Page 53 of The Villa

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.

Aestaswill 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 fromAestasare 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.

When the last note fades out, Mari realizes she’s crying, her own tears joining Lara’s on the sheet music.

“I wrote that after Billy,” Lara says quietly, and Mari closes her eyes because somehow, she’d already known that. The sadness weeping out of the song was familiar to her even without words.

“I miss him, too,” Lara says, and for the first time Mari lets herself remember the good parts of it all, before her son got sick. When he was a sweet, rosy-cheeked baby there in their little flat, and she can see Lara holding him, dancing around the kitchen with him in her arms, his little face alight with joy and with love.

Lara had loved him. Lara had lost him. All this time, she’s been reaching out to Pierce, waiting for him to join her in her grief instead of wishing it away.

She should’ve reached out to Lara, too, but her hurt and her anger was too raw. It was justified, and she can’t feel guilty about it, but even at nineteen, she’s learned the world isn’t as cut-and-dried as all of that.

Mari entwines her fingers with Lara’s and rests her head on her sister’s shoulder.

“You’re the one who should be making an album here,” Mari tells her, and then squeezes their joined hands. “You’re the one who’sgoingto write an album here. And I’m going to write my book, and by this time next year, I’ll be a famous author, and you’ll be a star. Bigger than Carly Simon. Bigger than Joni Mitchell. You watch.”

She thinks Lara is chuckling at first, amused by Mari’s grandiose plans, but then Lara sucks in a watery breath, and Mari realizes she’s crying again.

“What is it?” she asks, lifting her head to look at Lara.

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