MILES APART

EPIPHYTIC AIGAE NAD OTHER COMPLICATIONS

Chapter Three

Epiphytic Algae and Other Complications

The problem with epiphytic algae, Elara reflected, was that it was extremely good at being algae and extremely bad for seagrass.

She was hunched over the microscope in the corner of the lab, counting epiphyte cells on a sample blade of Zostera marina. The work required concentration—the kind of deep, focused attention that usually pushed everything else out of her mind. Usually. Today, her mind kept wandering.

Forty-three cells on this transect. Forty-four. Forty-five. She clicked the counter, recorded the number, moved to the next section of the blade. The seagrass specimen was from the northern meadow, where water temperature had been consistently warmer. If her hypothesis was correct, she'd find higher epiphyte density there, which would correlate with—

Her phone buzzed.

She ignored it. Forty-six cells. Forty-seven. Forty-eight.

It buzzed again.

She ignored it again. Fifty cells. The lab was quiet, the way she liked it. The other researchers had gone home hours ago. It was just her and the microscope and the samples and the familiar rhythm of counting, recording, moving on.

Her phone buzzed a third time.

She sighed, pulled off her gloves, and reached for it. The screen showed a message from an unknown number.

João says I'm lucky to know you. I think he might be right. —Leo

She stared at the message for a full thirty seconds. Her first impulse was irritation—how had he gotten her number? Her second was something else. Something that felt dangerously like pleasure.

She typed back: How did you get my number?

The response came almost immediately. João. He has opinions about everything, including my lack of social skills.

Despite herself, she laughed. The sound echoed in the empty lab, startling her. She couldn't remember the last time she'd laughed at a text message. Couldn't remember the last time she'd gotten a text message worth laughing at.

She typed: Your social skills seem fine to me.

A pause. Then: They're not. I'm much better behind a camera.

She considered that. Thought about the way he'd held himself on the beach that morning—present but not pushy. The way he'd apologized without being asked. The way he'd said her name, carefully, like it mattered.

What are you doing right now? she typed.

Waiting for the light to change. It's a photographer thing.

Sounds boring.

It is. Want to make it less boring?

She should say no. She had samples to process. Data to enter. A fellowship to justify. She was here to work, not to make friends with wandering photographers who couldn't stay in one place.

Where are you? she typed.

---

The Café Atlântico was the kind of place Elara had learned to recognize during her months in Portugal. No tourists. No menus in English. No Wi-Fi password taped to the wall. Just locals, tiny cups of coffee, and pastries so sweet they made your teeth ache.

Leo was already there when she arrived, camera on the table beside his espresso, face tilted toward the sun that slanted through the window. He looked up when she walked in, and something in his expression shifted—surprise, maybe, or pleasure, or both.

"You came," he said. He sounded genuinely surprised.

"You asked." She sat down across from him, and the waitress appeared at her elbow—a woman in her sixties with silver hair and kind eyes who'd been running this café for forty years. Elara ordered a galão without looking at the menu. "I'm still not sure why."

"Why I asked, or why you came?"

"Either. Both."

He considered this. His fingers traced the rim of his espresso cup, a slow, absent motion. "I asked because you're interesting. You study grass in cold water and you quote Greek mythology and you didn't let me take your picture. That's a combination I don't run into very often."

"And why I came?"

"That's simpler." He smiled, and this time it reached his eyes—warm, genuine, disarming. "Because you were curious."

She opened her mouth to deny it, then closed it again. He was right. She was curious—about him, about his project, about why a documentary photographer with an American accent and a Mexican grandmother had ended up in a small Portuguese fishing village documenting the last of a dying breed.

"Fair enough," she said. The waitress brought her galão, the milk and espresso swirling together in the glass. She wrapped her hands around it, letting the warmth seep into her fingers. "Tell me about yourself, Leo Reyes."

He leaned back in his chair. The afternoon light caught his face, and for a moment, he looked younger—the guardedness that seemed to live in his shoulders momentarily lifted.

"Where do you want me to start?"

"Anywhere. The beginning is usually good."

"The beginning." He laughed softly. "The beginning is complicated."

"All the best stories are."

He looked at her for a long moment, as if deciding something. Then he began.

He told her about growing up in Tucson, Arizona. About his mother, Elena, who worked double shifts as a nurse and came home too exhausted to do anything but sleep. About his father, Javier, who left when Leo was seven and never looked back.

"I don't remember much about him," Leo said. His voice was careful, neutral. "Not his face, not his voice. I remember waiting for him. That's the part that sticks. Standing at the window, watching for his truck. I did that for months after he left. Maybe years."

Elara said nothing. She knew about waiting for someone who wasn't coming back.

"But I had my abuela," Leo continued. "My grandmother. She lived with us—she'd come from Mexico when my mother was a baby, never quite learned to speak English the way everyone wanted her to. She raised me, mostly. While my mother worked."

He told her about the camera his abuela had given him when he was twelve—a battered old Canon that had survived three decades of family parties, quinceañeras, and weddings. It smelled like her house, he said. Like cinnamon and candle wax and the particular dust of the Arizona desert that found its way into everything.

"You see things," she'd told him. "Not everyone does. The camera just helps you show other people what you're seeing."

He told her about dropping out of college after two years, buying a one-way ticket to Mexico City, and never looking back. About the early years—couch surfing, freelance gigs that paid nothing, learning to pitch stories and sell himself and survive. About the eight years of constant motion that followed: protests in Hong Kong, glaciers in Iceland, street vendors in Mexico City, refugees in Greece.

"I've slept in airports and trains and the back of my rental car more times than I can count," he said. "And somewhere along the way, I stopped being able to stay in one place for more than a few months without feeling like I was suffocating."

"Is that why you're here?" Elara asked. "The restlessness?"

"I'm here because the fishermen have a story worth telling." He paused. "But yes. Also that."

She nodded, recognizing something in his words that she didn't want to examine too closely. She knew about restlessness. Knew about the need to keep moving, keep working, keep filling the hours so there was no space left for the thoughts that waited in the quiet.

"Your turn," Leo said. "Tell me about yourself, Elara Mbeki."

She looked down at her galão, watching the swirl of milk and espresso. The café was quiet now—the lunch crowd gone, the evening crowd not yet arrived. Just the two of them and the silver-haired waitress wiping down the counter.

"My father died five years ago," she said, and the words came out before she could stop them. She hadn't planned to tell him this. Hadn't planned to tell anyone, not here, not in this village where she was supposed to be starting fresh.

But he'd told her about waiting by the window for a father who never came back. And she understood something about that.

"Cancer," she continued. "It was fast—six months from diagnosis to the end. I was in my second year of undergrad, studying marine biology because he'd always loved the ocean. Always taken me to the beach when I was little. Always said the sea was the last wild place on earth."

She told him about her father, Kwame. A poet from Kenya who'd come to London in the 1980s, met her mother at a lecture on African literature, and stayed. He was the one who'd named her Elara, after one of Zeus's lovers, because he loved the way the name sounded. He was the one who read her Greek myths and African folktales and poetry by Derek Walcott and Warsan Shire. He was the one who taught her that stories mattered, that words could hold worlds.

"And after he died?" Leo asked.

"I threw myself into the work." She heard how that sounded—defensive, maybe, or clinical. She didn't care. "If I couldn't save him, maybe I could save something else."

"Does it help? The saving?"

She considered the question. Thought about the seagrass meadows she'd studied, the data she'd collected, the patterns she'd begun to see. Thought about the satisfaction of understanding, the comfort of precision.

"Sometimes," she said. "Other times it just feels like I'm rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. The seagrass is dying everywhere. The water's warming, the currents are changing, the fish are disappearing. João knows this—he's been fishing here for seventy years, he's seen the decline with his own eyes. And I'm here with my microscope and my data sheets, pretending that if I can just document it precisely enough, I can figure out how to stop it."

"That's not pretending. That's science."

"It's hope dressed up in methodology."

"Is that so bad?"

She looked up at him. He was watching her with an expression she couldn't quite name—not pity, not sympathy, something quieter. Something like recognition.

"No," she said slowly. "I don't think it is."

---

The afternoon stretched on.

They talked about everything and nothing. His travels, her research. The best places to eat in Vila do Mar—he'd found a restaurant near the harbor that served grilled sardines so fresh they tasted like the ocean. The worst coffee he'd ever had—somewhere in Iceland, apparently, where they'd served him something that looked like mud and tasted worse. The way the light changed over the ocean at sunset, how it went from gold to orange to purple in the space of minutes.

She found herself telling him things she hadn't told anyone. About Marcus, the ex-boyfriend, and the slow erosion of three years. About the way he'd presented her data without crediting her, the way he'd told her she was being "emotional" when she pushed back, the way she'd left one night and never looked back.

"That's—" Leo stopped, seemed to search for words. "That's not how someone should treat you. That's not how anyone should treat anyone."

"I know that now." She wrapped her hands around her empty glass. "I didn't know it then. I thought—I thought if I worked harder, published more, proved myself, he'd see me as an equal. But that's not how it works with people like him. You can't earn your way out of being diminished."

He was quiet for a long moment. Then: "What did your father think of him?"

The question caught her off guard. "My father—he died before Marcus. Before any of it."

"So he never knew who you became after?"

She shook her head. "He knew who I was becoming. That was enough." She paused. "He would have liked you, I think. The way you see things. The way you pay attention. He always said I needed someone who saw me. Really saw me."

Leo said nothing. But something shifted in his expression—softened, maybe. Or opened.

"What about you?" she asked. "Did you ever—I mean, is there someone?"

"No." The word came out quickly. Too quickly. "I've never—" He stopped, exhaled. "I've never been good at staying. At staying with someone, I mean. I've had relationships. Brief ones. The kind that fit between assignments. Nothing that lasted past sunrise."

"And you never wanted that? Something that lasted?"

He looked at her for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was quiet. "I didn't think I was capable of it. Of wanting to stay."

"And now?"

The café was quiet. The afternoon light was fading, the shadows growing longer. Outside, someone was calling to someone else in Portuguese, the words rising and falling like song.

"I don't know," Leo said. "I don't know what I'm capable of."

She should let it go. Should pay for her coffee and walk back to her apartment and pretend this conversation hadn't happened. Should protect herself the way she'd learned to protect herself—walls high, expectations low, no one getting close enough to hurt her.

But he'd told her about waiting by the window. He'd told her about the father who left and the abuela who stayed. He'd told her about a restlessness that looked, from the outside, like fear.

"You should figure that out," she said. "What you're capable of. Not for anyone else. For you."

He smiled, and it was different from his other smiles—smaller, quieter, more real. "That's very wise."

"That's very practical." She stood, pulled money from her pocket, left it on the table. "I'm a scientist. We're good at practical."

She was halfway to the door when he called her name.

"Elara."

She turned.

"Same time tomorrow?" He was still sitting at the table, coffee cup empty, camera beside him, face half-lit by the fading afternoon. "If you're free."

She should say no. She should go back to her samples, her data, her carefully constructed life of work and solitude.

"Same time tomorrow," she heard herself say.

---

The walk back to her apartment was through streets she'd walked a hundred times before. The church square. The bakery where she bought bread on Sundays. The narrow alley that smelled of laundry soap and frying fish.

She was smiling. She realized it halfway home—the corners of her mouth curved up, her steps lighter than they'd been in weeks. She tried to stop, to school her face back to neutrality, but the smile wouldn't go.

Her phone buzzed. She pulled it out, expecting her mother, expecting the lab, expecting any of the usual messages that filled her days.

I'm glad you came. —Leo

She stopped in the middle of the street. Stared at the message.

Me too, she typed. Then, before she could second-guess herself: Same time tomorrow.

His response came as she was unlocking her door.

I'll be there.

She set her phone on the kitchen table, poured herself a glass of water, sat down in the chair by the window. The apartment was quiet. The way she liked it.

She was still smiling.

---

Outside, the light was changing. The gold of afternoon fading to the purple of evening, the first stars appearing over the Atlantic. Somewhere on the beach, João was probably mending his nets, the same way he'd done for seventy years. Somewhere in the village, Leo was walking back to his rented room, camera slung over his shoulder, thinking about things she couldn't guess.

She thought about the way he'd said her name. The careful attention he gave to each syllable, as if it mattered. The way he'd listened—really listened—when she told him about her father, about Marcus, about the work that both saved and isolated her.

She thought about the restlessness he'd described. The constant motion, the inability to stay. She recognized it. Not because she shared it—she was good at staying, too good, perhaps, at holding still in places that didn't serve her—but because she'd spent years watching someone else run from the same thing.

Her father, maybe. Or herself.

She pulled out her phone again, scrolled back through the messages. João says I'm lucky to know you. I think he might be right.

She saved his number. Leo Reyes, she typed, and then, because she couldn't help herself: Photographer. Witness.

Tomorrow, she would go back to the café. Tomorrow, she would sit across from him and listen to whatever he wanted to tell her. Tomorrow, she would be curious and careful and present, the way she was learning to be.

But tonight, she sat in her apartment above the bakery, watching the stars appear over the Atlantic, and let herself feel something she hadn't felt in a long time.

Hope. Maybe.

Or just the simple, terrifying possibility that something was beginning.

---

End of Chapter Three