Sunday 19 April, 2026

She'd heard it her whole life. This was the first time it sounded like something she could actually do.

Adunni is by the pool.

Titi knows this because she watched her go. Watched her gather the towel and the sunscreen and the book she won't read and walk through the gate without looking back, the way fifteen-year-olds move when they've decided they're done being with you for a while.

She ordered a drink after that.

The pool lounge is half full. Families mostly. A group of men at the far table, older, the kind of group that's known each other long enough that they're comfortable with silence between sentences. One of them is talking. Not loudly. Just talking, the way you talk when you're saying something you've thought about for a long time.

She isn't trying to listen.

But the lounge is quiet and his voice carries and the words arrive before she can decide what to do with them.

She's been in Rhodes for four days.

She told herself she needed sun. She told Adunni she needed a break, that work had been heavy, that Greece had been on her list for years. All of it true enough. None of it the real thing.

The real thing she's been carrying since February and has not put down once, not on the plane, not at the hotel check-in, not across four days of excursions and dinners and careful smiling.

She had a plan. It was a practical plan, the kind you make when emotion has finished with you and what's left is logistics. Wait until Adunni starts university. Don't disrupt the A-levels. Give her the last years of home intact, or intact enough, and then make the move when the child is gone and the damage is contained.

It was a good plan. She'd run it through her head enough times that it had stopped feeling like a decision and started feeling like a fact.

She takes a sip of her drink.

Across the lounge the man is still talking.

He's talking to his son.

She understands this slowly, the way you piece together a conversation you're not supposed to be hearing. The son is younger. Quieter. His body has the specific tension of someone who has been given advice they didn't ask for and are trying to receive it anyway. The father isn't preaching. He's not performing. He's just a man trying to give his child something useful from whatever he has left of himself.

His daughter-in-law. That's who they're talking about. Something she did. Something the son is still inside.

Titi looks at her glass.

The father says: forgiveness isn't about forgetting. The hurt is still there. It doesn't go anywhere. But you love anyway. You choose not to hold the anger. You choose not to sit inside the thoughts that want revenge. That's what forgiveness actually is. Not the removal of the pain. The decision not to be governed by it.

She has heard this before. In church. From her mother. From the women in her prayer group who didn't know the specifics but knew something was wrong and quoted scripture at the edges of it.

Seventy times seven. She's heard it her whole life.

Then he says something she hasn't heard before.

He says: seventy times seven simply means give them another chance.

That's all it means. Give them another chance.

The drink is cold in her hand.

She doesn't look at the table. She keeps her eyes on the pool gate where Adunni disappeared twenty minutes ago. She can hear the water from here. The sound of children she doesn't know playing in a language she doesn't speak.

She's been so certain.

The certainty arrived in February and it was clean and it was hard and she held onto it the way you hold onto something when everything else is moving. The plan gave her somewhere to put herself. Adunni's university. The contained damage. The logistics of an exit.

She'd never once asked herself whether certain was the same as right.

She thinks about the seventy times seven the way she's always thought about it. A number that meant endurance. A number that meant absorb more than you think you can. A number that, if she was honest, had always felt slightly punishing. Keep forgiving. Keep absorbing. Keep going.

She'd sat in pews her whole life and heard it that way and felt the weight of it and said nothing.

Give them another chance.

Four words. The whole scripture reduced to four words and for the first time it doesn't feel like a demand. It feels like a question. One she actually has the ability to answer.

Not because the hurt has gone anywhere. It hasn't. She knows where it lives, exactly, the specific place in her chest it settled in February and hasn't moved from since.

But she'd been confusing two things, she thinks. She'd been treating forgiveness like it required the pain to leave first. Like she had to feel different before she could decide differently. And the feeling hadn't changed. Hadn't shifted. So the decision felt impossible.

The man across the lounge hadn't told her to feel differently.

He'd said choose.

The micro-pause: she looks at the pool gate again. Still no Adunni. Just the sound of the water and the sun doing what the sun does in October in Rhodes, sitting low and warm, the kind of afternoon that makes everything feel slightly more possible than it did in the morning.

She's thought about what Adunni knows.

Fifteen is old enough. Old enough to notice the particular quiet that settled over the house in February. Old enough to feel the temperature change between two people without being told the cause. She hasn't asked. Titi is grateful for that. But she's seen her daughter watching her across rooms, across dinner tables, with the careful attention of someone who has decided not to ask because they're not sure they want the answer.

She'd told herself the plan was for Adunni. Wait until university. Protect her.

Sitting here now she's not sure that was entirely true.

The plan was also for herself. A delay dressed as protection. A way of holding the certainty without having to test it. Because as long as the plan was in the future, as long as it was logistics and timelines, she didn't have to sit in the question the man across the lounge just asked her.

Do you actually want to leave. Or do you want the hurt to stop.

Those aren't the same thing.

She hadn't let herself know that until now.

She finishes her drink.

Doesn't order another.

She's not going to decide anything today. That's not what this afternoon is. But something has shifted in the way the certainty sits. It's still there. The plan is still there. February is still there, exact and specific, not going anywhere.

But give them another chance is also there now. Sitting beside the plan. Not replacing it. Just present. A question she didn't have the shape of this morning that she has the shape of now.

Adunni comes through the pool gate, towel around her shoulders, book still unread. She scans the lounge until she finds her mother and something in her face relaxes, the way fifteen-year-olds relax when they've been trying not to need you and discover they still do.

She pulls out the chair across from Titi.

"What are you drinking?"

"Nothing now."

Adunni picks up the menu. Titi watches her daughter read it and thinks about a word she has been given today that she didn't come to Rhodes for.

Chance.

Just that. Nothing more resolved than that.

The afternoon holds them both in the low Greek sun and she doesn't say anything and neither does Adunni and for the first time in a long time the silence between them doesn't feel like something to manage.