The secrets families keep, and the people who decide to read them.

Marina counted nine mourners who still spoke Alexandrian Greek and seventeen who did not. The funeral was small. Her grandmother had wanted it small, and the people who came spoke either the Alexandrian Eudoxia had carried for sixty-five years in Athens or the Athenian her daughter had refused to inherit and refused to replace. Anastasia received condolences without correcting anyone's Greek. Marina, who had spent the morning cataloguing the mourners by their accents because it was the only thing she could think to do, stood a half step behind her mother and held her gloves.

The cemetery was on the south slope of the city. The Greek-Egyptian section was a small plot at the back, where the cypresses thinned and the city spread out toward Piraeus in the afternoon light. Eudoxia had picked the plot twenty years ago, paid for it in francs converted on a holiday, and told no one until the paperwork had to be witnessed. That was Eudoxia. Marina had organized the witnesses herself. She had been twenty-four, a graduate student, and her grandmother had said this is the kind of thing I prefer to do while I can still sign my own name.

The priest read in Greek with a slight Cypriot inflection. Eudoxia had liked him because he did not pretend to be Alexandrian. The reading was short. Eudoxia had wanted the prayers and not the speeches, and the family had honored it. No one stood to say anything about who she was. Marina had been grateful for it during the service and was grateful for it again now, watching the small line of mourners form to embrace her mother. She would not have known what to say. She had spent a career writing about the women her grandmother had been one of, and had not known how to be in a room of them as a granddaughter.

Anastasia stood very straight. The last of the early-autumn warmth still hung in the cypresses. A drop of sweat moved down the back of Anastasia's neck and Marina watched it without reaching to wipe it. Her mother would not have wanted her to. The line moved forward.

The woman who took Anastasia's hand was perhaps eighty. She wore a small dark hat with a veil and a thin gold cross. She did not introduce herself. Anastasia thanked her in formal Greek. The woman moved past Anastasia toward Marina and stopped in front of her and looked at her for long enough that Marina noticed Anastasia notice. The woman's hands were dry and careful when she took Marina's. She held them.

"I knew your grandmother in Alexandria," the woman said. "I am Lysandra Kallistos."

"Thank you for coming," Marina said.

Lysandra did not release her hands. "There are some things she did not finish," she said. "Pragmata pou meinan anoichta. You will know what to do."

The Alexandrian Greek was perfect. The phrase was Eudoxia's phrase. Marina had heard her grandmother use it about a half-translated letter, about a sweater she had not finished, about a question Marina had asked her once at seventeen and that Eudoxia had refused to answer that day and had not returned to. Things left open. Marina did not move her hands.

"I do not know what you mean," she said.

"No," Lysandra said. "Not today."