A true‑story interlude from The Holographer’s Atlas (COMC universe), set between Book VII and VIII.

After a few days he asked me to call my father.

He said it simply, the way he did everything — no preamble, no theatre. He wanted to take me back to Italy with him. To his village above Milan, his family, his life. He had decided, in the space of a Benidorm summer week, that I was the one, and he was telling me so with the straightforward gravity of a man who did not see the point of not saying true things.

In 1989 calling your father from Benidorm meant finding a locutorio — one of those small establishments on the backstreets, a row of narrow telephone cabines with sliding doors that didn’t quite block out the sound of whoever was weeping or arguing or whispering in the booth next door.

You negotiated with the owner, you fed pesetas into the slot, you waited for the crackling connection to resolve itself into something recognisable as your father’s voice coming down the line from Holland.

I had already used the locutorio on the Carrer de Martínez Oriola once that week — to tell my father, carefully, that I had passed my exams with flying colours, which was true, and that I had missed my return flight, which was also true, and that I was staying a little longer in Spain, which was true in the way that half-truths are true. What I had not told him was that I had known about the exam results for weeks and said nothing, letting him believe I was still waiting, buying myself time and space and six weeks in the sun.

Now Guido was asking me to go back to that booth and say something else entirely. Papi. Er is een Italiaan. Ik kom niet terug.

I was nineteen.

I told Guido I had already called. That everything was arranged. That I was staying a little longer in Spain.

He looked at me for a moment. He knew. Of course he knew — a man who listens the way he listened always knows when he’s being answered sideways. But he was noble enough not to push, and perhaps he understood something I didn’t yet: that you cannot ask a nineteen-year-old Dutch girl dancing on a block in a purple suit to go into a phone booth and decide her life for a man she has known for eight days.

The timing was wrong. The girl wasn’t ready.

The life he was offering was a real life and real lives require a self that knows what it wants, and I was still finding out.

Then I got sick.

Not metaphorically — genuinely, physically sick, the kind that puts you horizontal for days with the Spanish heat pressing down on the shuttered room like a hand.

I lay in the sisters’ penthouse and the world contracted to the ceiling and a glass of water on the nightstand and the sound of the city going on without me.

I didn’t know that Guido was downstairs.

I didn’t know he had come, and waited, and come back, and waited again, with the particular stubbornness of a man who has decided something and doesn’t abandon his decisions easily.

I didn’t know any of this until much later. What I knew was the ceiling, the heat, and the slow sick weight of a choice I hadn’t been able to make.

After a few days one of the sisters went down.

What she said to him I don’t know. That I was gone, perhaps. That I wasn’t coming back. That whatever had been between us was finished. She returned his watch — expensive, black, the one he had pressed into my hands with that same quiet certainty he brought to everything — and she sent him away, and came back upstairs, and said nothing to me about any of it.

I found out later. By then it was already a different story.

I have thought about that sister on the stairs more times than I can count. Whether it was cruelty or kindness or simply the pragmatism of a woman who understood that I was too sick and too young and too torn to do it myself.

Whether she was protecting me or disposing of a situation that had become inconvenient.

Whether Guido stood on that street and understood what the watch meant, or whether he waited one more day anyway, on the chance that she was wrong.

I wished he had waited one more day.

The watch left with him. I didn’t get to say goodbye. And when I recovered and came back to the world, the space where the ask had been was still there, and I was still nineteen, and Benidorm was still going, and a man at a rooftop pool looked at me across a table of champagne and dark-haired sisters and I looked back.

That is where the next story begins.

I.Ph