I knew he meant Clare. The words didn't hurt the way I expected. They felt like permission. The days that followed were a careful dance of learning each other. We rented an ATV and drove the winding roads between villages.
I screamed when we hit a particularly sharp turn. Daniel laughed for the first time I had ever heard. A real unguarded sound that made my stomach flip in a way I wasn't ready for. We swam in water so clear it felt like flying. We ate tomatoes that tasted like the sun itself and fresh bread still warm from the oven.
At night, we sat on the terrace and talked until the stars felt close enough to touch. But it wasn't all easy. On the third day, I broke down in the middle of a pottery shop because a couple was trying on rings and laughing the way Marcus and I used to. I left the shop so fast I knocked over a display of blue bowls. Daniel found me sitting on a low wall overlooking the water, shaking.
He sat beside me without asking questions. After a long silence, he said, "You don't have to be okay just because the view is pretty. " That night, I told him everything I had been holding back. How I had ignored the signs with Marcus for months. How I had shrunk myself to fit into the life he wanted. How the cancellation of the wedding felt like proof that I was fundamentally unlovable.
Daniel listened. Then he told me about the year after Clare died when he could barely get out of bed when Sophie's teacher had to call him because he forgot to pack her lunch three days in a row. He said healing wasn't a straight line. Some days you were fine. Some days the grief hit like a rogue wave and knocked you flat.
The only way through was to keep walking anyway. We started walking together in a different way. After that, the careful distance between us began to shrink. On the fifth night, we stayed out until the restaurants closed and the streets emptied. We walked the narrow paths of OIA under strings of lights, and somehow my hand ended up in his.
Neither of us mentioned it. We just held on. The hardest moment came on the sixth day. We took a boat to the volcanic island of Nea Cam. The hike up was steep and hot.
At the top, looking down into the crater. Something in me cracked open completely. I started talking about the life I had planned. The house with the blue door, the children with Marcus's eyes, the anniversaries we would have spent right here in Santorini. Daniel stood beside me, quiet, while I grieved the future that would never happen.
When I finished, he said the thing that still undoes me. You're allowed to want a different future now. One that has room for you exactly as you are. That night, we didn't go to separate bedrooms. We sat on the terrace until the sky turned the deep purple of almost morning.