Defne held the letter so tight it crumpled around the edges. Her gaze fell on the tomato plant again as her eyes welled up. Kostas had once told her that long ago in Peru, where tomatoes were believed to have originated, they used to call it ‘a plum thing with a navel’. Defne had liked that description. Everything in life should be evoked in such detail, she had thought, rather than being given abstract names, a random combination of letters. A bird should be ‘a feathery thing with a song’. Or a car, ‘a metallic thing with wheels and a horn’. An island, ‘a lonely thing with water on all
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