The Night Everything Started
The trouble with Dalmatia is that it doesn’t warn you.
Other places give you a running start—a gray sky here, a rude waiter there, a hotel room that smells faintly of mildew and regret. But Dalmatia in July? Dalmatia grabs you by the throat on the ferry from Split and whispers you are already too late in a language you don’t speak but somehow understand completely.
The night everything started—and by everything, I mean the precise sequence of catastrophic decisions that would reshape my life into something I no longer recognized—began with a glass of wine I didn’t want, served by a man I didn’t know, at a festival I had actively tried to avoid.
That was the first bad decision: showing up at all.
The second was wearing linen.
The town was called Murvice, which sounds like something you’d name a cat you found behind a dumpster, and it clung to the side of a hill above the Adriatic like it was personally offended by the concept of flat ground. Every street was a staircase. Every staircase was a trap. The entire place smelled of rosemary, grilled fish, and the particular desperation of tourists who had read one too many Hidden Gems of the Croatian Coast articles and were now discovering that hidden gems often lack things like functioning air conditioning and sidewalks.
It was the Feast of St. Roko, which in Murvice meant three things: wine flowing from barrels in the town square, a brass band that had been playing the same four songs since the fall of Yugoslavia, and the collective, enthusiastic abandonment of all good judgment by every person within a ten-kilometer radius.
I had been in Murvice for exactly six hours. My Airbnb—advertised as “charming stone cottage with sea view”—was a converted toolshed with a window that looked directly into a dumpster. My Croatian consisted of dobar dan, hvala, and gdje je WC, the last of which I had learned approximately forty-five minutes after arrival when the toolshed’s plumbing revealed itself to be purely decorative.
And my cousin Nina, who had convinced me to come to this godforsaken festival with promises of “authentic Dalmatian culture” and “the best oysters you’ve ever had,” had abandoned me within the first hour to go make out with a sommelier from Dubrovnik behind a fishing boat.
So there I was. Alone. In linen. At a festival I didn’t want to attend.
The wine helped.
The wine was called Plavac Mali, and it tasted like someone had crushed a dozen blackberries, added a splash of the sea, and decided that subtlety was for cowards. They served it in little plastic cups, two euros each, from a table manned by a man who looked like he had personally wrestled every grape into submission.
“Još jedno,” I said, pointing at my empty cup, because I had learned that phrase approximately four cups ago.
The man—sixty years old, face like a walnut, arms like rope—grinned at me. “Turist?”
“Kako ste?” I replied, which was my entire repertoire deployed in a single desperate gambit.
He laughed and poured me another cup. Then he poured himself one, raised it in a toast I didn’t understand, and drank it in a single motion that suggested he had been doing this since before my parents met.
The band struck up a new song. It was indistinguishable from the old song, except somehow louder. The square was packed with bodies—sweating, dancing, shouting bodies—and the air was thick with the smell of grilled sardines and cigarette smoke and something else, something older, something that might have been the ghost of every bad decision ever made on this stretch of coast.
I was on my fifth cup. Or sixth. The cups were small, which meant they didn’t count. That was the logic, anyway.
The square tilted slightly. Not in a concerning way—more in a you are finally relaxing, you uptight idiot way. I had been in Croatia for three days, and I had spent the first two checking work emails in the toolshed because I didn’t know how to stop. But here, now, with the brass band playing and the wine burning my throat and the sun setting over the Adriatic in a riot of orange and purple, I felt something I hadn’t felt in years.
I felt like I was about to make a terrible mistake.
And then I saw her.
She was standing at the edge of the square, half in shadow, half in the golden spill of string lights, and she was arguing with a man who looked like he sold timeshares. He was red-faced and gesticulating. She was perfectly still, arms crossed, chin lifted, radiating the particular energy of someone who had been wronged and was about to make it everyone else’s problem.
I couldn’t hear what they were saying. The band was too loud. But I could see her face—sharp cheekbones, dark hair curling at her temples, eyes that caught the light like two chips of sea glass—and I could see that she was winning.
The timeshare man threw up his hands and stalked off. She watched him go with an expression of profound satisfaction, then turned, and for a moment—just a moment—her gaze swept across the square and landed on me.
I raised my plastic cup.
She raised one eyebrow.
And then she walked over.
“I don’t know you,” she said, in English so crisp it could have cut glass.
“No,” I agreed. “You don’t.”
“You’re staring.”
“I’m admiring. There’s a difference.”
She tilted her head. Her eyes were gray, I realized. Not blue. Not green. Gray, like the sea before a storm. “That’s a very bad line.”
“It wasn’t a line. It was an observation.”
“The difference being?”
“I haven’t asked you to buy me a drink yet.”
She laughed. It was a surprising laugh—loud, unguarded, the kind of laugh that made people turn their heads. “You’re American.”
“Is it that obvious?”
“You’re wearing linen in July. In Dalmatia. That’s either American or a cry for help.”
“The linen was a mistake,” I admitted. “I’m sweating through it at an alarming rate.”
“Everyone is sweating,” she said. “The trick is not caring.” She gestured at my cup. “What are you drinking?”
“Plavac Mali. The same thing everyone’s drinking. It’s the only thing they have.”
“Ah, but they have it from three different producers. And you chose the wrong one.”
I looked at my cup. It was half full of something purple and aggressive. “This is the wrong one?”
“This is from a vineyard near Komarna. It’s fine. But the good one”—she pointed to a table on the other side of the square, hidden behind a cluster of drunk Germans—“is from Dingač. Different grape. Different soil. Different everything.”
“Are you a sommelier?”
“I’m a disaster,” she said, “but I know my wine. Come on.”
She didn’t wait for an answer. She just turned and walked toward the other table, and I—because I was on my sixth cup and because her hips moved in a way that made the linen feel like a personal betrayal—followed her.
Her name was Lana. She was from Split, which she described as “the only real city on the coast, don’t let anyone from Zadar tell you different.” She was twenty-nine, unemployed, and recently un-engaged to the timeshare man, whose name was Marko and who had, according to Lana, “the emotional intelligence of a sea urchin.”
“He tried to propose again,” she said, after we had secured two cups of the Dingač and retreated to a stone wall overlooking the harbor. “Tonight. In the middle of the festival. On one knee. In front of everyone.”
“That sounds romantic.”
“It would have been,” she said, “if I hadn’t already said no three times. And if he hadn’t been cheating on me with his business partner. And if he hadn’t used a ring he clearly bought at the airport.”
I winced. “That’s rough.”
“He’s a fool,” she said, without heat. Just a statement of fact. “But he’s not wrong about everything. He said I was impossible. And he’s right. I am impossible. I’m too loud and I drink too much and I say exactly what I’m thinking and then I’m surprised when people are offended. I’ve been fired from four jobs in three years. I told my mother I hope she dies alone. I told my best friend her baby is ugly.”
“Was the baby actually ugly?”
“The baby looked like a potato. But you’re not supposed to say that. That’s the point.” She took a long drink from her cup. “I’m the kind of person who makes everything worse. I show up and things catch fire.”
“And yet,” I said, “you showed up here. To me.”
She looked at me then. Really looked. Her gray eyes traveled over my face like she was reading something written there, something I hadn’t meant to show.
“You looked lonely,” she said finally. “And I was angry. And when I’m angry, I need someone to talk to who isn’t going to try to fix me or fuck me or tell me to calm down.”
“What do you need them to do?”
“Listen. Drink. Not run away when I get mean.”
“How mean do you get?”
She smiled. It was not a reassuring smile. “Let’s find out.”
The night accelerated.
That’s the only word for it. Accelerated. Like someone had put a brick on the gas pedal and the whole thing was careening toward a cliff, and I was too drunk and too charmed and too far gone to even think about grabbing the wheel.
We drank more Dingač. Then we switched to rakija, which is not wine and is barely a drink and is essentially jet fuel flavored with whatever fruit happened to be dying at the time. Lana’s rakija of choice was travarica—herb rakija—which tasted like medicine and rebellion and the inside of a forest after a fire.
“To bad decisions,” she said, clinking her cup against mine.
“To bad decisions,” I agreed, and drank.
The band played. The crowd surged. Somewhere, a man fell into a fountain. Somewhere else, a woman lost her shoe and decided it was the end of the world. Lana and I wandered through the chaos like tourists in a war zone, drunk and delighted and completely detached from consequence.
She told me about her father, who had died when she was twelve, and her mother, who had remarried a man Lana described as “a living reminder that there is no justice in the universe.” She told me about the time she threw a glass of wine in her boss’s face—“He deserved it; he said my work was ‘too emotional’“—and the time she got banned from a ferry for singing protest songs at the captain. She told me about the engagement, the cheating, the three separate occasions she had caught Marko texting other women, and the one time she had caught him in bed with someone else and had simply stood in the doorway until they noticed her, then said, “Don’t stop on my account,” and walked out.
“You’re not impossible,” I said. We were sitting on the steps of the church now, because the square had become too crowded and the church steps were marginally less occupied. “You’re just a lot. There’s a difference.”
“People don’t like a lot.”
“People are boring.”
She looked at me sideways. “You’re not boring.”
“I’m extremely boring. I work in finance. I wear linen. I came to Croatia because my cousin told me it would be good for me, and I’ve spent most of the trip checking emails.”
“And yet here you are. Drinking rakija. On a church steps. With a woman who just told you she threw wine in her boss’s face.”
“That’s not me being interesting. That’s you being interesting. I’m just along for the ride.”
She considered this. “The ride is about to get bumpy.”
“How bumpy?”
She pointed. Across the square, emerging from a side street with the terrible timing of a sitcom villain, was Marko. He was no longer red-faced. He was now the color of a tomato that had been left in the sun too long. He had found backup—two men, both larger than him, both wearing the same expression of aggrieved masculinity.
“Lana,” Marko called. His voice cut through the band’s latest rendition of the same song. “We need to talk.”
“We don’t,” Lana called back. “Go away.”
“You embarrassed me. In front of everyone.”
“You embarrassed yourself. I just watched.”
The two men flanking Marko shifted their weight. One of them cracked his knuckles. It was such a cliché that I almost laughed, except that the cracking of knuckles was followed by the cracking of something else—the sound of a bottle breaking against the stone wall behind us.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Lana muttered.
And that was when the argument turned into flirting turned into something else entirely.
“I’m going to say something,” I said, standing up, “and I need you to not be mad.”
“Everything you say from now on will make me mad,” Lana said. “That’s the fun part.”
I turned to Marko. “Hey. Timeshare guy.”
Marko blinked. “What?”
“You’re making a scene.”
“He’s making a scene,” one of the goons echoed, because apparently he had the intellectual range of a parrot.
“No,” I said. “You’re making a scene. You’re standing in the middle of a festival, shouting at a woman who clearly doesn’t want to talk to you, with two friends who look like they got lost on the way to a B-list action movie. This is embarrassing. For you.”
Marko’s face went through several expressions in rapid succession—confusion, outrage, the dawning realization that he was, in fact, embarrassing himself—and settled on something that looked like a decision.
“You don’t know her,” he said. “You don’t know what she’s like.”
“I know she threw wine in her boss’s face. I know she got banned from a ferry. I know she told her best friend her baby looks like a potato. And I still think you’re the problem.”
Behind me, Lana made a sound that was either a laugh or a gasp. Possibly both.
Marko took a step forward. His friends took a step forward. The crowd around us—which had been pretending not to notice—stopped pretending. Phones came out. The band kept playing, because the band had seen this before and knew better than to interrupt.
“Listen, American,” Marko said, close enough now that I could smell his cologne, which was cheap and aggressive and exactly what I would have expected. “You don’t know what you’re involved in.”
“You’re right,” I said. “I don’t. But I know that you cheated on her. I know that you proposed in public because you thought she wouldn’t say no if people were watching. And I know that you’re standing here with your two very large, very confused friends because you can’t stand the idea that she chose a stranger over you.”
The crowd made a sound. It was the sound of a hundred people collectively holding their breath.
Marko looked at me. Then he looked at Lana. Then he looked at his friends, who were clearly reconsidering their life choices.
“Fine,” he said. “Fine. But this isn’t over.”
And then he walked away.
His friends followed.
The crowd exhaled.
And Lana—Lana grabbed me by the front of my linen shirt, pulled me close, and kissed me like the world was ending.
The kiss lasted approximately four seconds. In those four seconds, approximately forty people took approximately four hundred photos. By the time Lana pulled back, her gray eyes bright and her lips curved in a smile that was equal parts triumph and terror, the damage was done.
“That,” she said, “was not smart.”
“No,” I agreed. “It wasn’t.”
“I kissed you because I was angry. And because you were brave. And because you smell like rakija and sunscreen and something else I can’t name.”
“What’s the something else?”
“Trouble,” she said. “You smell like trouble.”
“You started it.”
“I always start it. That’s the problem.”
We stood there, on the church steps, in the middle of a Dalmatian festival, with a hundred strangers watching and recording and undoubtedly posting to every social media platform known to humanity. The band played on. The wine continued to flow. Somewhere, a man was still in the fountain.
“What now?” I asked.
Lana looked at me. The chaos of the evening was written all over her face—the anger, the wine, the rakija, the kiss, the slow realization that we had just done something neither of us could take back.
“Now,” she said, “we finish the bottle. And then we figure out how much trouble we’re actually in.”
She was right about one thing: I smelled like trouble.
But standing there, in the sticky heat of the Dalmatian night, with a woman who had just kissed me in front of a hundred phones and a man she’d left at the altar, I realized something else.
I wasn’t checking my emails anymore.
Morning came like a hammer.
The sun rose over Murvice with all the subtlety of a flashbang grenade, turning the stone walls white-hot and the harbor into a sheet of blinding light. I woke up on a beach. Not a nice beach—a rocky beach, the kind that looks idyllic in photographs and feels like sleeping on a bag of hammers. My linen shirt was wrapped around my head like a turban. My shoes were gone. My phone had seventeen percent battery and forty-three notifications.
The first notification was from Nina: WHO IS THAT WOMAN???
The second was from my mother: Are you okay? I saw something on Facebook.
The third was from a colleague: Dude, you’re famous.
I opened Instagram.
There I was. On the church steps. Kissing Lana. The photo had been posted by someone named @dalmatian_dreams_ and had, in the six hours since it was taken, accumulated twelve thousand likes.
Twelve thousand.
The caption read: American tourist steals local girl from ex-fiancé at St. Roko festival. Most dramatic moment of the summer. #dalmatia #drama #festival #strokofight
There were comments. Hundreds of comments. In Croatian, in English, in German, in languages I couldn’t identify. Some of them were supportive. Most of them were not.
“This is why tourism is ruining Dalmatia.”
“She’s crazy. Everyone in Split knows she’s crazy.”
“He’s cute though.”
“They’re going to regret this in the morning.”
I was regretting it now.
I sat up. My head pounded. My mouth tasted like rakija and regret. And somewhere behind me, on the rocky beach, Lana was stirring.
She was wearing my linen shirt.
I wasn’t sure how that had happened.
“Good morning,” she said, her voice rough with sleep and wine.
“Good morning.”
“How bad is it?”
I held up my phone. She squinted at the screen, then at the photo, then at me.
“Twelve thousand likes,” she said.
“Twelve thousand.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then she laughed—that same loud, unguarded laugh from the night before, the one that made people turn their heads.
“Well,” she said. “Everything’s different now.”
She wasn’t wrong.
The night everything started had ended. The night everything went wrong was just beginning.
And somewhere in the toolshed, my laptop was still open to my work email, and I still hadn’t replied to a single message.
I didn’t care.
For the first time in years, I didn’t care at all.
