecent relief.
Faces around the terrace shifted as admiration, pity, and disillusionment quietly rearranged who stood with whom.
The older men from the village, who had earlier hovered near Andreas’s table like iron filings to a magnet, found fresh interest in their cigarettes and the scuffs on their shoes. One by one, they drifted back toward the Theodorakis side, gravitating to the familiar bulk of Marios’s uncles as if remembering, in real time, that they still had to meet these people in church on Sunday.
A cluster of younger women who had been whispering over Andreas’s watch and his car now stole glances at Nerina instead, shock softening into something like protective solidarity. Someone’s aunt crossed herself discreetly. Someone else muttered, “Poor girl,” with the relish of having a new story that, for once, did not end in a wedding.
Investors and hangers-on, who earlier had aligned themselves by the neat logic of money, began to look oddly marooned: caught between the shrinking island of Andreas’s status and the rocky, inconvenient mainland of Marios’s principles. They edged back a few paces, bodies angling so that if tomorrow’s photos were examined too closely, their allegiance might remain plausibly deniable.
Sofia, who had spent most of the evening orbiting the village tables to keep conversation pleasantly lubricated, stepped without hesitation to Nerina’s side. The move was small, only a shift of sandal on stone, but it cut a clean line through the crowd. Beside Marios, Lazaros lowered his camera a fraction and, almost unconsciously, took up a position that read as guard rather than observer.
Even Katerina’s fiancé, who until now had stood with the rigid elegance of a man used to being the most respectable presence in any room, hesitated. His eyes flicked from Marios to Andreas to Katerina, calculating risk against reputation, and ended up resting uneasily on the village, which for the first time looked less like a picturesque backdrop and more like a jury.
Marios became aware, with a sick sort of clarity, that he was still holding Nerina’s hand. Her fingers were cold, despite the heat of the lights and bodies, the slight tremor in them running straight up into his chest. He could, even now, make some vague statement about “misunderstandings” and “private matters.” He could let the village decide its own version, as it always did.
Instead, he heard his own voice say, “We lied.”
The word was small and brutal on the terrace stones.
“We thought,” he went on, the Greek thick in his mouth, “that if people believed we were…together, it would stop the questions. About her. About me. About what kind of investors we would allow into this place.” A faint, rueful huff escaped him. “I was tired of being told a man without a wife must be hiding something. So I hid behind her.”
A murmur moved through the crowd. Somewhere, someone tutted; somewhere else, someone nodded, as if recognising a familiar sin committed on a larger stage.
Beside him, Nerina drew a breath that sounded almost painful. “It wasn’t only for him,” she said, her voice thin but steady enough to carry. “I agreed because: because the truth about me is worse than village gossip.”
She lifted her chin, as if presenting her throat to a knife. “My name isn’t the name I gave you. I left Athens because of an art scandal with my real signature on it. I was blamed for work I didn’t steal, and no one cared about the difference. Coming here under another name was the only way I knew to keep working, to survive.”
Her eyes swept the terrace once, flinching at every raised phone, every familiar face turned sharp with curiosity. “So when Marios asked me to pretend, I thought. Good. One more lie will protect the others. If I look like a woman in love, no one will look too carefully at my past.”
A thin sound, almost a laugh, escaped her. “Turns out,” she added, with unexpected bleak humour, “it’s harder to fake being in love when you start…forgetting where the pretending stops.”
The sentence hung there, dangerously close to a confession of another sort. Marios felt every gaze on him, felt the flush creep under his sunburn; but there was nothing in him now that could manage denial. His eyes met hers, dark and stricken, and he inclined his head the barest fraction, as if accepting a debt.
“If you think less of anyone,” he said quietly to the terrace at large, “let it be me. I asked her to stand next to me and take the bullets meant for my decisions. I may be a good farmer, but I have been a coward in other ways.”
The word “coward” from his own mouth jolted the listeners more than any accusation could have done. In that unvarnished moment, stripped of all PR gloss and romantic speculation, Marios stopped being merely the dutiful son of the grove and became, uncomfortably, one of them: a man who had tried to manage appearances and made a mess of the truth.
Around the terrace, spines straightened, expressions shifted. Some looked away, embarrassed by so much honesty at close range; others found themselves, almost against their will, inching perceptibly closer to his side of the invisible line.
For once, Katerina’s timing failed her. The polished smile she summoned in boardrooms and on panels appeared, wavered, and then (under the collective, pitiless attention of the terrace) simply slid off her face.
“I didn’t just leave for the startup,” she heard herself say, the confession sounding oddly flat to her own ears. “I left because I thought he would never choose me. Not over this place. Not over these trees.”
A few of the village women exchanged looks; one of the investors’ wives tilted her head, suddenly interested in a way no term sheet had ever made her. The narrative of the sleek, successful ex who had traded mud for marble floors shrank, revealing instead a woman who had gambled love against ambition and now, in front of everyone, dared to wonder aloud if she had bet on the wrong horse.
Until tonight he had framed other people’s crises, trimming them into tidy arcs with a drone shot and a wistful voice-over. Now his own footage implicated him, too. With the terrace lights glaring like a jury’s lamps, Lazaros understood that he had stepped over a line: from jaunty outsider scavenging stories to reluctant participant answerable to them.
For the first time since arriving, he looks merely expensively dressed and badly lit. Without the PR gloss, the designer linen and watch read less as effortless taste than as armour that has failed at the crucial moment. All his careful talk of “vision” and “partnership” seems, in retrospect, like a script everyone has just agreed to stop believing.
The murmur did not so much ripple as curdle, turning the warm babble of the terrace into something sharp-edged. Someone thumbed the music off mid-chorus. The speakers died with an embarrassed crackle. Into the sudden quiet stepped a new soundtrack: the soft, insectile whirr of phone cameras shifting from discreet to brazen, the little artificial chimes of recording icons being tapped.
Andreas felt, with the unpleasant clarity of a man realising he had walked onto the wrong stage, every lens swing towards him.
His default smile ( the one that had disarmed journalists, junior bankers and at least three mayors) rose automatically to his face, held for a second, and then faltered. Without the cover of background noise and choreographed lighting, it looked less like charm and more like a grimace of someone caught with his hand in a till he had personally designed.
“Look,” he began, one hand slicing the air in a gesture that usually summoned agreement, or at least deference. “We are all adults here. Partnerships are…mutually beneficial narratives. Everyone understands that.”
The words landed with the dull thud of something dropped from a great height and found to be hollow. A couple of the younger waiters exchanged glances; an uncle of Marios’s made a derisive noise through his teeth.
Andreas’s gaze skittered, first to Sofia, who stood with her arms folded and her head tipped, the patron saint of village common sense regarding him as one might a dog who had brought in something unspeakable from the fields. Then to Nerina, whose expression (pale, watchful, mouth set) offered none of the softening deference he was used to from women in negotiations. Finally, to Lazaros, whose camera, lowered but still on, pointed at the flagstones between them like a weapon in temporary truce.
Each face presented not an escape route but a locked gate. He could see, as plainly as he saw the phone screens raised behind them, the future thumbnails: his own figure, caught mid-protest, beneath captions other people would write. Once those clips slipped free into feeds and group chats, his carefully curated persona would no longer be his to edit.
He opened his mouth again, groping for the practiced vocabulary of damage control, misunderstanding, context, unfortunate phrasing, but the village square instincts of the terrace got there first. Somewhere at the back, a woman said, just loudly enough, “Άμα έχεις τα λεφτά, νομίζεις πως αγοράζεις και τις ιστορίες μας.” If you have the money, you think you buy our stories too.
Laughter, short and sharp, broke out. Not everyone joined in; a couple of investors shifted, uncomfortable, checking whether this was still a business event or had become something dangerously personal. But the spell of his authority, such as it had been, was gone. What remained was a man in very good linen, exposed under bad light, realising far too late that in this place, reputation travelled faster than any press release.
Marios moved before he quite registered that he had done so; one step, half a turn, and he was no longer merely beside Nerina but between her and the thickening ring of phones. His shadow fell across her skirts. Shoulders set, jaw tight, he looked less like a host smoothing over an awkward moment and more like a man finally done with being reasonable.
“Theodorakis oil will stand or fall on its own merits,” he said, the words roughened by fatigue and something older than that, “not because we dress up the grove (or any woman) as a prop for someone’s campaign. If that is the price of your contract, then keep it.”
The statement did not fly; it settled, heavy and definite, over the terrace. Somewhere near the bar, a cousin’s muttered “μπράβο” was echoed by the dry click of an aunt’s tongue of approval. Men who had once told him he was too soft eyed him with a reassessment that was not quite pride, but no longer scepticism either. Even the investors’ polite masks faltered, as if they, too, recognised that some lines could not be costed in a spreadsheet.
Behind him, Nerina’s fingers had bunched in the linen at his back, small anchors in a rising tide. Now, with an effort that showed in the slight shake of her hand, she let go. She stepped out of his shadow as if it weighed something.
“My name here isn’t my real one,” she said, voice thin but carrying. “I agreed to pretend with Marios because I was terrified that if anyone connected this place to who I was before, to that exhibition in Athens, to the ‘plagiarist illustrator’ headline, the story would eat your grove like it ate my life.”
A murmur, a few sharp intakes of breath.
“I did not steal anyone’s work,” she went on, colour high in her cheeks. “I signed a contract I was too naïve to question. Another artist took my sketches, my concepts, and when the lawyers came, they chose the girl with no famous surname to take the blame. Sponsors pulled out, clients stopped calling, my own parents told me to lie low until it blew over.” Her throat worked. “It never blew over. It just…stuck.”
She glanced toward Lazaros’s camera, then to the glittering semicircle of phones, then, finally, to Marios. Her gaze held his as if bracing for impact.
“That’s the truth I’ve been hiding behind your grove and this ridiculous ‘romance.’ Not because I am proud of running, but because I was afraid that if people here knew, they would only see the worst story ever told about me.” She drew a breath that steadied on the exhale. “So if you are going to film me, talk about me, invest in me. Do it knowing that. And then decide whether you see a scandal, or simply a woman who made one terrible choice and is very tired of being nothing but that choice.”
Katerina, cheeks flushed and engagement ring suddenly heavy on her hand, let out a brittle laugh that was not amusement. “I did what he’s doing,” she said, nodding once toward Andreas without looking at him, “I weighed love against optics and quarterly projections and chose the story that photographed better. I told myself Marios would always choose the grove over me anyway.” Her voice thinned. “I’ve built a whole life on that assumption, and tonight, watching you refuse to sell yourself, I don’t know if I was wrong about you, or just a coward about myself.”
Lazaros lowered his camera with a jerk, as if the weight of it offended him. “For the record,” he said, not to his followers but to the terrace itself, “Andreas came here with a storyboard, not a heart. A pre-approved love arc, ready to cast. He only needed to see which woman ‘tested best’ with his brand team.” The word tested landed like something sour in the collective mouth; a shudder passed through the crowd as if they had all, at some point, agreed to be more palatable versions of themselves. Around the terrace, poses slackened, smiles faltered, the carefully arranged couplings and old, safe compromises loosening like costumes at the end of a play. Until what remained were the unguarded glances that had been flickering, stubbornly honest, between the people who had been orbiting each other in truth all along.
For an instant, he thought the cicadas had stopped, that even the sea below had gone still. It was only his own blood roaring in his ears, drowning out the low surge of whispers and the small, shocked laugh from one of his uncles. Lantern light swung gently in the breeze, casting the terrace in moving pools of gold and shadow, and in the shifting crowd a narrow line of sight opened like a path.
She stood at the other end of it.
Nerina. Or whatever her name had been before she came here with paint under her fingernails and that careful, borrowed history. Her eyes found his as surely as if they had been looking for nowhere else to land all evening. The faces between them blurred to colour and outline: Sofia’s tense jaw, Andreas’s offended stillness, Katerina’s fixed, brittle poise. All of it fell away under the steady, stricken clarity of Nerina’s gaze.
Behind his ribs, something thin and over-stretched gave an ominous tug. All his life, he had practiced the art of standing between things, the grove and the bank, the uncles and the new machinery, the past and the future, absorbing, translating, never quite belonging wholly to one side or the other. Tonight, with too many truths hanging in the humid air, he knew he was being asked to choose once more. Orchard or investor. History or reinvention. Safety or the woman who had lied to his face and somehow made him feel more seen than anyone in years.
He realised, with a flicker of dark amusement, that no investor alive would recommend his next move.
His shoulders, knotted tight since morning, loosened by a fraction. The phones, the cameras, the judgement: let them have their spectacle. He took a breath that tasted of crushed olives and fear, and then he moved, one decisive step into the dangerous, honest space that existed between himself and Nerina and nowhere else.
Nerina’s fingers unclenched from the wineglass she had been gripping hard enough to leave a faint crescent of condensation on her skin. The glass wobbled in her loosening grasp, then steadied, much as her breath did. Guilt, sharp and metallic, flickered first across her face, followed swiftly by the white flare of fear at so many eyes, so many phones, turned toward this narrow, exposed strip of terrace where her lies had finally run out of places to hide. But under both, stubborn and uninvited, lived the fierce, bewildered affection that had taken root here among the olives: a feeling as inconvenient as it was undeniable.
She saw him take that half-step towards her, not away. It was nothing, a shift of weight, a movement the cameras might miss, but to her it was an earthquake. Her shoulders, braced for impact since the day she set foot on the estate under another name, loosened as if a verdict had already been given. For one reckless heartbeat, it felt like he had somehow forgiven truths she had not yet dared to shape into words.
Sofia, near the terrace’s low wall, felt Andreas’s nearness at her elbow like a draught from an open door, expensive cologne and chilled disapproval, yet her gaze would not be trained where his money or his PR team might have preferred. It slid past the gleam of his watch and the poised phones around them and fixed, helplessly, on Marios and Nerina. In their faces, strained and naked in the swaying lantern light, she recognised an expression she knew far too well: that ridiculous, mule-stubborn tenderness that refused to bow to common sense, contracts, or exit strategies. The same soft, defiant feeling she had spent years wrapping in jokes and loud music and village gossip, as if laughter could make it any less dangerous.
Lazaros’s fingers slackened on his camera, the red light winking dumbly against his shirt as the lens slid askew. Sofia’s face, turned toward Marios and Nerina, held no thought for angles or audience, only that raw, stubborn loyalty he had spent years cropping out of his work. The algorithm, he realised with a ridiculous sting, had never deserved this kind of truth.
Ringed by phones and lantern light, the curated romances and strategic alignments shudder; what had looked glossy and inevitable a moment ago now seems thin, almost amateur, beside the unspoken understanding sparking between those who actually ache for each other. The crowd feels it, a collective flinch, as the choreography of staged affection falters and one false construction after another begins to sag, then visibly crack.
The ring of raised phones, until now a coronet for Andreas’s pet narrative, hardened by degrees into something more judicial. Glass screens glowed like small, pitiless moons; every angle that had been chosen to flatter now served to enclose. The murmur that had greeted Marios’s “no” ebbed backward, as if the whole terrace had inhaled and then forgotten how to exhale.
Lantern light carved a hollow beneath his cheekbone, picked out the fine dust of the day still caught in the dark stubble along his jaw. He ran his tongue once over lips gone dry, as though searching for the safer words he ought to offer: then abandoned them.
“If we’re going to film something,” he said, voice steady in that scraped, late-harvest way, “it might as well be true.”
The phones twitched minutely, refocusing. Someone whispered, “Ti leei?” and was answered only by the faint creak of the lantern ropes in the breeze.
He did not look at Andreas, nor at the phones. His gaze stayed fixed on a point somewhere beyond the faces, just over Nerina’s shoulder, as if he could only manage this confession by pretending the sea were listening instead of his neighbours.
“This thing between me and Nerina. What you’ve all been…liking, sharing…” A corner of his mouth tightened. “It didn’t start because we fell into each other’s arms under the olive trees.”
A soft, disbelieving laugh escaped one of the seasonal pickers, cut short almost at once.
“It was a shield,” he went on. “A way to keep the stories simple. For you,” a brief gesture took in the phones, “for potential buyers, for investors who like their villages picturesque and their couples…coordinated.” His hand dropped. “For men who arrive with contracts already drafted and would prefer a package to a family.”
The last word came out rougher than intended. Across the circle, one of his uncles shifted, uncomfortable.
“The grove is small, the village smaller. People talk.” His eyes flicked, almost apologetically, towards the cluster of older women by the drinks table. “After last year, I didn’t want my life, or hers, pulled apart for entertainment or leverage. So we agreed (” he hesitated, and at last glanced at Nerina “) to give them a story they could repeat without asking questions we weren’t ready to answer.”
The admission landed with a series of tiny shocks: a sucked-in breath here, a low curse there, the wet glug of wine abandoned mid-pour. The red recording dots, absurdly unblinking, burned back at him.
“It made the estate look…stable,” he finished, with a flicker of self-mockery. “Romantic. Safe for partnerships. That was the idea, at least. A neat, marketable couple on the label.” His gaze cut, briefly and very clearly, to Andreas’s impeccable profile. “Even if the label was the only honest part.”
Nobody laughed this time. The phones did not lower; if anything, a few edged closer, obedient to the scent of scandal. But the mood had tipped. What had been staged as a charming backdrop for a visionary investor call now felt perilously like evidence, and not at all the kind Andreas’s PR team had intended to capture.
For a moment it seemed no one would move; then Nerina stepped into the narrow space at his side, as if crossing some invisible border. Lantern light caught the fine tremor in her hands, the pulse jumping at her throat; only her voice betrayed no quiver.
“He isn’t the only one who has been…curating the story,” she said, the faint Athens lilt of her vowels suddenly more pronounced. Several phones pivoted, greedy. “For me, the pretending was not only about gossip. It was cover.”
She folded her fingers together so tightly her knuckles blanched. “Nerina is my name. But not the one some of you might remember from galleries or headlines, if you followed that world. I came here with a different surname, a different past, because there is an unfinished scandal attached to my real one. A fight over who stole whose work, over signatures on canvases and contracts I never saw. Lawyers. Articles. Enough smoke that no one bothered to ask where the fire started.”
A ripple shivered through the listeners. Recognition for a few, prurient curiosity for the rest.
“I was afraid,” she went on, “that if anyone connected this estate to that mess, it would stain you. Make the grove part of a story about fraud instead of what it is.” She drew a breath that sounded almost like apology. “So every time I smiled for your photos, every time I kissed him where a camera could see, I was not only pretending to be in love. I was pretending to be someone safe to love at all.”
For a heartbeat she looked like she might brazen it out, reach for the nearest talking point about “synergies” and “scaling heritage,” but the words seemed to wither on her tongue under the combined heat of her fiancé’s narrowed eyes and Marios’s stripped-bare admission.
“That’s not the whole of why I left,” she said at last, the bright, panel-discussion cadence dropping out of her voice. “Athens, the startup, the funding. That was all true. But I also left because I never believed you would choose me over this place.” Her gaze flicked to the dark line of trees, then back. “I chose first, so I wouldn’t have to hear you choose the grove. And now (” she glanced at the ring, almost startled by its weight “) I’m still not certain I chose a life I can respect.”
It was Lazaros who moved next. The camera that had drifted like a benign insect all evening now fixed, predatory, on Andreas’s face. “Since we’re doing honesty,” he said lightly, thumb checking that the red dot still burned, “shall we talk about your storyboard?” And then, with practised clarity, he recited the emails, the DMs, the scouting notes: a “spontaneous” proposal to be arranged with whichever woman focus groups found most “authentic,” sunset silhouettes trialled against spreadsheet projections, the grove reduced to content, its people to props, and every clause drafted so that the only ring with real weight would be the one that tightened Andreas’s grip on ownership and narrative alike.
Faces on the terrace rearranged themselves as if some invisible hand had swept the board: titters of derision where there had been admiration, embarrassed coughs where there had been applause. Sponsorships, hashtags, expansion plans. All shrank beside older currencies: who had told the truth when it cost them, who had lied prettily, and whose loyalty, under the harsh light, refused to bend.
In the nights immediately following, the veranda becomes a quiet tribunal of sorts. The festival lanterns, left up out of exhaustion rather than design, burn lower and gentler; their glow flattens sequins and sharp suits into something more human. Chairs scrape into small, serious circles. People who spoke hard truths at the festival, however clumsily, are waved over with small nods and the tilt of a coffee pot, while those who had clung to polite fictions find themselves hovering near the railings, suddenly fascinated by the darkness beyond the courtyard.
Marios does not set himself up as judge. He ends up at the centre regardless, by the simple accident of being the one who refuses to look away when conversations get uncomfortable. He pours coffee, listens more than he speaks, and when he does speak it is with the same bluntness that ruined several perfectly good speeches three nights ago.
“You were right to be angry,” he tells a cousin who had publicly snapped at Andreas, and who has been apologising ever since. “Just. Next time, aim better.”
The cousin blinks, then laughs, half-relieved, half-abashed; the circle absorbs him. By contrast, an uncle who had loudly praised “modern partnerships” all evening now clears his throat near the side-table three separate times, never quite invited into the inner ring of talk.
Nerina sits at first on the edge of things, sketchbook closed on her lap like a shield. The knowledge that she lied, not about what she could do for them, but about who she was, hangs between her and the older women shelling roasted almonds in a bowl. It is Sofia who breaks the tension, thumping a cup down in front of her.
“Come,” Sofia says, loud enough for several aunts to hear. “If we only drank with people who never lied, we’d be very thirsty.”
A few lips twitch; one aunt sniffs. Nerina’s fingers curl around the warm ceramic as if it is a form of amnesty. She answers questions plainly now, even when they pinch. She speaks of work she lost, of the fear of being Googled, of wanting somewhere that judged her for what she did here, not what was argued over in some Athenian office she will never enter again. The very act of saying it aloud, under the chipped plaster of the veranda ceiling, becomes a down payment on belonging.
Across the courtyard, Andreas keeps to the brighter fringe where the fairy lights still pretend the evening is festive. His laugh comes a shade too quickly as he entertains a pair of younger cousins with travel anecdotes. People listen, but their bodies angle ever so slightly away from him, towards the quieter knots where decisions are now being made. When he saunters closer to Marios’s group with a bottle of good wine in hand, the conversation does not exactly stop; it thins, like a stream encountering a stone.
“Top-up?” he offers.
Marios lifts his cup of thick Greek coffee. “I think we’re all right,” he says mildly. No one contradicts him. Andreas retreats with a practised half-smile, but the rebuff leaves a faint, brittle edge to his charm.
Lazaros, by contrast, drifts easily between clusters, camera off, hands free. He asks questions instead of proposing schemes. “What do you want people to know about this place?” he says to an old aunt who rarely speaks above a mutter. When she answers, slowly, stubbornly, he listens as if she is delivering a keynote. Before long, when talk turns to “how this will look to the outside world,” several faces turn instinctively towards him, not to be dazzled, but to be translated.
By the third night, an unwritten rule has settled over the veranda: those who will own their missteps may sit in the inner light; those who insist on their own spotless motives must make do with the railings and the dark beyond. No proclamation is made, no chairs are formally reassigned, yet everyone, watching where bodies cluster and where they do not, understands perfectly well what has changed.
By the end of the week, the small concrete apron outside the press house looks less like a place for orders and more like a very early, very gruff committee meeting. The older Theodorakis uncles begin appearing before the workers, nursing tins of coffee and an unfamiliar humility. Where once they had swept in mid-morning with pronouncements (“We’ll do it this way, Marios, the man from Athens knows what he’s talking about”) they now clear their throats and unfold papers with a care bordering on reverence.
“How do you want to handle this?” one of them asks, holding up an email printout from Andreas’s office like a mildly offensive relic. Another adds, “If it were your decision alone,” as if acknowledging, at last, that it nearly had not been.
The wording comes out stiff, the deference sitting oddly on shoulders accustomed to command, but the change is real. Each proposed partnership, each glossy brochure promising “synergy” and “brand uplift,” is now laid beside the memory of Marios, jaw clenched, saying, “We are not for sale,” and quietly failing to apologise for meaning it.
Down on the gravel and under the vines, the recalibration is noisier and greasier. Folding tables, hastily pushed together, bear aluminium trays of cooling spanakopita and orphaned slices of lamb; plastic chairs creak as people lean in, forks gesturing to emphasise some remembered moment from the disastrous night. The usual markers of status lose their currency as workers and villagers trade accounts of who stood squarely beside the grove when it mattered. Reputations are rebuilt or reduced in these retellings; some names, once spoken with awe, now earn only a shrug, while quieter figures acquire a new weight. “He told the truth,” “She said it plain,” become, quite without fanfare, the highest form of praise.
Sofia becomes, without announcement, the usher at this new gate. With trays balanced on one hip and a running commentary about overcooked lamb or under-sugared baklava, she quietly edits the guest list of significance: topping up glasses when someone owns a mistake, planting a steady hand on a shoulder mid-confession, but leaving the still-defensive to the comfort of their own echo.
Even casual interactions take on new weight. A seasonal picker who publicly backed Marios’s stand finds himself waved over to sit in on an agro‑tourism brainstorm, his opinion sought on guest walks and “authentic experience” packages. A cousin who trumpeted the flashiest investor discovers his once‑automatic invitations quietly drying up. By week’s end, everyone can feel the invisible ladder rebuilt around who protected the grove’s integrity, its new rungs leading toward the renegotiated deals and unexpected creative collaborations beginning to glimmer at the edges of conversation.
By the time the sun has burned the dew off the grass, the “important talks” look suspiciously like work.
Instead of summoning everyone to a single dramatic conclave, decisions begin in small, movable circles: around mugs of thick coffee at the long farmhouse table; in the patch of shade by the press where the concrete stays cool; on a slow walk up through the upper terraces, boots scuffing at dry earth and fallen olives. The festival bunting still flaps overhead in places, faintly ridiculous against the new seriousness.
Marios does not announce himself as leader of any of these gatherings. He simply arrives first, already rolling up his sleeves, and places what authority he has on the table in the shape of spreadsheets, hand‑written notes, and dog‑eared copies of contracts. When someone tries to take the literal head of the table, he only shifts his papers slightly until their chairs, by common consent, angle towards him.
“All right,” he says, more than once, voice flat from lack of sleep but steady. “If we do this, what happens in five years when the rain doesn’t come?” Or: “Explain to me, slowly, why we should give up our name on the bottle for an advance that lasts one season.”
The questions are not clever, merely relentless. They have the discomfiting quality of assuming the grove will still be here long after the current excitement fades.
Those who had, two nights before, cheered the flashiest offers now sit further back, their designer brochures curling slightly at the edges. They listen as Marios redraws the invisible borders of what the estate will and will not trade away: no external control over the land itself; no dilution of the oil to meet supermarket price points; no scripted “heritage” narrative written in an office in Athens.
“So we are clear,” he says at one point, tapping the table with a biro for emphasis, “we choose partners, not owners. And we keep the right to tell our own story. In our own words.”
Around him, nods accumulate. Some are reluctant, some relieved. A few of the louder visionaries of the previous evening discover they have, overnight, become consultants rather than kingmakers, offering figures and scenarios that must fit within the lines Marios now draws.
It is not a triumphant coup, not exactly. It is more like the slow, undeniable settling of an olive on the bottom of a jar: the quiet recognition, in circle after circle, that whatever money comes, it will have to flow around the grove’s roots, not wash them away.
Under the veranda, Nerina positions herself at the big wooden table usually reserved for communal meals, a stack of rough paper and a tin of inks between the coffee cups. The oilcloth bears the ghosts of family dinners each flaw becoming, in her mind, another line in the estate’s story. She does not hide in a side room; instead, she sketches openly while a rotating audience of aunts, cousins, and workers drifts past, some with arms crossed, some pretending not to care, most lingering just a heartbeat longer than necessary.
The first olive branch designs are almost too polite, and she can feel it. She begins to steal motifs from the chapel’s faded frescoes, from the old iron key hung by the door, from a cracked family stamp pressed into a drawer of receipts. When a label suddenly looks “right”, the air at the table changes.
“That’s your grandfather’s tree there. Don’t forget the split branch,” an uncle mutters, pointing despite himself. Another insists the sea’s line belongs in the corner, “otherwise no one will know where this oil learned to breathe.” Soon, corrections and memories tangle together over the paper. The resistance in their faces softens, inch by inch, into the kind of wary, emerging pride that behaves as if it is criticising the work while, in truth, quietly beginning to claim it.
Down in the courtyard, Lazaros edits on his laptop with the press building as an impromptu backdrop, pausing occasionally to show rough cuts to anyone curious enough to lean over his shoulder. Children cluster first, then pickers on their break, then an aunt wiping her hands on her apron “just to see what nonsense you’re making.” The segment where he calmly dismantles Andreas’s glamorised branding pitch, intercut with quiet shots of gnarled trunks and calloused hands, begins circulating online before lunch; a cousin’s teenager has already clipped it for TikTok. Messages arrive from diaspora Greeks and eco‑tourists asking how they can support the grove directly. The workers who once dismissed him as a “tourist with a camera” start treating him like a conduit, bringing him stories of past harvests, old photos, even a cracked cassette of his grandfather singing mantinades, to weave into the next chapter.
Meanwhile, Andreas tests his usual arsenal, casual references to shipping magnates, celebrity chefs, and lifestyle editors, in a series of short, awkward exchanges that land with a thud. Aunts turn back to their chopping boards mid‑sentence, uncles exchange glances and change the topic to rainfall and soil depth, and even younger cousins who once fawned over his car now shrug off his suggestions with a brisk, “Marios will decide.” An attempt at charm in the press room dies when a picker asks, perfectly politely, whether his proposal guarantees year‑round contracts. Forced to sit through a meeting where his draft contract is marked up in red pen by people in work boots and ink‑stained fingers, he begins to realise that access here will depend less on his surname and more on whether he can stomach genuinely fair terms and relinquish the starring role in the story.
On the square that evening, Katerina finds her usual audience thinner and sharper‑eyed; instead of awe, she meets measured curiosity edged with local pride. Over coffee and loukoumades she barely touches, villagers and her own fiancé press her on algorithms, revenue splits, veto rights, and how prominently “Theodorakis” would sit beside investor logos. Every probing, almost courteous question peels back a layer of curated shine, forcing her to acknowledge aloud that her sleek system is tuned for scalability, not sovereignty or story. By the time the bell calls the faithful to vespers, it is plain (even to her) that any partnership she proposes will be weighed not by decks and headlines, but by whether she can stomach putting the grove’s name before her own.
By the time the last of the guests drift toward the lower courtyard, the raw edge of the confrontation has dulled into something more fragile: embarrassment, exhaustion, and a wary willingness to talk. The festival, which an hour ago had felt like a single thrumming creature fractures into smaller, quieter constellations.
Voices drop to a more human register. The loudest aunts, who had been conducting commentary at a volume suitable for ship‑to‑shore, now speak in half‑sentences and sighs as they stack plates near the kitchen door. Chairs scrape as people pull them into new arrangements that reveal fresh allegiances: two uncles who had thundered on opposite sides of the argument now find themselves sitting back‑to‑back, ostensibly to share an ashtray, but really to listen in on one another without admitting it. Younger cousins, once orbiting around loud music and selfies, form uneasy circles, scrolling their phones between glances at Marios, Nerina, and Andreas, as if trying to reconcile the people they know with the versions currently trending in their feeds.
There is a new awkwardness to proximity. Men who, earlier, had shouted across the terrace with cheerful accusations about missed olives and crooked rows now look away when their former targets pass, suddenly aware of how words can blister when layered over real stakes. A pair of seasonal workers who had giggled over Andreas’s stories of Mykonos yachts now sit with their heads bent together, discussing hourly rates and contract clauses with a sharpness they did not have yesterday. No one quite knows whose side they are on, because the sides themselves have blurred.
From his vantage by the press‑room door, Marios registers all this in the small, tired way of a man counting damage rather than victories. He notes who drifts toward Nerina and who keeps an extra chair’s distance; who still laughs at Andreas’s asides and who responds with a thin, polite smile; which cousins offer Katerina a refill of wine without quite meeting her eye. The map of the terrace redraws itself in front of him. Fault lines where there had been footpaths, new bridges thrown over old grievances.
It is not forgiveness, not yet. It is the first, awkward redistribution of attention and trust after an earthquake: people testing how close they dare to stand to one another, now that everyone has seen which walls were load‑bearing and which were only painted scenery.
Near the farmhouse door, it is the grandmother who decides that suspense has gone on long enough. She wipes her hands on her apron, settles herself on the low wall by the kitchen steps as if taking a throne, and crooks a finger at Nerina. The nearby cousins fall tactfully silent.
“Proïno kafe,” she declares, patting the space beside her. “Tomorrow. You will come as yourself this time, koukla. All of you. No more pieces missing.”
The words draw a few winces, a few approving nods. Her tone is soft, but there is iron under the cotton: the family will not pretend the lie did not sting, yet they will not throw away a pair of good hands and a good heart if she stops hiding.
She makes the terms plain, in front of everyone. The art was never the injury; the secrecy was. If Nerina wishes to stay, there will be no more half‑truths, no more convenient omissions.
Nerina swallows, colour rising under her freckles, and nods. “I’ll answer what you ask,” she says, voice shaking but steadying on the last word. “Everything.”
On the Harvest Terrace Overlook, away from most of the crowd but not entirely out of sight, Marios and Sofia sit Andreas down with a printed draft of revised contract terms, the paper weighted by an ashtray against the breeze. Where his proposal once dazzled with glossy branding, influencer tie‑ins and lifestyle shoots among the trees, the new version reads almost puritanical: no exclusivity clauses, no aggressive pricing controls, no image rights over the family, workers, or even the chapel. Marios insists on absolute veto power over any marketing narrative that cheapens the grove’s heritage or hints at a “Vlahos Estate”. Sofia adds a clause requiring plain‑language quarterly reports on every euro. Andreas, seeing little room to bargain, signs with a tight jaw and a quiet, “If I stay in, I do it your way.”
By the lanterns, Katerina finds herself oddly surplus to requirements; the easy intimacy she once wore like a second skin has nowhere to fasten. When she approaches Marios with a tentative query about next steps for the platform, he answers with precise, courteous efficiency, as if on a panel with strangers. No private shorthand, no wry shorthand glance. Her fiancé, hovering close enough to catch every syllable, slips in with pointed follow‑ups about control, data ownership, and long‑term leverage for the estate, his tone politely sceptical in a way that leaves her no room to translate. In the pauses between their questions, with only the clink of glasses and distant laughter to fill the gap, Katerina understands that whatever special claim she imagined she still held here (on this place, on this man) has cooled into something strictly transactional, and the loss is hers alone to register.
Later, as plates are stacked and extension cords coiled like tired snakes, Lazaros peels away from the chatter and finds one of the uncles by the bottling room door. He holds out his camera, thumb skimming through clips: the tearful argument neatly cropped to wide shots of trees and lanterns, a relative’s face blurred during a shouted accusation, the audio cut entirely where old grievances turned into names and dates. “This is your story, not mine to sell,” he says, uncharacteristically subdued. The uncles confer in low murmurs, then nod; rough hands clap his shoulder, once, twice, in a wordless thanks that lands heavier than any influencer brand deal. His earlier teasing, drone flyovers, and flirtations are effectively forgiven, and when a cousin calls out that he should come back “as our official documentarian,” no one bothers to contradict it.
By the time the last extension cord disappears into a storage room and someone kills the music mid‑song rather than let it wheeze to an end, the terrace has thinned to murmurs and clinking glass. Marios, suddenly surplus to coordination, finds his feet taking the familiar path down toward the chapel. His palms still carry a faint sting from hot plates and wine bottles; under the sharper tang of detergent there is that ineradicable note of olive and smoke that seems to have soaked into him as thoroughly as regret.
The chapel sits in its usual half‑shadow, whitewashed wall glowing softly, icon lamp a faint ember within. Nerina is on the low stone step, knees drawn up, sketchbook closed beside her like a witness she might yet call or dismiss. The sight of her there punches a brief, unhelpful thought through his chest before his caution catches up.
He stops a few paces away. “I didn’t mean to… ambush your hiding place,” he says, tone dryer than he intends.
“You don’t own the chapel,” she answers, almost managing lightness. “Only everything else.” Her fingers worry the frayed elastic on the sketchbook’s spine. “But I was going to come find you. Eventually. Before the next harvest, at least.”
Silence stretches, filled by cicadas and the distant scrape of chairs from the terrace. They begin with the obvious, the safest currency: apology paid for with apology.
“I should have told you who I was,” she says first, words neat, rehearsed. Then, less tidy: “Who I had been.”
“And I should have asked,” he replies. “Instead of deciding that what I understood was the whole story.”
She glances up, startled, as if she had prepared for accusation, not complicity. “You were entitled to worse,” she says. “Shouting. Banishing. Dramatic pointing at the gate.”
“You’ve met my uncles,” he says. “They enjoy the drama; I prefer not to give them a matinee performance as well as the evening show.”
The corner of her mouth finally lifts. Encouraged, he pushes farther into specificity, away from the easy refuge of general sorrow.
“You lied,” he says, without flinching from the word. “Not to steal from us, not to sell us to someone else, but you lied. That matters. I made it… convenient for you to continue. I liked what I thought I saw and didn’t look harder. That matters too.”
She swallows, throat working. “I was afraid that if I came here as myself, the scandal would arrive behind me on the next bus. That no one would let me prove that the work was mine if they’d already decided I was the woman who… took credit where she shouldn’t.”
“You chose safety over honesty,” he summarises, not unkindly. “I chose efficiency over curiosity. We both got what we paid for.”
“And nearly lost what we want,” she says, so quietly he almost misses the last word.
He studies the chapel door, its one peeling blue panel. The grove has been his accounting ledger since childhood; suddenly he is too tired to add and subtract feelings on top of olives.
“Whatever we are,” he says at last, voice roughened by more than smoke, “we don’t owe it to the story we pretended to tell people. We start counting from today.”
Her eyes close briefly, as if absorbing the terms. When she nods, it is small but deliberate: not a sweeping pardon but an assent to hard work.
“From today,” she repeats. “I show up as the person standing in front of you, not the one on paper. At the press. At the table. Even when it’s… very awkward.”
“Awkward we can afford,” he says. “Dishonest is too expensive.”
She lets out a breath that sounds suspiciously like a laugh broken in half. After a moment, she nudges the sketchbook with her toes.
“Tomorrow,” she says, almost shy, “I’d like to show you something. Ideas. For labels, for… how this place could look on the outside of a bottle.”
Marios, feeling the tight band round his chest loosen by a cautious notch, gives a single, grave nod, as if agreeing to a business proposal rather than to the possibility of being seen.
“Tomorrow, then,” he replies. “We start with pictures. The rest can catch up later.”
The next afternoon, under the same plane of chapel shade now sliced into neat rectangles by the late sun, that private truce becomes an unmistakably public practice. Nerina spreads early sketches along the whitewashed ledge while Marios counters with a clipboard of yield charts, bottling schedules, and wholesale delivery dates, as if they are bartering in their native languages and trusting the other to translate.
They settle, without drama, that she will stay through the coming season as the estate’s visual voice. Her first name will sit beside a carefully chosen, still‑borrowed surname on discreet “illustrated by” credits. A compromise between truth and breathing space.
An uncle pair trudges past on their way to the lower terraces, eyes lingering on the spread of paper and plastic‑sleeved spreadsheets. Their nods are tight‑mouthed, but they are nods. Sofia arrives with a battered tray of coffees and koulourakia, wedges herself cheerfully between chart and sketch, and begins talking in the same breath about printing costs, festival dates, and which labels tourists actually photograph, until the collaboration starts to feel less like a gamble and more like the way things have quietly always been.
By the time the sky has slipped from gold to bruised peach, the Harvest Terrace Overlook is mostly abandoned, the lantern hooks above them still bare, like questions no one has yet bothered to hang light on. Sofia and Marios bracket Lazaros on the bench, his camera lying face‑up on the wood, lens capped for once. They do not ask about click‑through rates or thumbnails; they ask what he wants his work to mean in five years, in ten.
“What if,” Sofia says, tapping the camera body, “instead of a one‑off viral thing, you kept coming back? Pruning to pruning. Flower to fruit.”
“A standing series,” Marios adds. “Four chapters: pruning, blossom, harvest, winter. You shoot what you like; we reserve the right to say no to anything that exposes family business, or grief that isn’t ready.”
Lazaros’s first instinct is to deflect. “So I sell out to the village board of directors,” he says lightly. “Next you’ll want editorial control over my haircut.”
“You can keep the hair,” Sofia replies. “We’re more interested in keeping the trees.”
Her flippancy is thin cover for something steadier; when he glances sideways he finds her gaze level, not teasing. Marios, usually all logistics, is uncharacteristically still beside him, elbows on his knees, watching not Lazaros but the view below as if already imagining it in story arcs instead of spreadsheets.
“We don’t need a hero edit,” Marios says. “We need someone who understands that this place doesn’t exist only when the drone is in the air.”
“And that you’re not just passing through,” Sofia finishes. “That you can leave, of course, but that you know where you’re coming back to.”
The joke about selling out collapses on his tongue. No brand has ever offered him a contract measured in seasons rather than deliverables. No one has asked what he wants to build that might outlast an algorithm.
“You’re giving me veto power too?” he asks, half to test the edges. “If I think something makes you look like a brochure instead of a family?”
Marios’s mouth quirks. “You can argue with us,” he says. “You’ll lose sometimes. But yes. If this is long‑term, it has to be honest both ways.”
Silence folds around them for a moment, broken only by the rustle of olive leaves and the distant clatter of plates being stacked below. Lazaros feels the old restlessness rise and for the first time in years it is met by a competing pull: the thought of returning to the same row of trees and seeing what time has done to them, and to him.
“All right,” he says at last, palming the camera as though accepting a formal brief. “I’ll block out weeks, not days. We plan shoots around your actual pruning, your water anxieties, your ugly hailstorms. No staged fights, no surprise reveals.”
“Disappointing,” Sofia murmurs. “I was hoping to throw at least one glass of wine in someone’s face for the sake of art.”
“You can,” he says. “I just won’t slow it down for dramatic effect.”
They laugh, but it is an easy, domestic sound, not the brittle peal of festival flirtation. The terms settle between them, simple and weighty: he will feature their compost heaps as readily as their sunsets, show hands sorting olives without trimming out the calluses, ask before filming arguments and be prepared to put the camera down if the answer is no.
“Think of the grove as a character,” Sofia suggests, rising as a gust of cooler air skims the terrace. “Not a set.”
“A stubborn one,” Marios adds. “She doesn’t like being lied about.”
Lazaros glances over the slopes darkening into silhouette and feels, absurdly, as if the trees are listening. “Then I’ll treat her like any good character,” he says. “I’ll stop trying to make her flattering, and start trying to make her true.”
He says it lightly, but the promise lands with the same quiet weight as the uncles’ hands on his shoulder the night before. Routes and flight alerts can be changed; the new entry in his calendar, a return not demanded by sponsors but by choice, feels oddly like the first pin driven into a map that might, someday, be called home.
A few evenings later, at the long outdoor table where only close family and overnight guests remain, Andreas tests the old charms, stories of Mykonos launches, name‑drops of ministers and journalists on speed dial, but they land with a dull clink, like cutlery on empty plates. The uncles respond with courteous, noncommittal questions; Sofia punctures his grand branding visions with dry references to water rights, yields, and who exactly will scrub toilets when the influencers leave. Even the younger cousins, once rapt, now glance to Marios before laughing or demurring. Realising the table no longer treats him as a dazzling solution but as a guest on probation, Andreas lets the pitch die mid‑sentence. Later, near the darkening courtyard gate, he intercepts Marios, extends a hand stripped of theatrics, and offers terms so pared back they are almost self‑effacing: minority capital only, no naming rights, no staged couple storylines, quarterly reports but no interference in harvest decisions, and the explicit understanding that he can be cut loose, quietly, if he oversteps.
On Katerina’s final night at the estate, they walk a familiar loop between terraces, gravel crunching where they once ran as students sketching opposite blueprints for escape. There are no accusations now, no resurrected scenes; only steady, almost businesslike talk of investor pressure, diluted equity, and the ways success can quietly exact interest in sleeplessness and fear. Katerina admits the glamour she chased has its own stripped‑out Sundays and curated silences; Marios concedes that the safety he clung to nearly fossilised him into his father’s shadow. They reach the chapel path where he had stood with Nerina days before, and there Katerina stops, straightens, and offers her blessing without theatrics followed by a final, steady handshake that feels disconcertingly like signing off on an old chapter. When she drives away the next morning, the dust on the estate road looks less like something taken and more like ground cleared after pruning, leaving Marios anchored enough to meet outside offers with a firmer spine, a quieter heart, and no lingering question about what might have been.
In the days after the festival, the first retellings surface over kafedakia in the village square, where the raw sting of betrayal begins to soften into story. By mid‑morning the kafeneia are an unofficial tribunal, the plane tree listening in as witnesses rearrange the evening into something more palatable. People reconstruct who stood where and who said what, but the emphasis tilts, day by day, from outrage to the sheer absurdity of it all: the staged romance, the drone shots, the wellness buzzwords floating over trees older than the entire influencer economy.
Old men who never watched the livestream swear they saw it all with their own eyes, describing ring lights as though they were UFOs. Women at the bakery counter correct each other on the precise wording of Andreas’s more egregious phrases, polishing “synergy” and “brand narrative” into local idioms that sound faintly like curses. What began as shocked muttering. In front of everyone!, becomes, through repetition, entertainment with a moral edge.
Each version trims some cruelty and sharpens some punchline. The harshest guesses about Nerina’s past are quietly edited out once it is clear she has not robbed anyone of land or wages; what remains is the comedy of a woman so nervous about being recognised that she accidentally chose the one place where everyone notices everything. Andreas’s initial grandeur is exaggerated until he appears in the stories as a sort of travelling salesman of enlightenment, opening his briefcase to reveal branded incense and a portable gong.
Without anyone announcing it, the village begins to nudge the debacle toward something it can live with, and even learn from. The worst is not forgotten, but it is sanded down by wit, folded into a narrative where vanity is mocked, nerves are forgiven, and the grove itself (stubborn, unbuyable) emerges as the only true elder in the whole ridiculous affair.
Sofia, half-host and half-ringmaster, becomes the unofficial curator of this new folklore. At the kafeneia, she reenacts Andreas sweeping his arm over the grove and talking about “monetising serenity,” then pauses just long enough before wondering aloud if they ought to bill the cicadas per decibel, and whether the goats require an invoice for “participating in the mindfulness ambience.” Laughter breaks over the square in waves, but under it runs a firm boundary: she is recutting his pitch into a parable about anyone who mistakes neighbours for extras and trees for décor.
By the third telling she has introduced optional premium add‑ons: for an extra fee, the olives themselves may agree to feel more aligned with their higher purpose; for a VIP surcharge, the old stone well will contemplate its inner child. Children on the way home from school stop to perform exaggerated sun salutations at the trunks, solemnly announcing they are “activating the brand.” The joke spreads faster than any official campaign, a low, constant murmur that makes it socially embarrassing to speak of the grove as a lifestyle accessory rather than a living inheritance.
Meanwhile, Lazaros sifts through his hours of footage on a laptop at the farmhouse table, the smell of olive brine, dish soap, and over‑boiled coffee hanging in the air while someone quarrels with a tap in the background. He scrolls past the most flattering angles and sunset drone sweeps with a faint wince, as if embarrassed on behalf of his own profession. Instead of cutting a glossy, investor‑pleasing highlight reel, he splices together awkward silences after grand promises, slow shots of workers actually harvesting, and Marios’s bone‑dry responses whenever someone suggests “experience upgrades.” Nerina’s skeptical glances and raised brows become the visual chorus. The final episode, equal parts satire and love letter, frames the estate not as a backdrop for personal branding but as a place that resists flattening into mere “content”: and the online response, unexpectedly tender and amused, rewards that honesty.
Back at the estate, the older uncles, who once muttered that cameras and “branding” would curse the olives, begin to wield the language of gimmicks as both shield and sieve. When a cousin proposes rentable “harvest costumes” for tourists, one uncle observes, without looking up from his worry beads, “Fine: so long as we add a limited‑edition authenticity surcharge.” The table dissolves into knowing laughter; the suggestion, already ridiculous, withers without a vote. Their sarcasm, rough but oddly proud, marks a quiet turn: they are no longer refusing all novelty, only the sort that treats the grove as stage‑set rather than home, and humour becomes the quickest test of whether an idea belongs.
As these stories and quips circulate, a shared line in the sand emerges without any formal declaration. Tourists and investors still come, but now they step into a narrative already claimed by the villagers: a narrative that rewards self-awareness and quietly ridicules puffed‑up egos. The festival fiasco, once a source of hot-faced embarrassment, is refiled in collective memory as the evening the community learned to laugh power back into proportion, to weigh promises by whether they sound ridiculous when repeated over coffee. By the time more serious talks about contracts and partnerships begin, everyone around the table has absorbed the lesson: any future plan that can’t withstand the square’s jokes, the uncles’ barbs, or Sofia’s arched brow probably doesn’t belong on this land.
In the weeks after the festival, “serious talks” stops meaning glossy proposals from Athens and instead becomes evenings around the long kitchen table, ledgers open beside plates of olives, bread, and the heel of yesterday’s cheese. The laptop with its neat spreadsheets stands at one end like a foreign delegate; at the other, an uncle’s battered notebook lists who helped whom at last year’s harvest, in handwriting that thins around the edges of the page.
Marios, who has learnt to brace for PowerPoint, now braces for something trickier: family. He takes a scrap of paper torn from the side of an invoice and writes three short phrases in a careful, almost schoolboy script: fair wages, soil health, no fake stories. The pen hesitates on the last word, as if even ink finds “stories” hard to regulate. He slides the paper across the table as though submitting a resignation rather than a proposal.
Silence follows, the thick, domestic sort broken only by the ticking of the old clock and the wet suck of an olive stone being worried from between someone’s teeth. One uncle reads, then passes the scrap along like contraband. Another adjusts his glasses, squints, frowns not at the words but at the audacity of their neatness.
“So,” a cousin mutters, half testing, “no special influencer packages?”
Marios lifts one shoulder. “If they eat, they eat what we eat. If they film, they film what is there.”
It is not a stirring speech. It is, in fact, painfully prosaic. Yet it is the quiet refusal underneath that settles over the table.
At last, one of the oldest men clears his throat, the sound dry as the rafters. He taps the line where Marios has underlined “land” almost by accident, the tail of an “h” straying into the margin.
“Your grandfather,” he says, “was offered barrels of that new fertiliser once. They said the trees would grow faster, fatter. He told them if something burns your nose when you open the sack, it will burn the roots in ten years. He chose to stay poor and stubborn instead of rich and stupid.” A thin smile. “We did not starve.”
The room exhales. Another uncle, previously opposed to “eco-nonsense,” grunts. “Fair wages we already owe them, whether we write it or not. The soil, if we ruin it, no contract will save us. As for fake stories…” His gaze flicks to Marios, dry as dust. “We tried those. Look how that festival ended.”
A ripple of laughter runs round the table, edged but not unkind. The scrap of paper is pushed back towards Marios, now crinkled with fingerprints.
“Write it properly,” the oldest uncle says. “Not on rubbish. Put it in the front of the ledger. So when the clever ones from Athens come again, you show them first what cannot be changed. If they still want to talk after that, we listen.”
Marios nods, throat unexpectedly tight. For the first time in months, the numbers in the open books feel less like a verdict and more like a set of problems to be worked within a boundary they have chosen, rather than had imposed. Serious talks, it seems, can begin with three lines on a scrap of paper and the memory of a man who once refused an easier poison.
With that rough charter in place, Sofia turns the abstract into the practical, prowling through the estate as if re‑stringing a loom. The first decree is quietly radical: no more shuttle buses disgorging people for forty‑minute “experiences” and a curated sunset. The minivans, with their padded seats and air‑conditioned detachment, are dismissed like unsuitable suitors.
Instead, she maps out a different choreography. Visitors will arrive in twos and threes, folded into the same dusty pickup that brings seasonal workers up from the village, their knees knocking against crates, their cameras brushing against pruning shears. They will walk the last stretch on foot, feeling the slope in their calves, the heat in their shoulders.
At midday, there is no separate tasting room. Sofia pulls extra benches to the long table and adds two plates, nothing more. Guests eat fasolakia and horta beside pickers who still have olive leaves in their hair. Between mouthfuls, conversation drifts. Not a rehearsed “heritage story,” but the plain arithmetic of a bad harvest: what it means when the rain comes wrong and the oil runs thin, while school fees and electricity do not.
At the far end of the table, Nerina quietly blankets a strip of butcher paper with sketches, translating these fledgling principles into lines and shadows: gnarled hands pruning silver leaves, the small chapel crouched in first light, children racing between trunks with shoelaces undone. No poured‑over mood boards, no anonymous sun‑hatted silhouettes. When she finally turns the paper round, it has become mock‑ups of labels and a homepage where each terrace is named, Patima, Kato Rachi, and each bottle carries a picker’s first name and year of arrival. There is a beat of anxious silence: will baring their actual faces invite mockery, or pity? Then an aunt snorts, wipes her hands on her apron, and says, “If they drink our oil, they can look us in the eye.”
Word of this shift ripples outward: Andreas, running numbers with a risk‑averse adviser in Athens, realises that the only way to keep a foothold at Theodorakis is to drop the more extractive clauses from his proposal, replacing them with co‑branded transparency dashboards that track water use, worker pay, and biodiversity; awkwardly, he must sell integrity as a premium feature. Katerina, stung by how quickly villagers pierced her gloss, sits up late rewriting her platform’s supplier guidelines to guarantee veto power for small producers over exploitative marketing, discounting that punishes them, and any “exclusive content” that turns their lives into scenery without consent.
By the time the olive buds fatten into tiny green promises, the new rules have settled not as manifesto but as muscle memory. Contracts now carry clauses on storytelling rights and village review; even in thin weeks, pay envelopes land a little heavier on the kitchen table. Gossip, that most efficient regulator, skewers anyone proposing “just a little embellishment” for a brochure. Success is counted less in export volumes or likes than in whether each bright notion can be described, without flinching, over coffee in the square or under the pines by the chapel: no euphemisms, no strategic omissions, only the plain, complicated truth of who pays, who benefits, and who can bear to sign their name to it.
They begin treating each batch of oil like a short story rather than a product line. What had once been “Lot 7B” becomes, under Nerina’s pencil and Marios’s reluctant commentary, “the trees that sulked after the February hailstorm.” It starts almost accidentally: a morning when the light comes up soft and low, and the tasks for the day feel, for once, merely urgent rather than catastrophic.
Marios takes her out just after first light, when the grove is still half in dream. The damp air carries that faint metallic tang of sea mist blowing in from the gulf, and the terraces nearest the western edge gleam darker, leaves beaded with tiny droplets. He gestures with his pruning knife toward the slope. “These here drink the sea before they drink their own soil,” he says, then glances sideways, as if embarrassed by having said anything so poetic aloud.
Nerina only nods and writes it down.
They move slowly, not in the pressured march of harvest season but at a pace set by her questions. He points out which terraces caught the mist and which lay stubbornly dry, which rows faced the worst of the winter winds. Tree by tree, he inventories the year’s invisible negotiations: where frost nipped the blossom, where an early warm spell tricked the branches into hope, where a neighbour’s escaped goats chewed the lower shoots to pathetic brushes.
She lingers where he would usually pass. While he notes yield potential and pruning schedules, she quietly sketches a knot of bark that looks like a clenched fist, the ladder scars that climb one trunk like a faded history of risk, the crooked horizon where the terraces stumble down toward the blue. Her notebook, already smudged with olive dust and the faint ghosts of erased lines, thickens with these fragments: a broken branch caught in the wall, a child’s forgotten marble half-buried in the path, the way his hand rests, without thinking, against the gnarled bole of a heritage tree as if checking a pulse.
He is used to walking the grove as a ledger; she insists on walking it as a manuscript. By the time they circle back toward the farmhouse, the sun higher and the cicadas beginning their dry chorus, each terrace has acquired not just a projected yield but a title, an image, a mood. He feels, to his own surprise, that he has spoken more this morning than in some entire weeks of harvest: and that, for once, nothing he has said was about invoices.
In the press room’s low hum, with the steady clank and sigh of the machinery as their metronome, they begin to treat the label drafts like a shared diary. Sheets of mock-ups feather across the stainless-steel table, smelling faintly of ink and crushed olive leaf. They experiment with lines that read almost like field notes. To his own surprise, Marios, who once dismissed Sofia’s talk of “storytelling” as romantic fluff, finds himself the one insisting they keep even the imperfections she draws: a missing stone from a wall, an overfull crate listing at one corner, a dog’s tail disappearing at the frame’s edge. When she reaches automatically for the eraser, he catches her wrist, gently but firmly. “No,” he says, a little gruff. “Leave it. People should know it isn’t perfect. And that we were here.”
Between test prints, their routine softens into something like a miniature household stitched into the working day. Nerina starts arriving before the others, the kitchen still smelling of last night’s coffee, to leave a quick sketch propped against his mug: an olive leaf curled like a question mark, the outline of his hand on a lever, once, disastrously, his profile caught mid-frown. He pretends not to collect them, but they migrate to the press room wall all the same. In return, he quietly rearranges the press schedule so she can have the chapel yard when the light slips honey-gold along the stone. Evenings find them at the big farmhouse sink, sleeves rolled, forearms wet, debating whether a certain green is “too city” for their bottles, the argument meandering into memories, teasing, and easy silences that feel, disconcertingly, like belonging.
One blustery afternoon on the path to the chapel, a sudden gust turns the paper sheaf into startled birds. Pages skitter toward the terraces; Nerina lunges, swears under her breath, and Marios catches her elbow, boots slipping on loose gravel. For a breathless second they seesaw between sky and drop, then tumble against the low stone wall, laughing too loudly, relief fizzing. His hand stays, warm and steady, at her sleeve and then, somehow, her wrist or themselves. Away too fast.
The next label dispute tips into deeper ground: when Marios balks at placing his family name smaller than the terrace map, Nerina quietly asks whether the story belongs to one surname or to everyone who has ever bent their back on that slope. His jaw works; an uncle’s pride, a bookkeeper’s fear, wrestle behind his eyes. The conversation brushes the edge of her own falsified signature before she swerves it aside with a wry remark about “anonymous saints of agriculture.” Still, when he exhales and mutters, “Fine, the hill can be bigger than me,” something in the surrender, awkward, sincere, lodges as evidence that admitting smallness here, cautiously, might actually be survivable.
The first gathering in the village square has the air of an emergency parish meeting and a family argument disguised as civic duty. Under the plane tree, whose branches have presided over more than one scandal and reconciliation, metal chairs scrape and wobble on the uneven stones as grandmothers, teenage pickers, café owners, and two of Marios’s uncles arrange themselves in a loose, sceptical ring. Someone has dragged out a plastic table that once hosted cards and retsina; today it holds only a notebook, a chipped ashtray, and Sofia’s elbows.
Marios stands half in the shade, half in the sun, feeling both equally exposed. He can read the field before a storm; this has the same low, charged hum. The villagers’ eyes keep flicking between him and Sofia as if deciding which of them is the greater danger: the one with the land papers, or the one with the ideas.
Sofia does not begin with her carefully drafted bullet points or the sample itineraries Lazaros helped her sketch in the margins of a taverna bill. Instead, she looks around the circle like a primary-school teacher waiting for quiet, then says, lightly but clearly, “When strangers come, what do you wish they understood before they step onto our land?”
The word “our” lands like olive pits on a tin tray. A few heads turn towards Marios, measuring whether he will object. He keeps his face still, hands in his pockets, resisting the urge to cross his arms like his uncle beside him. Sofia lets the question hang, refusing to rescue them from the silence. Cicadas grind away in the plane tree; a moped whines past the square and fades. The pause lengthens just enough to become shared, a small, uncomfortable commons they must either fill or abandon.
One of the café owners coughs. A grandmother shifts, folding her hands over her apron. A teenager at the back kicks the leg of his chair, metal clanging against stone. No one is yet convinced they are not being sold something; no one has quite realised they are being asked to sell themselves a different future.
At first the answers tumble out as complaints rather than vision. It is easier, after all, to say what one will not endure. Old men grumble about “plastic smiles and plastic shoes,” about coaches that arrive in convoys and disgorge people who do not know the difference between a koroneiki and a garden shrub. Women mutter about tourists photographing children without asking, about strangers lifting phones in churches as if icons were museum pieces and not relatives. Younger workers worry about being filmed while sweaty and exhausted, tagged and shared without consent, turned into rustic wallpaper for someone else’s feed.
Lazaros, camera bag zipped shut at his feet in a deliberate act of disarmament, listens without protest. Once or twice he opens his mouth to explain “algorithms” or “authenticity,” then thinks better of it and simply nods, guilty as charged. Nerina takes quiet notes, her pencil scratching steadily, sketching stick‑figure guests with enormous phones and startled expressions, speech bubbles full of the villagers’ phrases. On the page, their raw frustration begins to arrange itself into bullet points and borders, the first rough lines of a manifesto rather than a mere rant.
As the litany of grievances finds shape, Sofia steers them toward specifics: if tourists shouldn’t just “drop in and grab content,” then what should they do? The first answers are tentative, then gather courage. Guests, they decide, should be invited, not invade. Into homes for rotating dinners where one family cooks and another hosts music, stories, or card games, with prices agreed in advance and posted on a board in the mini‑market. Every guided walk through the groves must include a local co‑guide paid a fixed share, not a “tip if they feel like it.” No filming of faces or interiors without explicit consent, with a simple red‑string‑on‑the‑wrist or ribbon‑on‑the‑gate system signalling those who prefer not to appear on camera, no questions asked.
It is the first time, Marios realises, that his columns and margins have not been deployed to defend the estate from the village but to bind them together. The numbers are crude (rounded, argued over, annotated with question marks and exclamation points) but when an old mason suggests a line for widows’ winter heating, heads nod. Even his most suspicious uncle grunts, “If we do this, we do it properly,” which in that dialect almost qualifies as blessing.
By dusk, the square has produced more than complaints. It has produced language: a single handwritten page, drafted by Sofia and Nerina and read aloud by the village priest, defining a “guest” not as a customer but as “a temporary neighbour who walks gently, listens first, and leaves something of value behind.” They argue verbs, not euros; Lazaros quietly adds a note about crediting guides by name; even Andreas, lurking at the back, murmurs assent. Copies of the charter are pinned in the taverna, the kafeneia, and at the estate gate, declaring that Agios Dimitrios is no longer background scenery but co‑author and gatekeeper of the story that future visitors will enter.
At the estate, “who does what” stops being an unspoken scramble and becomes a living plan. It begins, as revolutions often do, with a piece of paper and a man who has finally admitted he has only two hands.
Marios clears a corner of the farmhouse wall, tapes up a sheet of butcher paper, and draws. The result is less corporate org‑chart than strange family tree: boxes for “Soil Tests,” “Winter Pruning,” “Tasting Sessions,” “Guest Mornings in the Grove,” all linked by arrows that loop and double back like old roots. Beside the harvest schedule and the ageing calendar for each batch of oil, his flowchart looks almost playful. Almost.
“Is this… art?” Lazaros asks, leaning in with a camera, half teasing, half sincere.
“It is survival,” Marios replies, uncapping his pen again. “And it stops with me.”
For once, he means that the buck does not stop with him. It moves.
He writes names into boxes. His own, Sofia’s, Nerina’s, his uncles’, even two of the more responsible seasonal pickers. Sofia’s domain stretches across “Guest Check‑in,” “Village Dinners,” “Storytelling Walks.” Nerina’s curls around “Label Design,” “Workshop Posters,” “Sketch Sessions with Children.” There are dry, prosaic rectangles, “Machinery Maintenance,” “Invoice Filing,” “Supplier Calls”, and he gives several of those away with a wry kind of relief.
“That one is mine,” he tells his cousin Yiannis, tapping “Logistics for Deliveries.” “You already live in your truck; now you live on the board too.”
A low ripple of amusement passes through the room. The wall, once a private battlefield of lists, becomes communal territory. Questions are asked, objections raised, arrows redrawn. Marios finds himself saying “we” more than “I,” and no one looks surprised.
By the time they step back, the plan is no longer his flowchart but their map. The estate’s work, once a constant, anxious improvisation, acquires a visible rhythm: and with it, permission for its steward to be something other than perpetually exhausted.
Sofia turns the charter’s language into muscle memory. Within days she has commandeered the farmhouse veranda, seating a loose ring of village women, teenage nieces, and two of the quieter seasonal pickers on mismatched chairs. The sea breeze flips the corners of her handwritten notes; she ignores it.
“We are not waitresses in someone else’s movie,” she says, chalk in hand, as she sketches “temporary neighbour” on a bit of scavenged cardboard. “We decide the script.”
They practise greetings. Warm without fawning, curious without prying. She runs small role‑plays: the over‑enthusiastic influencer who wants to climb a heritage tree for a photo; the guest who treats everyone as part of the scenery; the shy couple who need drawing out. “Here you say yes,” Sofia demonstrates, “here you say no, and here you say ‘maybe later, after coffee.’ Always with a smile. Sometimes with a priest.”
She drills them in stories of the grove that centre ancestors, weather, labour, not tragedy or picturesque poverty. “You are not props,” she repeats. “You are hosts. Hosts set the tone.” The women nod, amused. And faintly taller.
Lazaros, who once filmed and fled, negotiates a rhythm that keeps him answerable: two harvests a year on‑site, remote check‑ins in between, and an editorial rule that every episode must foreground at least one local voice over his own. He drafts the clause himself, then, at Sofia’s insistence, reads it aloud in the kafeneion while old men pretend not to listen and listen very hard indeed. His contracts are now witnessed over thick coffee and clacking tavli pieces, co‑signed beneath the yellowed photograph of the village football team, rather than in some anonymous office in Athens. When he proposes a drone shot sweeping over the groves, Marios only agrees on condition that the first frame begins at ground level, boots and soil in view.
Nerina claims a sunlit storage room as her studio, lining one wall with sketches of the heritage trees and another with drafts of labels and pamphlets; the air smells of paper, linseed, and crushed leaves. With Marios and Sofia she edits out anything that smacks of “postcard fantasy”, insisting that every image (gnarled roots, nicked bark, calloused hands) answer honestly to the place.
The outside deals quietly re‑draw their borders around that truth. Andreas, after one rueful glance at the latest village‑annotated spreadsheet, concedes to remain in the background as a minority partner, his money routed into cold storage, shipping, and finally reliable broadband instead of glossy logos. In Athens, Katerina tears up her old pitch deck, rebuilding it so estates dictate terms, timing, and percentages, her platform reimagined as a patient bridge rather than a conquering flag.
At the grove, the running joke slowly replaces old tensions. It begins, as such things often do, with an allegedly serious meeting.
They convene on the Harvest Terrace at sunset, the sky streaked with apricot and mauve as if Nerina herself had taken a brush to it. The elders arrive in their Sunday shirts although it is a Tuesday, the better to lend weight to the proceedings; Sofia arrives with a folder and a stack of plastic cups; Lazaros, having “just happened” to be nearby with his camera, is firmly informed by Marios that this particular conversation is “off‑record”. Nerina hovers on the path, pretending to sketch thyme while really watching Marios’s shoulders.
Andreas, seated at the rough wooden bench in what he privately thinks of as his former throne, straightens his linen cuffs and produces a leather folder with the ease of a man used to being on the side that writes the terms. He clears his throat, begins to speak of “brand alignment” and “synergies”, and is immediately interrupted by Yiorgos Theodorakis, who slides a very different sheaf of papers across the bench with the gravitas of a bishop bestowing scriptures.
Red pen blooms across Andreas’s slick black typeface: clauses on data transparency, local hiring quotas, mandatory Greek‑language summaries, annual public meetings in the village square. There is, printed in Sofia’s neat hand, a paragraph granting veto power to a rotating council of villagers over any marketing campaign that “misrepresents the character of Agios Dimitrios or the Theodorakis estate, including but not limited to the use of misleading filters.”
Andreas reads, once, twice. His polished lawyer’s phrases come back to haunt him in unfamiliar order. Marios watches him with that constrained stillness he has cultivated over years of being outnumbered at the family table. The elders, apparently absorbed in adjusting their chairs, follow each change of Andreas’s expression with open satisfaction.
“Well,” Andreas says at last, leaning back. “I see I have been… comprehensively localised.”
“You said you wanted authenticity,” Sofia reminds him, almost sweetly. “This is what it looks like on paper.”
“And in the kafeneion,” one of the uncles adds. “We have a copy there now.”
A ripple of laughter passes around the terrace, loosening something in Marios’s chest that has been knotted since Andreas first drove up the dirt road in his gleaming car. The joke sharpens into a ritual: the investor who arrived to stage a lifestyle romance now mock‑saluting the committee as he signs away his right to airbrush the village.
Andreas hesitates only a moment longer. Then, half‑amused and half, though he would not yet admit it, relieved to be answerable to something other than faceless shareholders, he takes the red‑marked pen Sofia offers and signs in full view of the olives, the sea, and three generations of Theodorakis eyes.
Down among the trees, where the festival bunting has already been packed away and only a few stubborn fairy lights blink in the distance, Lazaros props his camera on a crate and talks to the lens as if to an old friend.
“So,” he says, scratching the back of his neck, “turns out ethical storytelling isn’t just sunsets and dancing, my people. It’s coming back when the hangover hits, when it’s pruning day and the only soundtrack is secateurs and someone swearing about committee minutes.”
He swings the camera to the rows behind him: an uncle muttering over a crooked branch, Sofia in trainers and an old T‑shirt arguing softly with Marios about compost ratios, Nerina in the background rinsing brushes at a hose. No drone shots, no swelling music: only cicadas and the occasional sheep.
He explains, briefly and without his usual patter, that if he’s going to talk about roots, he has to grow some of his own by returning, listening, staying long enough to be told no.
Later, in the dim light of the farmhouse Wi‑Fi corner, he hits upload and opens his planning app “just to jot ideas”. By the time the video finishes processing, an entire content calendar has appeared, olive bloom, summer irrigation, next year’s harvest dates, each entry presuming, with a casual arrogance he does not yet dare name, that he will still be here when the trees need him again.
In the farmhouse kitchen, Katerina stands over her laptop while Yiayia rolls out dough beside her, the screen spattered with a faint dusting of flour. They workshop new slide titles out loud, “No blitzscaling,” “Farmer‑first margins,” “Opt‑in growth only,” “No surprise pivots”, each phrase sounding, to Katerina’s faint astonishment, less like a pitch to venture capital and more like a set of house rules for a decent life. Yiayia pauses to correct her spelling of “cooperative,” then nods as if this, at least, passes muster. Somewhere between the dough circles and the bullet points, Katerina realises with a jolt of rueful pride that the metrics exciting her now are the number of producers keeping their land, the kilometres between farm and buyer, the years a partnership can quietly endure without anyone needing to “exit” at all.
Later, on the bottling line, Marios and Nerina finalize the first labels under the new agreements: each bottle lists the terrace name, harvest team, even the day’s weather, with a tiny sketch of the specific tree row. When Marios hesitates, muttering that this level of detail is “too much,” Nerina only smiles and says this is precisely what makes the estate impossible to copy: or casually abandon.
When the season’s first mixed shipment goes out: cold‑storage pallets financed under Andreas’s newly modest terms, documented in uncharacteristically quiet cuts by Lazaros, routed through Katerina’s contrite, farmer‑led platform, Marios walks the length of the gravel courtyard alone at dusk, hearing compressors hum like distant surf. In the mesh of small, argued‑over clauses he recognises a version of modern entrepreneurship that does not require him to leave, sell his grandfather’s soil, or pretend that care and ambition are natural enemies.
At first the attention comes in small, almost comical waves, like the first olives shaken loose before the nets are properly spread. A cousin’s friend in Kalamata posts a shaky video of the harvest‑terrace dinner: the camera lurches between Yiayia scolding someone off‑screen for double‑dipping bread and Lazaros laughing as Sofia corrals a line of city guests into passing plates down the table. The clip is badly framed, the sound half‑wind, half‑cutlery. And yet, under bad lighting and worse focus, a certain ease leaks through.
Lazaros’s edited version arrives a few days later, all soft dusk light and clinking glasses, the camera lingering on workers’ names stitched into aprons and Nerina’s ink‑stained hand lettering a date on a crate. It goes mildly viral among eco‑travel forums, where people argue in the comments about whether this is “authentic” or just good branding. Sofia, who has already anticipated the argument, posts carefully captioned behind‑the‑scenes clips: the broken glass swept after everyone leaves, the schedule whiteboard crammed with shifts and allergies and bus times. Those begin circulating in hospitality groups, not as “content,” but as how‑to examples with subject lines like, “Is this what respectful agro‑tourism looks like?”
Within weeks, the estate’s inbox, previously a quiet graveyard of spammy inquiries and last‑minute cancellation requests, begins to collect a new species of message. Marios, after one long morning on the terraces, showers, opens his laptop with the usual dread of invoices, and instead finds emails from co‑ops on other islands and hillside villages. They ask, not for discounts or bulk rates, but for copies of the estate’s guest guidelines and labour agreements; for permission to translate the picker‑code into their dialect; for advice on handling that one cousin who insists the old way, cash in envelopes, no questions asked, was simpler. Reading them, Marios realises with a slow, disbelieving satisfaction that, for once, the thing being copied is not the label, but the terms on which people agree to stand behind it.
By the time the first delegation actually appears at the gate, a “delegation” that looks suspiciously like a Sunday outing, complete with beach bags and a Tupperware of koulourakia, Marios has braced for clipboards and instead meets two island co‑op reps, a municipal clerk with sunburnt ears, and a sceptical aunt in black who announces she is “only here to see what nonsense you’ve invented.”
Sofia and Nerina claim the shade under the fig trees as if arranging a stage. The estate’s “rules” are pinned to a travelling corkboard, the pushpins colour‑coded in a way that only Nerina fully understands. No flash photography of pickers without consent. No drone shots during midday heat. Harvest schedules that put workers’ bodies ahead of influencers’ sunrise shots; visitor caps tied to the number of shade breaks, not booking enquiries.
“Is this law,” the clerk asks, tapping one sheet, “or… philosophy?”
“Practice,” Sofia replies. “Law can catch up if it likes.”
Marios stands back, listening as clauses are pulled apart and put back together, phrasing nudged until it sits comfortably in the mouths of lawyers, grandmothers, and twenty‑year‑old seasonal workers who have decided that anonymity is one tradition they are willing to abandon.
The piece she files is late, longer than her editor requested, and written in a tone he has not seen from her in years. The obligatory descriptions are there, but they function mostly as scenery for something less photogenic: spreadsheets printed large enough for ageing eyes, a clause that obliges any partner platform to disclose its own commission, a note in the margins in Marios’s cramped hand: “If we cannot explain it at the kafeneio, it does not belong here.”
By the time the article runs, under a headline someone in Athens chooses for its irony, Marios is only dimly aware of it, catching fragments read aloud by seasonal workers on their coffee breaks.
As more observers filter through (NGO interns, tourism officials, freelance photographers anxious about their own complicity) the estate’s practices harden from improvisations into a sketched‑out framework, then into something people start calling, with half‑embarrassed respect, “the Kalamata model.” Nerina drafts visual infographics that map the flow of money from bottle to picker and back into soil tests and shade structures; Lazaros uploads a companion explainer video that demystifies “sustainable storytelling” as something grounded in consent forms, veto power, and co‑authorship rather than wistful drone shots. In the shade of the old stone mill, Marios sits with another grove owner from a drought‑hit valley, sliding a sample contract across the table and saying, almost apologetically, “We’re still testing this, but at least everyone who signs it knows exactly what they’re giving and getting: and how to change it next year if we’ve got it wrong.”
Over time, the language of the place shifts in small but stubborn ways: visitors introduce themselves by asking whose trees they’ll be helping that day; tour brochures list crews instead of “hosts” and “guests”; bottle labels carry rotating names of pruners, press operators, and the grandmothers whose recipes anchor the tasting table. Among locals, a quiet certainty settles: that any contract which cannot survive being read aloud over coffee on the square is a trap, not a promise. Profit, people begin to say in half‑jokes and earnest toasts alike, is merely accelerated erosion unless it binds rather than strips away; here, on this hill, the binding has at last begun to outweigh the loss, thread by deliberate thread.
As the last of the evening heat lifts, Marios steps back from the final string of lanterns, fingers stained with oil and dust, watching their pooled light settle over the benches and wild thyme. He tests the rope with a habitual, unnecessary tug, then another, because a man who has watched wind tear roofs and crops apart does not readily trust a knot tied at the first attempt.
“Still there,” Nerina observes mildly, without looking up.
He glances across. She is perched on the low stone wall, sketchbook balanced on her knees, bare ankles swung over the drop as if the two‑metre fall into thyme and rock were nothing. Her pencil moves fast, almost impatiently, rapidly catching the way the bulbs turn the olives’ silver undersides to soft gold, how the shadows from the benches cross and recross like lines on an old map.
“You’re drawing the defective lantern line,” he says. “I should have fixed that before you immortalised it.”
She huffs a laugh, the sound light as the gnats rising from the terrace below. “Defects are how people know it’s real. Anyway, if it falls, I’ll just label it ‘dynamic lighting installation’ and you can charge extra.”
He permits himself the ghost of a smile. “You and Lazaros have been talking again.”
“Purely for research,” she replies, shading in the hollow of his forearm where it rests, unconsciously, on the wall beside her. “Someone has to document the rare phenomenon of a man voluntarily letting go of control.”
He considers this, watching a lantern sway and right itself. Their easy silence stretches, no longer the brittle, practised hush of two conspirators waiting for a cue, but something that has grown in the gaps between contracts and labels and shared, bone‑deep tiredness. It is as intimate as any confession they once rehearsed for show, and far less fragile: built not on what they pretend to be for outsiders, but on the slow, stubborn knowledge of who still shows up when the guests have not yet arrived and the work is, as always, not quite finished.
Below them, Sofia’s voice carries up the path as she cheerfully badgers a pair of uncles into sitting closer to the tourists they’ve adopted as honorary cousins, scolding them for leaving an empty chair “like a bad omen for business.” She redirects a tray with a flick of her wrist, “Not there, Thodori, unless you want the mayor to eat all the feta by himself”, nudges a bottle of village wine into a shy German visitor’s hand, then, without pausing, leans over the battered Bluetooth speaker to nudge the playlist from nostalgic laïká into something with a lighter bouzouki line.
“Tomorrow’s workshop?” she is saying, already turning toward a woman in linen trainers who has asked, in careful English, where the money goes. “Half to the estate, half to the cooperative fund. That’s for shade nets, child‑care during harvest, fuel for shared transport. If it doesn’t help more than one family, it doesn’t pass.” She states this as calmly as the weather, and the guest nods, taking notes, while around her men twice her age wait, trays in hand, for her next instruction, hardly aware that they are following orders.
On the periphery, Lazaros moves like a well‑trained extra rather than a star, camera dialled to forgiving wide angles that catch bursts of laughter, lantern flare, the slow migration of meze plates and the occasional gesturing aunt, without lingering long enough on any one face to turn a neighbour into “content.” When a child tugs his shirt and demands a turn “directing,” he hands over the camera without mockery or lecture, only a brisk adjustment of the strap and a murmured, “Don’t drop my livelihood, re.” The resulting crooked, joy‑drunk footage is destined, he knows, for a quiet epilogue rather than a viral hook, and, increasingly, for his own private archive of reasons not to keep moving.
Andreas appears up the path short of breath, leather soles dust‑streaked, a crate of local wine wedged against one hip and a bowl of village figs cradled in his other arm. The elders on the lower terrace offer a smattering of teasing applause; he answers with a rueful half‑bow, protesting that manual labour destroys one’s public image far quicker than scandal ever could. Sofia merely arches an eyebrow and reminds him of tomorrow’s sustainability workshop; to Marios’s faint surprise, he takes it without flinching, producing a dog‑eared notebook already half‑filled with questions instead of slogans, his careful handwriting jostling uncomfortably alongside wine stains and a scribbled, uncertain olive branch.
From where Marios stands, knotting one last cable, it feels less like punishment than a kind of gentle municipal re‑zoning of his life: investors reclassified as volunteers, rivals as consultants, ex‑lovers as line items on a shared spreadsheet. Even his own title, once “the last responsible idiot”, has quietly slid toward something humbler, and far more alarming: man who might finally stay.