The Villa(28)

It’s nice, having a sweet boy look at her, paying her compliments about something as mundane as her hair.

The first night she’d met Pierce, when he’d come by her father’s house and ended up staying for hours, talking music and art and philosophy, Mari had walked him to the door, her heart beating so hard she was sure he could see it, already so infatuated with him she could barely see straight.

They had paused there just outside the house, cloaked in shadows, and Pierce had cradled her face in his palm, his eyes moving over her face. “How have I gone this long without knowing you?” he’d murmured, and she’d felt that, too. That every moment up until that one had been wasted, but now they’d found each other and life could truly begin.

Pierce still says things like that to her, and while they thrill her in their own way, she realizes she’s missed this kind of mindless flirting, the kind that girls her age are supposed to engage in.

Girls her age should be sitting in the grass with charming boys, hearing how pretty their hair is. Girls shouldn’t be sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night with married men, running off to Europe, holding a baby that coughs and coughs and burns so hot.…

It’s a dark memory for such a bright day, so she does her best to shake it off.

“Thank you,” she says to Johnnie, giving him a little smile. “And you may, by the way. Tell me my hair is pretty.”

“Gorgeous,” he corrects her, and there it is, that slightly cocky, winning smile. “I said it was gorgeous.”

“That’s fine, too,” she says. And even though there’s no real racing pulse, no frisson of sexual tension, despite how handsome Johnnie is, that little moment by the pond warms her for the rest of the day.

Later that evening, after they’ve all finished dinner and begun to drift to their own corners of the house, Mari picks up her notebook from where she’d left it in the front drawing room to see a small piece of paper sticking out.

The edges are ragged, and with a little bit of dismay, she realizes the page was torn from this same notebook, leaving a jagged place halfway through the mostly blank pages.

The window seat, the note reads. In the glass, at the bottom.—J

Curious, she climbs to the second floor. There’s only one window seat in the house, and it’s in the upstairs hallway, halfway between the room she shares with Pierce and the staircase. It’s a cozy spot, one she’s used for reading several times already, even though the cushion is torn and every time she gets up, she seems to have little bits of stuffing stuck to her legs.

It’s dark in the hallway. The villa has electricity, but there are no lamps up here, certainly no overhead lights. There are candles all over the place, though, piles of thin tapers messily stacked on top of end tables, tucked into corners of bookcases, stuffed into drawers, matchbooks usually close at hand.

Mari moves to one of the little tables lining the hallway now, and sure enough, there’s a candlestick and a matchbox from some club in Rome.

Setting her notebook down on the table, she feels like a Gothic heroine as she lights the candle, laughing at her own reflection in the window.

Her face looks so white and so serious, her red hair drifting around her shoulder, the flame flickering, and she leans down, careful to keep her hair away from the fire.

It takes her a minute to find it, but then she sees it, the four carefully etched marks in the glass.

An M.

It’s sweet, Mari thinks.

It’s simple.

Her fingers trace the shape as she imagines Johnnie sitting up here, scratching it into the glass with … what? Probably a razor blade, a pocketknife.

But as she looks at it, she imagines something else, something more romantic. A ring, maybe. A diamond ring, stolen from a jewelry box.

And then she catches sight of her own face in the window again. A girl. A girl in a window seat, scratching an initial with a stolen ring.

Mari places the candle in one of the brass sconces lining the hallway, picks up her notebook, and arranges herself on the window seat.

She had left the pad with those two words scrawled across it—Houses remember—back in London, but she writes them again now, and this time, they don’t sit there alone on the paper. Other words follow. There’s a house, and there’s a girl. Victoria. She’s come to this house with her family for the summer, and she doesn’t know it yet, but this will be the summer that changes everything. Although, maybe she does sense it. Maybe that’s why she scratches her initial on the glass, wanting to leave her mark on this place that will leave its mark on her.

When Mari gets into bed, it’s nearly three in the morning, and she has ten pages of her notebook filled, and something buzzing, fizzing inside her chest that wasn’t there until now.

The next day, Johnnie finds her out near the pool, her notebook on her lap, her pen scratching across the paper.

“So?” he asks her, and she startles, her brain still stuck in the fields of England, in Victoria’s world, not her own.

It takes her a second to come back to herself, but by then, Johnnie is already losing some of his bright smile, his feet shifting awkwardly. He wants to sit on the end of her chair, she thinks, but isn’t sure if he’d be welcome.

“Did you see it?” he asks. “In the window?”

She’d actually forgotten about it. Not the letter itself—that had started her writing, after all—but the intent behind it, who actually did it and why. From the moment she’d started to write, that little detail had become hers, infused with the meaning that she wanted to give it, and she wonders if this is how Pierce and Noel feel when they write songs.