I have never been particularly good at reading maps, which is a polite way of saying I am absolutely hopeless at them. So when my partner handed me the directions to our Krk Vantacici holiday let in Kvarner Bay, Croatia, I should have known trouble was brewing. We had flown into Rijeka, picked up a hire car that smelled faintly of pine air freshener and regret, and set off across the bridge to Krk island with the sort of optimism that only a week off work can produce.

The mishap, when it came, was spectacularly stupid. I had confidently directed us down what I insisted was a shortcut, which turned out to be a farm track ending in a vineyard. There we sat, surrounded by grapes and the heavy afternoon heat, while a local farmer waved at us with the resigned amusement of someone who had seen this many times before. My partner did not say "I told you so," but the silence was deafening. Reversing back up that track took twenty minutes and most of my dignity.

By the time we found the actual property, I was ready to abandon the car and swim home. But then we turned into the driveway, and something in my shoulders unclenched. The Krk Vantacici sat there like a promise kept, all low stone walls and terracotta roof tiles, with a garden that had clearly been loved into submission by someone with more patience than I have for pruning. Olive trees cast their patchy shade over a terrace furnished with the sort of weathered wooden chairs that invite you to sit down and forget you ever owned a smartphone.

The key was in the lockbox, exactly where the instructions said. I fumbled with the code, still flustered from my navigational disaster, but the door swung open to reveal a kitchen that smelled of clean linen and somewhere, faintly, of the sea. I dumped my bag on the terracotta tiles and walked straight through to the garden, because that was where the property seemed to be pulling me. A hammock hung between two trees, moving slightly in the breeze like it was breathing. I had not read a novel in six months. I suddenly wanted to read six in a week.

That first evening, we did almost nothing. We unpacked with the lethargy of people who had finally arrived somewhere that demanded nothing of them. I sat on that terrace with a glass of local Zlahtina wine, watching the light change over the garden, and felt something I had forgotten existed. It was not happiness exactly, more like the absence of the low-grade panic that usually hums beneath everything. The sort of panic that makes you check your emails at midnight and plan your weekends with military precision.

The next morning, I woke without an alarm for the first time in years. The garden was already warm, the sort of Mediterranean warmth that makes you move slower without deciding to. I made coffee in the small kitchen, spilling grounds on the counter because I was still half-asleep, and took it outside in my pyjamas. A lizard darted across the terrace wall. I watched it for longer than I would admit to anyone back home.

I had brought three books, thinking this was optimistic. By day three, I was rationing them. I read in the hammock until my legs went numb, then moved to a sun lounger until I got too hot, then retreated to the shade of the olive trees with a blanket. The garden had these little pockets of temperature, microclimates of comfort, and I spent the week migrating between them like a very lazy bird. My partner pottered about making salads with tomatoes from the market in Krk town, chopping slowly, drinking wine at eleven in the morning because why not.

We did walk to the sea once, a scramble down a rocky path to a tiny cove where the water was so clear it looked like a trick. I swam for twenty minutes, got salt in my eyes, and declared myself exhausted. The walk back up nearly finished me off. I spent the rest of that afternoon in the hammock, recovering from my exertions with a cold beer and the smugness of someone who had briefly exercised.

What I keep thinking about, now I am home and the panic has returned, is how the Krk Vantacici taught me something I did not want to learn. I had always thought holidays were for seeing things, ticking off churches and viewpoints, coming back with stories to tell at dinner parties. But I have no stories from that week, not really. I have no photographs worth showing anyone. I have a memory of reading half a novel in a hammock while a lizard watched me from the wall, and of my partner laughing at something I said that I have now forgotten, and of the particular quality of afternoon light through olive leaves when you have absolutely nothing you must do.

The farmer in the vineyard probably does not remember us. I remember him, though, waving with that amused patience, as if he knew something we were still learning. Sometimes getting lost is how you find your way to the place you needed to be. Sometimes the best thing you can do with a week is absolutely nothing at all, and do it slowly, in a garden, with a book you will never finish because you keep falling asleep in the sun.