I have a friend, Adamantia, who cuts her dark hair short and often wears a ring, an unpolished pearl clasped in silver. It belonged, she tells me, to her great-great-grandmother, the one that almost became queen of the underworld—until she was shipped off to America, to live with an uncle she had never met.

Her parents told her that night at dinner, after it almost happened. They didn’t know how else to keep her safe.

“That,” I imagine her mother sighing, “is what beauty gets you.”

Adamantia tells me the man rode up while her great-great-grandmother was working in the fields with her sisters, seven or eight of them; sturdy, proper Greek girls. I don’t know what kind of field and Adamantia can’t tell me, but I imagine the gold sway of wheat, and above a sky jarringly wide, like a mouth open far enough to see the grooves in the back teeth. She tells me he rode up, this man from the village, on a horse (again, she cannot supply the details, so it will be a plow horse ridden bareback, thick neck and shaggy legs, hooves large as dinner plates), rode up and grabbed her great-great-grandmother by her hair, which was famously long—past her waist—and black.

This village man had asked many times to marry Adamantia’s great-great-grandmother, and each time she refused. I don’t know why, but I imagine it was her destiny to find love, or a husband, across the Atlantic and have children who would have children who would have children who would have children who would have a daughter with green eyes, except for the left which is mottled with brown like the spots on a stove-top where sparks have jumped from the pan and burned patches.

Or he may have had a foul temper and unfortunate teeth.

He tried to drag Adamantia’s great-great-grandmother onto the horse, to sit in front of him or be slung across the withers like a captive sack of tubers—either way, no easy feat on a plow animal of this height and girth—but her sisters dropped their tools and ran at him, brandishing farm implements, screaming, spitting, directing curses and flurries of rude, elaborate hand gestures like well-aimed stones.

Adamantia’s great-great-grandmother was spared her abduction to Hades to be split open like a pomegranate on the hard bare floor of the village man’s house.

That night she agreed to board a ship to America. There she would unknowingly begin her great-great-granddaughter’s life: pet tabby cats, Halloween costumes, themeparks, divorce lawyers, smoking cloves, dating boys, prom dresses, giving up cloves, taxi cabs, summer internships, giving up boys, latte addiction, heartbreak at the hands of a girl who worked on a lobster boat, blue rain boots, silver nail polish, online dating, English major at a top college; becoming Adamantia, who wears a ring that belonged to a woman whose name and face are no longer remembered.