Page 68 of The Villa

“I get a say in this!”

Pierce’s shout rings out from somewhere downstairs, startling Mari, ripping her out of the world she’s creating and thrusting her right back into the one she lives in.

If he and Johnnie have started up again…

But it’s not Johnnie’s voice that replies.

“Pierce, you’re drunk,” Mari hears her stepsister say, her voice weary, and Mari goes still, waiting.

“You aren’t listening to me,” Pierce goes on. “You don’t understand that we could… we could all be happy, Lara. Wewerehappy, right? Before we lost Billy.”

The mention of her son’s name has Mari rising from her desk, and when she walks halfway down the stairs, she sees Pierce and Lara are standing in the front hallway near the door. Lara was playing earlier, and her guitar is still loosely held by the neck in one hand, resting against her leg.

“Stop it,” Lara says to Pierce, “and go to bed. We can talk about this in the morning.”

Lara tries to move past him as a clap of thunder rattles the house, but Pierce grabs her shoulders, stopping her. The guitar falls to the floor with a surprisingly loud thwack, and Lara’s eyes go to it, but she doesn’t try to extricate herself from Pierce’s grip.

“D’you know I talked to Frances’s mum last night? She says she’s keeping Teddy. She says… she says they’ll go to the courts if they have to, and that my father—my own bloodyfather—will pay for it. Says that his grandson deserves a better life, a more ‘stable’ life, than the one I’ll give him.”

Mari hadn’t known this. Pierce has been subdued today, but she’d had no idea it was because Frances’s family had decided to take his son away from him.

But as she stands there watching Pierce sob, trying to coax Lara into keeping her unborn child, she can’t blame them.

They should hold him tight and keep him safe,she thinks.Safer than we kept Billy.

If they hadn’t been so poor, if Pierce had let her take him to a doctor…

“I’m sorry,” Lara says, reaching out and stroking Pierce’s hair. “I am. But you can’t replace Teddy with my baby. You can’t replace Billy with my baby.”

Mari moves closer, feeling a need to intervene, and then Pierce says, “But it could bemybaby, too, Lara. And that fucking well counts for something.”

Time slows, and Mari sees Lara finally notice her over Pierce’s shoulder. The wretched look on Lara’s face says that it’s true.

Or at least, it could be true—and isn’t that just as bad?

Pierce follows Lara’s gaze and jerks his head around to see Mari standing there.

His face crumples and he lifts a hand to her. “Baby, come here.”

She thinks of that night, weeks ago: another storm, another offered hand, and how she’d thought that maybe she could live in Pierce’s world, after all.

But now she wants no part of it, wants no part of any of it, and she just shakes her head, a trembling palm pressed against her mouth, holding in a scream.

“You promised,” she finally manages to say, but it’s directed at Lara, not Pierce. “Youpromised, never again.”

“Mari,” Lara says, and there are tears running down her face, lightning flashing in the hallway window, making Mari wince.

“This can be okay,” Pierce is saying. “I can make this okay.”

He steps forward, lurches really, and Mari sees it happen like it’s in slow motion, his bare foot landing on the neck of Lara’s guitar, his toes curling slightly as he stumbles, and then there’s a horrible crack, wood snapping, splinters shockingly white against the dark wood. The strings give a protesting twang, but it’s too late, the thing is mangled.

Mari looks at Lara in horror.

She’s seen so many expressions cross her stepsister’s face, but this one is new. It’s not hurt, exactly. It’s deeper than that. It’s something animal, something primal, and all Mari can think about is Lara sitting in the parlor, Lara sitting by the pond, Lara on the edge of the tub, and how in every moment, that guitar has been a constant. Mari knows she hasn’t always loved Lara, but goddammit, Lara loved that guitar, and she was doing something with it.

Making something with it, something of value. Something for herself.

And now, like so many other of Lara’s dreams—and Mari’s dreams, too—it’s shattered under Pierce’s foot.

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