“What do you want?”

Theodoros stopped. He picked up a stone and tossed it into the cove. The plink echoed off the limestone cliffs like a single piano key.

Theodoros spoke for the first time. His voice was a low rasp, as if his vocal cords had been sanded down by years of disuse. “Truth and a ghost are the same thing. You cannot see either, but you feel the temperature drop when they enter the room.”

And if they pressed her for the question, she would smile—a small, sad, honest smile—and say:

“Are you Sirina?” she whispered.

“My name is Christina Rousaki. I have won three awards. I have been shot at, lied to, and thanked by people who had nothing left. I have not cried in eleven years, not since I covered the fire in the orphanage. I am not here to save these shepherds. I am here to consume them for a column. And I hate myself for it.”

“To offer you the same choice I gave the shepherds. Stay here. Leave your name. I will give you a silence deeper than any byline. Or go back and write your story. But if you write it, you must write the truth—not about me, but about the hole inside you.”

“I stayed because I was afraid of forgetting,” Theodoros replied. “Dimitris stayed because he was afraid of being forgotten.”

She should have been terrified. Instead, she felt a horrible, relieving recognition. It was true. Her parents had died when she was nine—a car accident, banal, unreportable. She had never mourned. She had simply turned other people’s catastrophes into copy. The dead children in the orphanage fire? They became a lede. A hook .