The Silence Between Us

He left without a word. She stopped feeling anything at all. Until the first night he stayed to do the dishes.

Fourteen years ago, on the night after prom, Adam Sobczak kissed Marta at the end of the pier in Kępa Morska—and disappeared. No letter, no phone call, no goodbye.

Now Marta is thirty-two. She has the Przystań, her late mother's six-table restaurant on the Baltic; a dishwasher that howls like a dying whale; and 186,000 złoty of debt, with a bank that wants forty thousand of it by the...