The Years Between Us

The first stone dropped not with a crash, but with the soft, sinister chime of her personal assistant’s phone. Mina heard it from her dressing room in the National Theatre in Zagreb, a delicate ping that seemed to hang in the air, pregnant with dread, before being swallowed by the usual pre-show hum. It was December 1st. The air outside was brittle with the promise of snow, and inside, the theatre was a womb of golden light and velvet warmth. Mina, in a silk robe, was having the final touches applied to her eyeliner for her role in The Seagull. Her reflection—those famous green eyes, the light brown hair swept into an elegant, loose knot, the lips that had launched a thousand magazine covers—showed a serene, focused artist. The face of Croatia’s darling.

Another ping. Then another. A rapid, staccato rhythm.

“Your phone is buzzing like crazy, Petra,” Mina said softly, closing her eyes as the makeup artist, Lina, dusted her cheekbones with a final shimmer.

“It’s… it’s nothing, Mina,” Petra’s voice was a half-octave too high. Mina opened her eyes. In the mirror, she saw Petra’s reflection, the young woman’s face pale as she stared at her screen, her thumb scrolling with frantic speed.

Then, the landline on the vanity rang, sharp and invasive. Petra jumped. Lina’s brush stilled. Mina felt a cold thread weave through her gut. She nodded, and Petra picked up the receiver.

“Yes?… Who?… I… she’s in preparation, she can’t—” Petra’s eyes shot to Mina’s in the mirror, wide with a kind of terrified apology. “It’s Večernji list. They’re insisting. They say it’s urgent. About… about Goran.”

Goran. Her manager. Her rock. The man who had plucked a sixteen-year-old girl from the drama academy and sculpted her into a national treasure. A father figure, a friend, her most trusted confidant for over two decades.

“Tell them I have a performance in forty minutes,” Mina said, her voice calm, the professional mask descending. “Any statements come through our PR office tomorrow.”

But the stone had dropped, and the ripples were becoming waves. Her own phone, silenced in her purse, began to vibrate against the wooden surface of the dressing table, a low, angry drone. Then Lina’s phone buzzed in her apron. From the corridor outside, they heard a burst of agitated conversation, hastily shushed.

“Mina…” Petra whispered, holding out her own phone. On the screen was the homepage of a major news portal. The headline was in thick, black, screaming caps: “WHERE IS THE MONEY? MINA’S MANAGER VANISHES, MILLIONS MISSING FROM PRODUCTION FUND.”

Below the headline was a photograph of her and Goran at last year’s Pula Film Festival. They were laughing, his arm around her shoulders, glasses of champagne raised. The caption read: “A trusted partnership? Goran Vuković and actress Mina Veršić, in happier times.”

The world did not so much tilt as soften at the edges. The golden light of the dressing room seemed to dim. Mina reached out a hand to steady herself against the vanity.

“It’s a mistake,” she heard herself say, the words sounding distant. “There’s a misunderstanding. Call Goran. Now.”

Petra dialed, put the phone on speaker. It rang once, twice, and went straight to a robotic voicemail. “The subscriber you are trying to reach is unavailable…”

They called his office. No answer. They called his home line. Nothing. With each failed attempt, the cold thread in Mina’s stomach coiled tighter.

The theatre director, Antun, appeared at the door, his face ashen. “Mina. My office. Now.” His tone brooked no argument.

In his book-lined office, a television was on, muted. A slick-haired news anchor was speaking with grave solemnity, a graphic of a broken piggy bank with euro symbols spilling out floating next to his head. Below, the ticker tape ran: …Fraud investigation expands… European film funds implicated… Fears of a major scandal in Croatian arts…

“They’ve been calling the box office,” Antun said, pouring himself a whiskey, his hands unsteady. “The press is massing at the stage door. They’re saying Goran hasn’t been seen for three days. That the accounts for the ‘Adriatic Stories’ co-production fund are empty. Fifteen million euros. Empty. And your name, Mina… your name is all over the fund’s documents as the principal patron and figurehead.”

“I’m the face of it, Antun,” Mina said, her voice trembling now, the mask cracking. “Goran handled everything. The finances, the contracts… I trusted him. You all know I trusted him!” She looked from Antun’s pained face to Petra’s tearful one. “I signed what he put in front of me. For charity. For Croatian cinema. He said it was all in order.”

“The police may want to talk to you,” Antun said gently, though the words were brutal. “About what you knew.”

“I knew nothing!” The cry tore from her, raw and unfiltered. It was the cry of a woman who had just realized the foundation of her entire adult life was built on sand. “He was my family. He was all I had.”

The next hour was a blur of nightmarish fragments. The performance was canceled, an announcement citing “sudden illness.” A security team had to carve a path through a seething scrum of photographers and reporters shouting questions that felt like physical blows.

“Mina! Did you know Goran was stealing?”

“Where is the money, Mina?”“Were you involved?”

“How does it feel to be betrayed?”

Flashbulbs exploded around her, a stroboscopic hell that captured every flinch, every tear that now streaked her meticulously applied makeup. The betrayed face. They got their headline picture. She was bundled into her black SUV, Petra clinging to her arm, and they sped through the dark Zagreb streets towards her apartment in the quiet, affluent Tuškanac district.

But there was no quiet. Vans with satellite dishes were already parked outside her building. Neighbors peered from behind curtains. Upstairs, in her minimalist, serene apartment of pale wood and soft linen—a sanctuary she had built to escape the world’s gaze—the noise was different. It was the digital roar of the scandal going supernova.

Her laptop, when she opened it, was a gateway to her own public execution. Every news site led with the story. Social media was a wildfire of speculation, memes, and venom. Comments sections were sewers:

“All that innocence was just an act. She had to know.”

“Pretty face, empty head. Or maybe not so empty?”

“She lived like a queen on stolen money. Lock her up.”

“I always thought she was too good to be true.”

The narrative was crystallizing with terrifying speed: the beloved, elegant actress, either a foolish puppet or a cunning accomplice. The saint or the sinner. There was no room for the complex, painful truth: a woman who was simply, devastatingly, betrayed.

Her phone rang. Not Goran. Never Goran again. It was journalists, former colleagues offering strained support, lawyers. Always lawyers. She let Petra screen them, listening to her assistant’s voice grow hoarse from repetition: “No comment at this time. Ms. Veršić is shocked and distressed and will cooperate fully with authorities…”

Around midnight, her lawyer, Damir, arrived. He was a tall, stoic man with the weary eyes of someone who had seen countless empires of reputation crumble. He laid out the facts like a coroner performing an autopsy.

“The fund is a shell,” he said, his voice flat. “The money, earmarked for five independent films over three years, is gone. Wired to accounts in Cyprus, the Caymans, then vanished. Goran was the sole signatory besides you. Your signatures are on the annual authorization documents.”

“I signed blank pages sometimes,” Mina whispered, staring at her hands as if they were foreign objects. “He said it was easier for him to handle paperwork when I was on location. It was a trust… a convenience.”

Damir’s silence was more eloquent than any reprimand. “The police will want a statement. The media will dissect your every move, your every expense for the last five years. They will try to connect your lifestyle to the missing money.”

“My lifestyle is paid for by my work!” she fired back, a spark of defiance. “My films, my endorsements. You know that!”

“The public doesn’t know ledgers, Mina. They know headlines. And the headline is that your manager stole millions from a cultural fund, and you were his closest associate.” He leaned forward. “You are not accused of a crime. But you are drowning in the scandal of one. Your reputation, your career—they are now the story.”

“What do I do?” The question was a plea.

“You disappear.”

The word hung in her beautifully appointed living room. Disappear. It sounded like a death.

“The police—”

“Will be informed of your location. But you must get out of Zagreb. Out of the spotlight. Let the forensic accountants and investigators do their work. Every time you step outside, you feed the beast. The narrative hardens. You need to let this enter its judicial phase without your face on every screen, looking guilty just by being visible.”

“Where would I go?” The idea of leaving this sanctuary, even with its windows now feeling like lenses, was terrifying.

“Somewhere isolated. Somewhere you have a connection to. Somewhere the press won’t think to look immediately.”

And then, like a whisper from her childhood, the answer came. She saw her grandmother’s gnarled hands, peeling almonds. Heard her smoky voice, full of longing for her birthplace. “In winter, Hvar is a different world. Not for tourists. For ghosts and fishermen and the smell of rosemary and pine. The sea turns the colour of iron, and the wind cleans everything.”

“Hvar,” Mina said, the word leaving her lips on a sigh.

Damir nodded slowly. “The island. Good. Off-season. Quiet. Do you have property there?”

“No. But my grandmother was from Stari Grad. She spoke of a woman… a friend’s family. I could find a villa. Something private.”

“Do it. Quickly. Tonight. Petra can book it under a different name. I’ll draft a holding statement for release tomorrow—expressing shock, offering full cooperation, requesting privacy for you and your family during this difficult time. It won’t stop them, but it’s the proper chess move.”

The next few hours were a fever dream of practicalities performed under a blanket of emotional shock. Petra, operating on a grim, efficient autopilot, found a villa. Not in bustling Hvar town, but on a secluded cove near the village of Brusje, high on the cliff road with a private path to the sea. It was owned by an elderly local. Petra booked it for a month under the name “Marija Ivanović,” her own grandmother’s name.

Mina packed mechanically. Simple clothes. Warm sweaters, jeans, boots. No designer labels, nothing that screamed “Mina Veršić.” She packed books, her journal, her laptop—a tether to a world that now felt hostile. She took down a small, framed photograph from her shelf: her and her grandmother, standing on the Riva in Split, decades ago. She was maybe ten, grinning a gap-toothed grin, her grandmother’s hand firm on her shoulder. She wrapped it in a sweater and placed it in her case.

As dawn tinged the sky a dirty grey, they made their move. A different car, a nondescript sedan Damir had arranged, was brought to the underground garage. Mina, dressed in dark jeans, a black parka, and a thick woolen hat pulled low, looked like any other woman fleeing a personal disaster. Which, she supposed, she was.

The drive to Split was a four-hour fugue state. The radio, when Petra tentatively turned it on, was full of the scandal. Talk show hosts debated her culpability. “Experts” dissected her career. They played a clip from her latest film, a romantic comedy where she delivered a line about trust. It was followed by ironic laughter from the host. Mina reached over and turned it off. The silence was worse.

The ferry terminal in Split was a moment of pure terror. Had the press tracked them? Were cameras lurking? But the December ferry was populated by islanders returning home, truck drivers, and a few hardy backpackers. No one looked twice at the pale, beautiful woman hiding behind large sunglasses. She kept her face turned to the grimy window as the ship pulled away from the mainland, watching the familiar outline of Marjan hill recede. She felt as if she were leaving her life, her self, on that dock.

The ferry ride was cold. The Adriatic was a churned, leaden green, whitecaps whipped by a biting bura wind. Mina stood on the outer deck, gripping the railing, letting the icy spray sting her face. The physical discomfort was a welcome counterpoint to the numbness inside. She thought of Goran. Where was he? On a beach somewhere, drinking a cocktail with a new identity? Did he ever think of her, of the wreckage he left behind? The pain wasn’t just financial or professional. It was the death of a story she had told herself about her life: that she was cared for, that her trust was well-placed. That she was not alone.

The island emerged from the haze, a long, dark spine of limestone mountains against the gunmetal sky. It looked austere, unwelcoming, magnificent. Hvar. She felt no light, only a profound darkness drawing her in.

A taxi, arranged by Petra, was waiting at the dock in Hvar town. The driver, a grizzled man who smelled of tobacco and fish, loaded her bags without comment. “Hvala,” she said. He grunted in acknowledgment.

The road wound up from the town, serpentine and narrow, past dormant lavender fields and ancient olive groves. The tourist palaces were shuttered, their swimming pools covered. The world was reduced to stone, green pine, and the vast, brooding sea below. It was breathtakingly lonely.

The villa was as promised: a traditional stone house with green shutters, clinging to the cliffside. An elderly woman, straight-backed with a face like a wise walnut, was waiting at the gate. Nonna Ivana. She assessed Mina with a single, sweeping glance that seemed to take in not just her disguised appearance, but the weight of shame and fear she carried.

“You are Marija,” the old woman stated, not asked.

“I am,” Mina’s voice was rough from disuse and suppressed tears.

“The house is warm. The fridge is full. The sea is down the path.” Nonna Ivana handed her a heavy iron key. “The air here mends many things. But it asks for silence in return.” Her eyes held Mina’s for a moment longer. There was no pity in them, only a deep, unsentimental understanding. She knew. Of course she knew. The island gossip network was likely already humming. But here, the knowledge felt different. It wasn’t for consumption. It was just a fact, like the weather.

Mina let herself in. The villa was clean, simple, furnished with sturdy antiques and homespun linens. A fire crackled in the hearth. A bowl of fat, perfect mandarins sat on the wooden table. It was a kindness that almost broke her.

She walked to the large window. The view was an epic panorama of the channel, the distant shadow of the mainland, and the endless, restless sea. The Christmas lights of Hvar town were just beginning to twinkle in the early dusk below, a faint, cheerful necklace against the gathering dark. They looked impossibly distant, belonging to a planet where joy was still possible.

She was here. She had disappeared.

But as she stood there, utterly alone, the silence of the house pressing in on her, she realized the scandal hadn’t been left behind in Zagreb. It was coiled inside her, a cold, living thing in her chest. The headlines, the accusations, Goran’s smiling face in that photograph—they were all here with her. The retreat was not an escape. It was merely the stage for a confrontation she had been avoiding for years, perhaps for her whole life: a confrontation with the woman behind the famous, beautiful, desperately lonely face.

Outside, the first star appeared over the island of Šćedro, sharp and cold. The bura wind moaned in the chimney. Mina Veršić wrapped her arms around herself and began, very quietly, to weep. The retreat had begun.