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recent graduate of the University of South Carolina, he sat at a table with a group of friends. He looked familiar.
    Wearing a maroon Carolina baseball cap, he had a handsome, tanned face, brown hair, and blue eyes that were glued to a golf tournament playing on a television set over the bar. Somebody missed a putt and he groaned. In an act of boldness that was so unlike me I can only attribute it to Greece, I walked up to him.
    “I think we went to the same high school,” I said.
    He stared at me, squinting a little. Clearly, I did not look familiar to him. “I’m Ann. Ann Kidd.” I wished I had not said my name like James Bond.
    “What was your last name?” he asked.
    “K-I-D-D.” I readied myself for the questions that always followed: Any relation to Captain Kidd?
    No.
    Billy the Kid?
    But he didn’t ask me either of those.
    “Any relation to Bob Kidd?” he said.
    “He’s my brother.”
    Scott smiled. “Bob and I played Little League together on the Perk’s Car Wash team.”
    We’d grown up in the same town.
    I sat down and we talked baseball. I think it surprised him that I could talk baseball. More so, that I wanted to. I told him I owned a baseball signed by Hank Aaron and that I’d watched the Braves play the ’95 World Series alone in my dorm room and called—who else but—Bob when they won.
    On our first date we almost went to a Bombers (Columbia’s minor league team) game, but due to extreme hunger, we ended up at an Italian restaurant called Mangia, Mangia, which roughly translates as Eat, Eat. We’ve been dating ever since.
    Scott’s degree was in sports administration—he was a brilliant tennis player, a golfer, a surfer, and stored baseball statistics in his vault of a brain—but his day job was in real estate. He had an outgoing, affable nature—he could sell ocean water on the beach if he wanted to—but in private, his warmth and openness was just as real. I learned quickly that he was a grounded, dependable person I could count on, but he also had an independent way of viewing the world—not conforming to conventional ways of thinking, but making up his own mind. He was both a people person and his own person—the perfect combination. I loved how much he cared about his interests and how hard he worked to achieve his goals and the running stream of wisecracks that always made me laugh. I fell hard for him.
    As my relationship with Scott developed, I sometimes thought about the tiny offering I left at Athena’s temple in Delphi and the words I told myself: Don’t ever lose yourself again. And I was vigilant. If I wanted to browse a bookstore or walk the beach instead of watching his tennis match, I did. I realized that not losing myself wasn’t only about how we spent time, though; it was about the way I valued myself within the relationship. I felt I’d left the accommodating girlfriend role behind. I had only to look at Athena’s face on my ring to be reminded to keep it that way.

    When Mom called and asked if I wanted to go to Greece with her, it was early spring and I was in the thick of my senior midterm exams, my future seemingly locked in place. I’d missed Greece from the moment I’d left. There were times I wondered if I could possibly wait years and years to go back.
    “Really? Seriously??” I shouted into the receiver.
    Mom said we were going there to celebrate her fiftieth birthday and my graduation. A celebration. No problem.
    I called Scott with the news. He showed up an hour later holding a plastic grocery bag. Inside was a jar of Greek Kalamata olives.
    Curled up on my sofa a few weeks later, I opened a letter from the University of South Carolina, informing me that I’d been rejected from the graduate program to study ancient Greek history.
    At the time I lived alone in a one-bedroom apartment after Laura moved to pursue her studies in Charleston, and I could have wailed if I’d wanted and no one would have heard, but I couldn’t muster anything so