I feel a little intimidated, embarrassed, and excited at the thought of telling you what happened to me. Intimidated because this is the first time I’ve done this. Embarrassed because it’s a little story about adultery. Excited because I regularly relive that moment in my head.

It was ten years ago. I was about 40 years old. I already had a beard and graying hair. I didn’t have a belly yet—that was back when I still kept myself in shape.

My wife, my daughters, and I were on vacation on an island in the Dodecanese, in Greece. We’d been there for a week, and we still had four days left before heading home. We’d rented a small studio just a few steps from the water’s edge, in a quiet little village.

Dimitri, our landlord, was an affable man, extremely kind—just like his wife Ekaterina and his daughter Sofia. In addition to managing the four studios they rented out, they ran a small bar—a taverna, as they say there. The couple was about our age, but their daughter was older than ours. She was between 18 and 20 years old.

The couple and their daughter worked all day. In the morning, they took care of the studios, and starting at ten o’clock, they ran the bar. The mother was in charge, the father was in the kitchen, and the daughter served customers.

Over time, we ended up forming a friendship, as we kept running into each other and hanging out at their bar between swims. Dimitri had a great sense of humor and loved regaling us with anecdotes that were more or less outlandish. It seemed like he had an endless supply of them. And even though we mostly spoke broken English, the conversations were lively and fun.

Ekaterina and her daughter were much more reserved, even shy. Always very friendly and smiling, they didn’t participate much in our conversations. Sofia, in particular, always stayed in the background, and we only heard her voice when we ordered drinks or snacks, or when she spoke with her parents.

Sofia was pretty in her own way. She often wore oversized T-shirts that barely concealed the lovely bust she’d inherited from her mother, along with tight-fitting shorts. She had long, slender legs that were slightly muscular. She had long hair that she kept neatly tied back in a ponytail or a bun. And to emphasize her shyness, she wore tortoiseshell-framed glasses that gave her a slightly stern look, which was complemented by a slightly pouty expression.