She stayed three days. Then a week.
One evening, as the sky turned the color of blood oranges, Antonio sat at his dusty upright piano on the terrace. He played a melody Rae had never heard—slow, minor, full of unresolved chords.
“Yeah.”
She’d grown up in the sharp, neon-lit corners of the city, where shadows moved fast and trust moved slow. Antonio lived in a different world—a sun-bleached finca on a hillside in Sóller, surrounded by terraced orange groves that whispered in the wind.
He smiled, a little sad. “Thank you , little rae. You reminded me why I started playing music in the first place.” lil rae black antonio mallorca
Rae worked in silence. The work was hard—bending, climbing ladders, checking for rot—but the silence was harder. Back home, silence meant danger. Here, it meant birdsong and wind and the distant clatter of a goat’s bell.
“Thank you, Antonio.”
“The groves have tunnels,” he said. “Old Moorish irrigation channels. They lead to the next valley, where my cousin has a boat. It’s slow, and it smells like wet earth, but it’s safe.”