“I really wish you wouldn’t call me that.”

“And I really wish I could turn the fucking TV on,” said Brad. “But as Mick Jagger once said, ‘You can’t always get what you want.’”

“God, I’m tired,” said Kristen.

“Me too,” said Marcus, still looking sourly at Brad. “I feel like I didn’t sleep at all, but I was totally out the moment I put my head down.”

“Me too!” said Kristen. “I don’t even remember getting into bed. But now I feel like I was run over by a truck.”

“Maybe ease off on the booze today, hon,” said Brad, looking out the window.

She shot him a quick, injured look, then gave Marcus and me an embarrassed smile.

“Might not be a bad idea,” she said. “One can have too much vacation.”

Brad snorted at that, a nasty, knowing laugh, though I wasn’t sure what—or whom—it was directed at.

“I had bad dreams,” said Gretchen. She looked distant, troubled, and I didn’t think it was about the awkwardness of last night’s spat with Brad. “People asking me questions in the dark. Monsters. It was weird. I think I was tied up or something . . .”

“Ooh,” said Brad. “Kinky.”

Gretchen shot him a look so savage and hostile that she looked, for a moment, like someone I’d never seen before.

“It was horrible,” she said. “It went on and on, and then . . . I guess I woke up. In my bed.”

“Best place to wake up,” said Brad, unmoved.

“What were they asking about?” I said.

“What?” she said, turning to me as if just realizing I was there.

“You said the monsters were asking you questions. What about?”

“Oh, I . . .” She hesitated and seemed to fade for a second, her eyes narrowing as she tried to remember, then widening suddenly, as if something unexpected had swum into view. Something unsettling. “I don’t remember,” she said, her face suddenly closed.

Now, I’ve told a lot of lies. I’m good at it, and I’m good at spotting when others tell them too. I wasn’t sure if it was because she wanted the attention, suddenly becoming the center of our glittering little circle as she had been the night before, but Gretchen was lying. If I had to guess, I’d say that it hadn’t begun as a lie but it had become one out of necessity as she blundered about in her own head, finding things and covering them up. I had done the same thing many, many times.

I watched her as she put her coffee cup down, and I thought her hand trembled slightly. I was almost sure it wasn’t the tremble of someone caught up in the thrill of misleading other people, the giddy rush of having secret knowledge no one else has. Gretchen was afraid.

Must have been one hell of a nightmare.

I must say, I didn’t feel great either. Like them, I had slept like a log, but now I felt wearier than ever. It wasn’t just physical tiredness either. I felt slow-witted and a bit out of it. Marcus had asked me what I wanted for breakfast, and I had just stared at him, knowing he was talking to me but somehow not able to process what he said, and I had already taken three Advil for a headache that rumbled in the front of my skull like a tractor trailer. Maybe Brad was right. It was time to lay off the vino and whatever-the-hell cocktails Mel kept producing.

“I need some air,” said Marcus. “This place is fantastic, but it doesn’t exactly circulate, does it?”

“Fancy a walk?” I suggested.

“Morning, people!” called Melissa, appearing from the other wing of the house and showing none of the half-awake misery that the rest of us were laboring under. “No walking off by yourselves. We’re heading into town for brunch. All of us. Won’t that be fun?”

She said it beaming and in defiance of our mood, though she couldn’t bring herself to look at Brad, who was glaring at her. But once Simon and Melissa put their minds to something, it would take an act of God—or at least a major fight—to derail it, and twenty minutes later we were boarding the Mercedes in compliant, if surly, silence. Where we were going, however, had not been determined, and our fearless leaders were not in agreement.

“Come on, Simon,” said Marcus. “For old times’ sake.”

“The Diogenes?” said Simon. “No. There’s a dozen restaurants in a two-block radius. We never thought the food was that good there. We just kept going back because it was familiar.”

“Exactly!” said Marcus. “We have to go at least once. Back me up, Kristen.”

“Absolutely,” said Kristen. “For old times’ sake.”

“Really?” said Simon. “Souvlaki and fries for brunch? Tomato salad drenched in olive oil? This is how you eat these days?”

“Of course not!” said Kristen. “Which is why I want to do it here.”

“I always kind of hated that place,” said Simon, and he wasn’t joking now. He meant it.

Simon had always had a tendency to push minor irritation into belligerence. Little things might stay little—meriting no more than a raised eyebrow or a resigned sigh—or he might dig his heels in and fight his corner like there was something real at stake. Still, I tried to remember him bitching about the restaurant before, but couldn’t recall him ever saying anything of the kind.

It was called Taverna Diogenes. It sat on the bus route from the hotel we had stayed in to Rethymno, though we had always walked there. It was less than five hundred yards from the Minos’s concierge desk, and it was someone there who had first recommended it to us.

“Probably his brother runs the place,” Brad had observed, not unreasonably. The local community seemed tight and interconnected. It was like a hundred other tourist-oriented Greek restaurants on the island, but it had become our place, and we’d eaten most of our meals there.

“You know, Si, it really might be fun,” said Melissa. “As they say, for old times’ sake.”

They exchanged a look that said anything but fun, then Simon shrugged and turned away.

“Fine,” he said.

As we drove over there once more, Simon grew quiet—“just focusing on the road, Mel,” he snapped when his wife asked him what was wrong—and the rest of us, as if to compensate, seemed to wake up. Our mood lifted, and even my headache went away as the ibuprofen kicked in, so that by the time we reached the Diogenes, I was feeling much better and had developed a serious appetite.

There were a few tables inside, but most were out in a flagstone-paved area by the road, surrounded by a low stone wall and canopied with a roof that was half thatch and half real grapevine. That had been a selling feature when we first arrived, the fruit hanging from the rafters above the table. It had seemed so exotic. Marcus told us some story about Diogenes wandering the streets at noon with a lantern. “Claimed to be looking for an honest man,” he said.

The food was standard Greek tourist fare—a dozen or so main courses, a handful of predictable sides, retsina, wine, ouzo, and pints of Mythos beer served very cold. It was still run by a boisterous middle-aged woman called Maria and staffed by her children and their cousins, some of whom also worked around the hotel and the beach. One of the boys, a teenager who had taken an obvious shine to Melissa, had appeared in Marcus’s slide show. He led tourists on snorkeling and paddling expeditions around the bay, and I remembered him badgering us to join him, though we didn’t go. Mel had flirted with him till he promised to bring us all fresh local sponges recovered from the sea by his own hands. There had been a rack of them, bagged in cellophane, beside the counter, and a couple of baskets of larger ones that looked like great ocher corals. I had bought a small one from the hotel and used it religiously for the next two years till it finally disintegrated. But the kid had said he knew where the best ones grew and would bring one as big as his head for Melissa. I remembered his boyish pride, his determination to prove himself worthy of Mel’s glamorous favor, though he never delivered the sponges—not to the rest of us, at least—and he wasn’t around at the end of the trip. I think Simon got tired of him buzzing around and may have said something to Maria. Or to Mel, for that matter. Still, I remembered his boyish grin, white teeth in a deeply tanned face, black hair and eyes to match, an exuberant, good-looking kid.

Waiter boy, Mel had called him teasingly. I smiled at the memory.

“You think they’ll remember us?” said Melissa, looking around.

Sometimes that lighthouse smile of hers seemed designed to attract attention to herself as well as to shed her beatific light on the less worthy. She was doing that now, being conspicuous as she scanned the seating area.