The Villa(49)

When he seems calmer, she can’t stop herself from saying, “And, you know, Pierce, that line you said? ‘She’s inevitable’?”

Pulling back, Pierce blinks at her, and she goes on, her heartbeat speeding up. “That’s really good. It’s so cool and could be foreboding, but could also be romantic.…”

His brow furrows. “What are you getting at?”

“I just think it’s a line you should use. Like in a song.”

Pierce pushes her away, his hands on her arms, his movements shaky as he stands. “No way,” he says on a breathless kind of laugh. “I just want to forget that shit and go to bed.”

But Mari doesn’t want to forget it.

She’s still thinking about it long after Pierce goes back to sleep, breathing softly beside her, and when she can’t lie there anymore, she gets up, goes to her notebook and the little desk under the window.

Victoria’s story has been frozen in amber for weeks now, but suddenly Mari feels it coming back to life.

She’s inevitable.

Pierce’s vision of Mari covered in blood comes back to her as she starts to write.

She’s inevitable.

Victoria, covered in blood. Whose blood? It doesn’t matter, not yet. She’ll figure that out.

The well, the cave into hell. There’s something there, maybe. Something, too, in the shopkeeper’s story about a suicide in this house. Years and years ago, but everyone in the town still remembers.

Houses remember.

Now the line makes more sense to her, now she knows how to use it.

Not a love story at all.

Or yes, a love story, but there’s horror inside of it. There’s death and loss, blood and sweat. Just as there is in every love story, after all.

Mari’s pen moves faster and faster as the story starts taking shape.

By the time the sun rises, she knows the book she’s writing and she understands why she couldn’t write it before.

It needed Pierce’s dream to show her the path.

Pierce wakes up, eventually, presses a kiss to the top of her head, but thankfully doesn’t bother her, drifting out of the room with his guitar in hand.

After a moment, she hears him begin to play in another room, and that seems to make her write even faster. She likes it, this sense of them both creating at the same time, near each other, but not together. Her writing inspiring his playing, his playing inspiring her writing.

It’s the life she’s wanted for them since the moment she climbed out that window in North London three years ago.

Finally, her hand cramping and her shoulders aching, she pauses, stretches.

Pierce is still playing, but it’s not a song she’s heard from him before. It’s sweet and sour at the same time, the notes dancing, and it makes her get up from her desk and go in search of him.

But when she steps out into the hallway, she realizes the music is coming from behind Lara’s cracked bedroom door.

Pierce is with her.

Pierce is playing for her.

Mari makes herself cross the narrow hallway, pushing the door open.

Lara’s room is nearly identical to the one Mari shares with Pierce, just smaller and done in shades of green instead of blue. There’s the same window, the same small desk under it, and the bed is pushed against the same far wall.

But it’s only Lara sitting on that bed now, her guitar in her lap. Pierce is nowhere to be found. It takes Mari a moment to realize that it’s actually Lara who has been playing this entire time.

It was Lara’s music filling her head as she wrote, spurring her on, and Mari isn’t sure how to feel about that.

The song stops as Lara registers Mari in the door, and Mari can tell she’s been crying again. Her face is red and puffy, her eyes wet, and when Mari comes closer, she can see splattered teardrops on the sheet music Lara has been writing on.

“That was beautiful,” Mari tells her, and Lara lifts her chin, her gaze meeting Mari’s.

“I’ve been trying to tell you all that I’m good,” she says. “You just never listen.”

Lara is right. She hasn’t listened. Neither of them have listened to each other.

Mari has spent such a long time feeling wronged by Lara that it never occurred to her that Lara was being wronged, too.

Just in a different way.

She approaches the bed cautiously, the way you’d try to get close to a skittish animal, but Lara scoots over, making room for her, the strings of her guitar twanging softly as she adjusts it.

“Play me something else,” Mari says, and Lara looks at her for a long beat before nodding, her hands falling back to the guitar.

This song is sad, too, the melody in a minor key, and Lara hums as she plays, but doesn’t sing. Even with just that, Mari can tell her voice is pretty, that it suits the music she’s making.

Aestas will eventually be heard everywhere. In other bedrooms, in cars. In the background at parties, and in quiet living rooms, in movies, in commercials. People will play it when they’re in a good mood, but it’s the heartbroken that it’s written for, and they’re the ones who’ll play it the most.

But the first time any songs from Aestas are played for an audience, it’s here in this small bedroom in Umbria, with two sisters—because they know in their hearts that’s what they are, no matter their parentage—finally beginning to understand each other.