PIA COMES BACK FROM HER RUN to a lobby full of people. The last of the wedding party have arrived on the morning ferry. On her way up to her room Pia stops on the landing and watches the new guests as they drop their suitcases and survey the lounge’s ornate furniture and plush carpets; the ceramic vases stuffed with plump flowers. The bride, here since yesterday, flits around greeting everyone: two bridesmaids who look like sisters, the musicians her father hired, distant relations red-faced and queasy from their travels.

  The bride’s father fusses over his daughter—‘How did you sleep?’ ‘Have you eaten?’—as if she were an egg that might easily crack. Then he turns to the bass player, who’s setting his instrument case gently against the wall farthest away from the fire. ‘Rough crossing?’

  The musician nods, and the desk clerk, peering up from her ledger, says, ‘You’re lucky the morning ferry ran at all—the rest of today’s sailings have been cancelled.’

  Later, when Pia heads back through the lobby on her way to the kitchen, the groom walks into the hotel. A cry goes up about bad luck, how he mustn’t see the bride before the wedding, and the bride ducks behind the front desk in a panic.

  ‘What?’ the groom asks, bewildered, as the father of the bride walks him back out the door.

  The fact that there’s a wedding at the hotel means nothing to Pia. She isn’t interested in weddings, can’t imagine getting married herself. The bride, coming out from behind the counter with an exaggerated expression of relief on her face, is in her mid-twenties, half Pia’s age. Twenty-four, twenty-five—isn’t that too young to make such a big decision? Then it occurs to Pia that she’d already lived in three countries by that age—and worked in five different kitchens.

  The wedding is scheduled for four o’clock. At six there’ll be fifty-two guests for dinner. Pia runs the day’s prep through her head. The fish and veg will have already been delivered; the guinea fowl will come by truck at ten; and the chef will start at two, which means everything needs to be in order by then. The dinner is in five courses: local oysters on a bed of greens, a tomato and basil terrine, crusted cod and peas, guinea fowl with parsnips, and then cake—a three-tier monstrosity that’s taking up too much room in the walk-in refrigerator. When Pia pushes through the double doors to the kitchen, the prep cook is already at his station dicing onions. He has dark circles under his eyes, his face is puffy and his hair is wild, as if he’s just rolled out of bed. He asks Pia if the rest of the wedding party has arrived yet.

  ‘On the first ferry.’

  ‘You run today?’

  Pia nods.

  ‘How far?’

  Instead of saying, Past the village hall and the widow sitting in her window, past the field of brown grass that suedes the sea, and the sheep in their shagging coats, and the stone farmhouse, and the gusting headland…Pia says, ‘Ten, eleven kilometres?’

  The prep cook grabs a fresh onion off the counter, starts to peel its skin. ‘You’re slacking,’ he says.

  THE ENTREMETIER AND PORTER come into the kitchen while Pia is checking off the deliveries. Sometimes the staff listens to the radio but today the reception is staticky so they work in silence. The entremetier is shucking oysters, hunching over the counter to do his knife work because he’s so tall. Pia picks one of the shucked oysters from its bed of ice and places it in her mouth to test its quality. The entremetier studies her face. The oyster is good—typical of the island variety: a slightly brackish taste, the mantle firm on her tongue. She dips a spoon into the mignonette he’s made, says, ‘Watch the salt. These have more—’ and here Pia’s brain shutters over the word for salmuera. She closes her eyes, repeats salmuera, and sees herself as a child wobble a spoonful of mussel up to her mouth under her mother’s sharp gaze.

  ‘Brine,’ she eventually says, and the edges of her mouth flick up in a smile.

  When Pia was a child in the village by the sea, food was simple: the signature of the soil or a slant of sun on the ripe tomato was what gave a soup or a salad its bright acidity; the broth served with mussels was the flavour of the mussels themselves. Pia was ten when the family moved back to her mother’s country, to the large city where her grandmother still lived. There, they ate a variety of mussels that were meatier and fuller than the ones Pia was used to, served with a broth of onion, parsley and hot pepper. For her it was as if a melody had been added to music she thought she knew.

  Pia’s grandmother—her abuela—was a fierce woman. ‘Eat, eat, eat,’ she would say, ‘stop staring at your food.’ The old woman sometimes mimed eating as she said this, as if suspicious the girl’s comprehension was poor. Then she’d give up and glare at Pia’s mother, who could usually be found sitting on the kitchen counter smoking a cigarette or at the long oak table in the dining room reading the newspaper. ‘So skinny,’ Pia’s abuela would say, ‘she fusses over everything!’ But Pia ate slowly only to stretch out the time, hoping her mother and her abuela would gossip: Oh my neighbour, he this, he that…and so-and-so across the street is pregnant, and why don’t you have another? And where are you going now for work, and when will you be back, and is it safe?

  Pia pulls a bucket of basil from the walk-in and takes it to the sink. If she closes her eyes she can remember the first time she tasted basil: in her abuela’s city garden—two plants sprigging out of the earth beside unhappy-looking tomatoes. Pia is like a woman in a famine in this way: always thinking about food.

  An hour before the chef is due, the prep cook and the entremetier fall into an argument about the fish. Pia walks over to them, inspects the prep cook’s deboning. She turns over a slip of cod. ‘He’s right,’ she says to the prep cook, ‘try not to make such a mess of it.’ There’s silence for a minute and then the porter—a local boy with a wide face and curly hair—turns the radio back on. Static. Outside it starts to rain, grey fingers tapping the window above the sink.

  THE RAIN COMES DOWN IN EARNEST, and the location of the wedding ceremony is moved from the hotel patio to the village hall. Hotel staff help shuttle the chairs and tables down the road to the hall, a former schoolhouse. When Pia heads to the bar for a coffee she passes the father of the bride, his coat soaking wet, talking to the hotel clerk: ‘Can we get some extra candles for the tables? It’s so dark in there.’

  The bar has filled up for lunch and the room is noisy with chatter. Pia slips past a group of local women waiting for a table—one wears a perfume that’s a burst of violets—and asks the barman for her coffee. While she waits she watches steaming plates of food coming out of the bar’s small kitchen—roast and gravy, a hearty stew—and checks to see if people are enjoying what they’re eating. At the front of the bar, by the quarrelled windows, the musicians are setting up their instruments. After dinner, the wedding party will go back to the village hall to dance, and there’ll be live music here for those who prefer to stay at the inn.

  The lunch guests are a mix of locals and wedding party members. The man Pia sometimes sleeps with—a builder who recently moved back from the mainland—is sitting with a friend at a table along the wall. He has his back to Pia, which means she can choose whether or not to go over and say hello. She tries to remember how they’d left things: the builder in her bed as she got up for a morning run…and then nothing for weeks.

  Pia puts her hand on the builder’s arm. He blinks up at her. His face—its cragginess, how tired he looks—always surprises her because in bed his body seems so youthful. He’s wearing a thick brown sweater, nubby under her fingers, and she remembers he still doesn’t have heat in the cottage he’s renovating.

  ‘Do you know Pia?’ the builder asks his friend, and the friend and Pia nod at each other. She’s been on the island long enough to know most of the locals. The builder wipes his hands with his napkin and then sets it on his plate. ‘Can you sit?’

  ‘No, I have to get back.’

  His eyes sweep over her face, inquiring. ‘I was on the mainland,’ he says. ‘Sorry I didn’t let you know I was going, something came up.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Pia says, and means it.

  Pia first met the builder on a morning run. It was late spring, the island lifting its face toward summer. After the coast road turns inland there’s an unfenced flock of sheep, and then a cottage. One morning there was a man outside the cottage, resetting rocks that had fallen off the stone wall. He waved, and Pia waved back. After a few days of waving, he happened to be working along the front of the property. He stepped out on the road to ask how her run was going. At first, Pia didn’t say anything because when she ran she tended not to think in English and his words were like steps that lead you out of a dream. ‘I hear you’re the new sous-chef, working over at the hotel,’ he persisted. He scratched the side of his nose with his thumb—a Roman nose, which at some point had been broken. Down the road a group of sheep moved slowly toward them.

  For a long time, Pia and the builder didn’t exchange names. Over the next few weeks he’d shout, ‘Hey chef,’ and she’d call, ‘Hey builder,’ and in the hours and days between sightings she never thought of him at all.

  BY TWO, WHEN THE CHEF ARRIVES, the wind is buffeting the building. He comes in with his dark hair wild about his head, his face wet with rain. Pia hands him a clean towel. He pats his face with it before handing it back so she can walk it over to the hamper.

  There’s a sound the wind makes that’s particular to the hotel—because of its position on the promontory above the sea, its flat stonework. Pia feels like she can hear the wind circling the building, whipping its head around corners to course along the stone, drag its knuckles along the windows. There was no wind like this in her childhood—no stretch of patio with frazzled grass, and no thin wire fence against a sudden drop to the ocean.

  ‘Bad out there?’ Pia asks.

  The chef buttons up his white jacket. ‘They called all the boats in a few hours ago.’ He turns to the porter. ‘One of the boats from the south harbour hasn’t come in yet. It’s not your father’s—he’s in, but I thought you should know.’

  The porter nods and goes back to the saucepans he was scrubbing, peering up at the square of grey sky framed in the window above the sink.

  Once the chef has made sure everything’s in order—the quail plucked and cleaned, the sauces started—he tells Pia that the widow’s son is one of the crew on the boat that’s missing. He knows that Pia or the hotel owner sometimes will take the widow a plate of food to make sure she’s getting enough to eat. Last night Pia had set aside an onion tart from the dinner menu for this very purpose.

  ‘Why don’t you stop over now, take her some soup?’

  ‘Does she know? About the boat?’

  The chef shrugs. ‘Probably not, and it’s too soon to upset her. They’re still trying to call the crew up on the radio.’

  The widow is in her eighties. Sometimes she will offer Pia tea and then come back into the living room carrying a vase or a colander instead of a teapot. A few weeks ago, after Pia had warmed up a meat pie, the widow asked Pia to call her husband in for dinner. There is a photo of him on the mantel: a gentle-looking man in his fifties with a strong nose and a mischievous smile. A man stuck in time, in a suit and tie from the decade he last lived in. Pia had brought the photo in and gently placed it next to the widow’s small pour of wine.

  On this part of the island there are almost no trees. It’s possible to walk out a door and be blown over by a wind you couldn’t see from your window. Pia learned early that the ribbon of road along the coast could alternate between stillness and sudden gusts. One morning, when she was out running, the wind had been so bad she’d been forced to turn around before the chapel and walk slowly back to the hotel, keeping to the inland side of the road. This was when Pia met the widow. She’d reached the windbreak of the village, and the widow—who lived four houses down from the hotel—stood up from her wingback chair facing the picture window to wave Pia inside.

  ‘I keep seeing you…’ the widow said, wavering in the doorway in a long grey cardigan, her hair white and thin. She reached out to touch Pia’s face and Pia, surprising herself, let the woman run her fingers lightly over her hairline. ‘I half wondered if you were a dream.’

  Pia knocks on the door and the widow answers. ‘Come in, come in,’ she says. Pia’s wearing the prep cook’s thick oilskin coat but has given up on her umbrella in the wind. Once inside Pia stands dripping on the entry rug. The widow disappears and Pia hears noise in the bathroom—cabinets and drawers being opened and shut—until eventually she comes back with a hand towel.

  The first time Pia was invited to the widow’s house, she noticed a peculiar scent she couldn’t quite place. There were the expected smells—of black tea and dusty shelves, the must of the sea breathing through stone; a trace of the talc the widow had probably dabbed on that morning. But under all that was something chemical, like wallpaper paste or adhesive. The smell turned out to be binder’s glue, which the widow used for book repairs. In her forties, fifties and sixties, the widow had been the island’s self-appointed librarian. Her husband, a carpenter, had fitted out the back room of their house with floor-to-ceiling bookcases and, over the years, the widow built up a good collection of books. Five days a week she would take a selection of these books on a blue bus—also outfitted with shelves—to various parts of the island: the south and north ports, the main town by the lake, the fishing village on the peninsula.

  Now there are at least a thousand books in the widow’s back room, call numbers inked on each spine. In the corner of the room there’s a wicker cat bed, its cushions lit with strands of white fur, although in all of her visits Pia has yet to lay eyes on its occupant.

  Over the past months, the widow has lent Pia a number of books. Sometimes Pia will ask for books on certain topics—food or cooking, recipe collections—but also natural histories, novels about distant cities to remind her that she doesn’t yet know where she’ll end up.

  ‘How’s your Roman history coming?’

  Pia looks up from her cup of tea into the widow’s bright blue eyes. Some days, the old woman’s mind is remarkably sharp. ‘I’m only at the Punic wars.’

  The widow smiles. ‘Well, there’s a lot more bloodshed to come.’

  On three or four occasions, in the widow’s back room, Pia has played a game. It was a game she and one of her girlfriends used to play in school: both girls would close their eyes and let their fingers trail over the bumps of the spines of books in the library. When either one of them called stop, they’d open their eyes and slide out the books their fingers had landed on. They had a pact: no matter what the book was, they had to read it. Pia had played a version of this game in the widow’s back room, and the book on Roman history had been one of these selections.

  The widow finishes her soup and bread. She talks about the charity raffle at the church, about the problems with her milk delivery, how sometimes the bottles are outside the door at six and sometimes at seven, and she isn’t sure if it’s because of the new delivery boy…and then she says, ‘I still like to get up early,’ and peers across the sitting room as if she can see a scene from some other time in her life playing across the curtains.

  When Pia stands up to leave, the widow says, ‘Thank you for coming.’ Then she adds, softly, ‘He’ll be all right.’

  Pia swoons with relief. The widow knows about her son’s boat.

  IT’S JUST PAST SIX P.M. when the wedding party crowds into the dining room. Midway through the meal Pia stands at the kitchen door and looks out its round window, like someone below decks peering out the porthole of a ship. The room is light and airy—the best man laughing at something the groom has said, the guests regarding the food on their plates thoughtfully even as they chat across the tables. Dinner is the chef’s hour. After the last course he likes to walk around the tables in his crisp jacket, greeting the locals he knows, shaking hands with the men and bowing to the women, his dark hair falling forward as he kisses their hands. Pia has imagined this role for herself: how she would navigate the room, what degree of attention, of affection, she might be able to give.

  Tonight when the chef comes back from the dining room, he looks pleased. The prep cook’s shoulders relax, the porter steps out for a cigarette, but Pia scrubs the range harder, working off the splatters of sauce. She thinks: If I sit down on the side of the road midway through a run no one notices, but here, in this space, the chef sees everything. And her contract is almost up. The island has so few tourists in the winter and the restaurant isn’t busy enough to require a full staff. Pia hasn’t yet decided where she wants to land—if she should pack the small bag she came with, leave with a good reference, or ask to stay and see what else she can learn here.

  ‘Great work,’ the chef says. He pats Pia’s back and then rubs his own eyes with the heels of his palms. ‘Finish the clean-down, then you can head over to the dance if you want.’

  All the staff from the hotel are invited to the dance. The hall, a one-room building with wood floors and a peaked roof, is the usual spot for local festivities. Pia sprints to it through the rain with the prep cook. She’s wearing her only dress—blue silk, short-sleeved—one that’s too light for autumn. By the time she and the prep cook duck inside the main doors they’re both soaked. The bride’s parents have made everything beautiful: the hall’s rafters strung with white bunting, the ledges of the stone walls lined with tea lights, lanterns hanging over the dance floor. Dahlias are bunched in vases on either end of a table stacked with brightly wrapped gifts. Soon, the father of the bride gives a toast to the happy couple and someone puts a record on—bright, up-tempo music—and everyone begins dancing. In the gaps between songs Pia hears the rain pummel the roof.