I have never been particularly gifted at reading ferry timetables, a fact that became painfully obvious somewhere between Split and Kastel Stafilic. There I stood at the port, rucksack on back, watching the boat I was meant to be on shrink toward the horizon. The next sailing? Three hours. My landlady, Marija, had promised to meet me at four. It was now looking closer to half seven. I sent her a text that I can only describe as grovelling, then found a cafe and ordered a coffee that cost roughly the same as my flight.

The bus to Kastel Stafilic dropped me at a stop that appeared to be someone's driveway. A man in a vest was pruning an olive tree and watched me with the amused patience of someone who has seen this exact scene many times before. "NovaSol?" he asked, before I'd opened my mouth. I nodded. He pointed up a lane barely wide enough for a scooter and returned to his olives without another word.

Marija met me at the gate with a torch, having clearly given up on daylight hours. She was perhaps sixty, built like a woman who has spent decades hauling laundry and winning arguments. Her first words were not hello but "You missed the good ferry," delivered as a statement of biological fact rather than criticism. She led me through to the stone courtyard of the split property, flicking on lights that revealed a space of such absurd charm that I temporarily forgot my travel trauma. A lemon tree grew through the terrace. An actual lemon tree. I may have said "blimey" out loud.

"British," Marija noted, not quite approvingly.

The mishap, however, was not finished with me. In my haste to admire everything at once, I walked straight into a low stone wall surrounding a herb garden. Marija did not laugh. She did something worse: she looked at me with the resigned sympathy of a woman who has raised three sons and seen every stupidity humanity offers. "Rosemary," she said, gesturing at the plant I had partially flattened. "Good for memory. You need."

She showed me the studio apartment with the brisk efficiency of a nurse discharging a patient. Terrace with sea view, kitchenette, bed that looked like it had supported several generations. The bathroom featured a shower with approximately three seconds of hot water before a decision was required. I loved it instantly.

That evening I sat on my terrace with a bottle of Marija's homemade wine, which she had pressed upon me with the sternness of a prescription. Across the lane, an elderly man was singing something that sounded both mournful and filthy. Marija appeared at her window and shouted something in Dalmatian dialect that I suspect was not complimentary. He shouted back, grinning. They had clearly been shouting at each other since approximately 1973.

I raised my glass to him. He raised his. The wine tasted of sunlight and poor decision-making.

The next morning I found Marija in the courtyard beating a rug with the kind of violence that suggested personal history. She paused to ask about my plans, then immediately informed me they were wrong. "Trogir is full of tourists with cameras. You go to Kastel Gomilica, walk the waterfront. My sister runs a konoba there. Tell her I sent you, she gives you good fish." She returned to the rug before I could respond.

I did go to Kastel Gomilica. I did tell her sister. I did receive excellent fish and a lengthy interrogation about whether I was married, why not, and what was wrong with me exactly. The sister, Ana, had the same build, the same directness, the same tendency to answer her own questions. "You need a wife," she concluded, presenting me with grilled sardines I had not ordered. "Marija says you walked into a wall."

"Herb garden," I corrected weakly.

"Same thing," Ana said, and that was that.

Back at the property that evening, Marija produced figs from her own tree and demanded a report on her sister. I gave one. She nodded, satisfied. "Ana talks too much. But her fish is good." She looked at me then with something approaching evaluation. "You are not so stupid as you look. The rosemary will help."

I stayed ten days. I walked into nothing else. I learned to time the shower. I became competent at ferry timetables through sheer trauma. And I left with a bag of figs, a bottle of wine, and the certain knowledge that somewhere in Kastel Stafilic, two sisters were discussing my marital prospects and finding them hopeless.