“What?” he demanded, rounding on her. “This is our holiday too, Kristen. Crying over some lunatic who runs a crappy restaurant isn’t my idea of a good time.”

“I’m sorry if my wife’s distress isn’t sufficiently fun for you,” snapped Simon.

“Oh, whatever,” said Brad. “Look, if you’re gonna play support group to the Wounded Warrior there for the rest of the afternoon, count me out. I’m on vacation.”

“Then maybe you should go do something else for a while, bud,” said Simon, putting a protective arm round Melissa.

For a second, I thought Brad would climb down, nod, say he was sorry, but there was something about Melissa that needled him.

“Fine,” he said. “You know, I keep casting my mind back, and I’m pretty sure that this wasn’t how anyone partied in 1999. I’ll meet you back here in two hours.”

“Four,” said Simon. “The girls want to go shopping.”

“Four?” said Brad, incredulous.

“Four,” said Kristen quietly but firmly.

Brad stared at her, his face reddening at the betrayal.

“Fine,” he said again. “Whatever. See y’all later.”

He stalked away, not looking back. His anger gave his speed the appearance of purpose, like he knew where he was going, and for a moment the rest of us just stood there watching him in awkward silence, like he’d taken the needle of our compass with him and we were suddenly lost.

“Don’t mind him,” said Kristen. “He’s just . . . Brad.”

She shrugged and smiled in a way that was both knowing and apologetic, so I reached out and touched her shoulder sympathetically.

“Now he’s spoiling everything,” Melissa whispered to Simon. “First that woman, now him.”

She sounded like a child whose Christmas had been canceled, but when I caught a look at her face, the teary pouting contained something else entirely. Her eyes were hard and fierce, her teeth set. I thought Mel had revealed a vulnerable side I hadn’t seen before. She had, after all, always seemed so together. But now I saw that she wasn’t just upset—she was angry, indignant that her plans had been disrupted. Shocked, and just a tiny bit scared by the intensity of her look, I stepped back.

“OK,” said Gretchen. She made a series of odd, wavy gestures over Melissa’s head, like she was washing her hair. Some weird, New Age ritual thing that might or might not have been a joke. “And we’re rinsing away the past,” she said, “all negativity and cruddy experiences, and now we’re clean and ready for . . . fun!”

She beamed, eyes wide and delighted, like she was leading a toddler to her birthday party. Melissa’s returning smile was small and wan but it didn’t last, and Gretchen’s exuberance stalled. So we walked through the tangled, cobbled streets of Rethymno quietly at first, Simon with his arm around Melissa, sometimes almost pulling her along. All the light had gone out of her face, and she looked both sad and sullen. Every time he asked her if she wanted to go into such and such shop or stop for a coffee or gelato, she would shrug and look away, as if the day was already ruined and she was just marking time before going home to bed.

But it got better. Simon, knowingly, wisely, didn’t force the issue, but he guided her around, and gradually the little streets of artisan shops dotted among the souvenir T-shirts and assorted kitsch began to work their magic on her. Gretchen helped too, I was mildly annoyed to note. Having failed with the frontal attack, she tried a more tangential approach, taking her free hand and chattering girlishly as if nothing had happened, ignoring Melissa’s sourness and very gradually drawing her into talking about the clothes and jewelry in the shop windows.

Rethymno was quaint, but its narrow carless medieval streets weren’t some kind of walkable museum. It was a real town with real people living recognizably regular, modern lives, and the contents of the store windows wouldn’t have been wildly out of place in Charlotte, even if the stone facades were several hundred years older than anything there. There were stores full of artfully arranged mannequins in trendy clothes—some of them well outside my budget and others selling appliances and cell phones. There were pharmacies, banks, law offices, and everything else you would expect in a place where people actually lived all year-round, though everything was on that smaller, slightly huddled, European scale. I was mildly surprised by it, and I started to find the day-to-day stuff more interesting than the stores of faux Greek statuary and painted ceramics aimed at the tourists.

“Ooh!” cried Gretchen, pointing. “Let’s check this out.”

It was a leather goods store, nothing like as shiny as most of what we had just passed, and the heaped purses, the bins of wallets, and the hanging bags on the walls all suggested a cottage industry. The place had that unmistakable leather scent, warm and fragrant and comforting as baking bread. I drank it in, picking up a satchel and inhaling its musky, outdoor earthiness. At the back was a workbench, where an old man sat with a set of slim carving tools, shears, stacked sheets of hide, and spools of leather thong, working quietly while the woman I assumed was his wife ministered smilingly to the customers.

“These from factory,” she announced, indicating the brand names stamped into the polished leather. “These made here.”

She must have said it a million times, but her eyes still flashed with pride.

“I love this,” said Kristen, picking up a tiny boxlike purse, whose rough leather was contrasted by fine chain. She wobbled a little as she considered it, leaning back as if trying to get her eyes to focus, and I wondered how much she’d had to drink at lunch.

“What about that!” said Gretchen, pointing to one of the hanging bags.

The shopkeeper broke off her conversation with another customer—a woman in stretch pants and heavy gold jewelry—bustled over wordlessly, and reached up with a hook on a pole to lift it down.

“You have these in red?” asked Melissa.

And she was back. Whatever sadness and bewilderment had been coiled around her since the episode at the taverna fell away and was forgotten. I caught Simon’s watchful eye and gave him an appreciative look.

Well handled.

He smiled back in acknowledgment, though there was, I thought, no joy in it. Melissa considered the bag critically, then nodded and set it down on the pile to look over another, a rich teak-colored thing with heavy leather lacing. The woman in the heavy gold jewelry was at her elbow, scrutinizing the purses with a predatory air. As soon as Melissa turned away from it, the woman reached for the red one, but Melissa turned on her, all weepiness swept away by a hard and instant ferocity.

“That’s mine,” she said.

The woman snatched her hand away as if it had been scalded.

“There’s a Venetian fort by the harbor,” said Marcus. “Sixteenth century. Who’s up for it?”

Bored of shopping, he was getting antsy, walking a bit faster than everyone else, standing and looking back at the rest of us like he was leading a dim and distracted school group. I couldn’t say I blamed him. Being in retail—albeit at the unglamorous backside of it—I’ve never been much for window shopping. It starts to feel like work.

“Me,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Kristen lazily. “That might be a novelty.”

She had been quiet, insular since Brad left, and I think Gretchen’s glee was starting to wear on her nerves.

“I think I’ll stay here,” said Melissa. “Drift. Buy some stuff. Get a latte or something.”

“I’ll stick with you,” said Simon to her.

“To protect me from the Greek randoms,” said Melissa.

“Absolutely,” said Simon.

“Thanks,” she said, tipping her face up to his and kissing him quickly.

“I’ll stay too,” said Gretchen, ever the third wheel.

Melissa hugged her, then turned back to Simon.

“You know,” she said, “you should go with them. You don’t want to go traipsing around a bunch of stores while I try things on.”

Simon hesitated.

“Well,” he said, “no, but . . .”

“Go ahead,” she said. “I’ll be fine. Gretchen and I can do a little girl talk.”

“Yay!” said Gretchen, like she’d won a prize in some low-rent sideshow.

“You sure?” said Simon.

“Positive,” said Melissa. “Go do some history.”

“OK,” he replied, giving us a wry grin. “More history. Lucky me.”

Marcus looked very slightly pissed off, but he glanced away so they wouldn’t see.

“OK,” said Simon. “Back at the car at five. If we get done sooner, I’ll text you.”

In town we had a decent signal, and everyone had been glued to their phones for the first ten minutes of our visit. It felt like some cautionary meme about the decline of Western civilization—the six of us huddled over, blind to the ancient beauty of the town around us.

I reached over and gave Mel a parting squeeze, and she smiled gratefully.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Have fun.”

We bumped into a group of Americans outside the imposing entrance to the fort—college students, perhaps, or just graduated.

“Christ,” said Kristen. “It’s us, five years ago.”