Chapter 20
VIOLET
The daisy napkin has gone damp from my grip, soft at the creases where I've been folding and unfolding it. Everything is exactly where it was before. The trees, the stone bench, the morning dew on the grass, except Matt is dead.
How long have I been sitting here?
The light says minutes. My body says years. The two numbers don't reconcile, but my brain, my stupid, stubborn brain tries to anyway.
The courtyard is empty now, just stone and morning light and a dark stain spreading into the grout lines that nobody has cleaned yet. Valente and Elio are gone. Matt is gone. Whatever they did with his body happened while I was sitting, shrouded by the shadows of the lemon tree.
I look down at the daisy. Nine petals. Eleven. Ten. Still can't decide. The ink has smudged where my thumb has been pressing, turning the lumpy center into something even less recognizable than it already was. The stem is still crooked. Still committed.
From the world's worst artist to the world's best.
I put it in my pocket.
Wait for it to happen. But there're no tears, no shaking, no screaming, no falling off the bench, no dramatic collapse onto the wet grass.
My body just sits here. Breathing. In and out.
Steady as a metronome, which is obscene, and the most violent thing my body has ever done to me, this refusal to react on a scale appropriate to the occasion.
I should be falling apart.
But maybe I can't just yet. Maybe I need to keep it together until I can find out what the actual fuck just happened here.
Okay. Inventory. What do I know? A man I trusted killed a man I loved.
Not loved, not like that. But loved. The way you love someone who shares their bread with you in the dark.
The way you love someone who puts his body between you and the worst thing in the room every single time without being asked.
The way you love someone who draws you a terrible daisy and means it with his whole chest.
That man is dead. The man who killed him is inside that villa, and at some point in the next hour he is going to look at me and say something. And whatever he says, whatever version of this he's built, I'm going to have to receive it.
I stand up. My knees hold. Good. My hands are steady. Also good. The napkin daisy is a soft square against my thigh through the fabric of my pocket, and I leave my hand there for a few seconds before I take it away, because I cannot afford to be holding anything when I walk through that door.
The kitchen corridor smells like coffee and freshly baked bread. Normal morning smells and sounds. My feet carry me through all of it not stopping until I'm at my destination.
Elio is the dining room. Coffee in hand, standing by the window, as morning light catches the side of his face, turning his profile into something that belongs in a gallery. He's dressed. Showered. The shirt is fresh, white, sleeves rolled to the forearm.
No blood.
Not a drop. Not under the nails, not on the cuffs, not in the fine lines of his knuckles.
No evidence of what I witnessed.
He turns when I walk in, and his expression shifts, his lips spreading into a soft smile. My fists clench behind my back, but I smile back.
"Morning," I say. My voice sounds exactly like it should. The right weight. The right temperature. The right amount of half-awake roughness from a woman who got up early and sat in a garden and saw nothing but lemon trees and light.
"You were up early." He says it over the rim of his cup. Watching me the way he always watches me, with that focused attention that used to make me feel like the most important thing in the room.
"Couldn't sleep." I pull out the chair across from him and take a seat, placing my hands on the cool marble, palms flat. "Went to the garden to get some fresh air."
He nods, his eyes not leaving me as he slides a plate of focaccia toward me.
I pick up a piece and put it in my mouth. It's a performance, and the focaccia is my prop. Everything on this table is a set piece in a play we're both performing, except only one of us knows there's a play happening.
"Your friend Matt left," he says, and my heart stops at the lie. His eyes stay on mine. Steady. Committed.
Mine begin to sting. I hoped he'd tell me the truth, explain what happened this morning. Make sense of what I saw. Give me a reason. But I guess I'm not someone who deserves reasons or the truth.
"Early this morning. He said something about his apartment in Connecticut getting flooded," he continues setting his cup down. "Asked me to give you a hug."
I blink back the tears threatening to spill.
This man I trusted, this man I fell for, this man who stood in a courtyard this morning with a blade in his hand and rage eating through every layer of his face, is sitting across from me telling me lies.
I watched as his hands moved in one clean, deliberate arc through Matt's throat.
Now those same hands lift a slice of bread from a basket and set it on my plate.
"He just left?" I ask, watching him as he plays with the rim of his coffee cup.
"Mmmm."
I tear the bread he put on my plate. Tear it again. Put it back down.
"Why wouldn't he say goodbye to me?"
Elio puts his hand over mine, and it takes everything in me not to flinch.
"Maybe he wasn't who you thought he was, Violet," he says, each word carefully chosen. "It's better that he's gone. Leave it there."
Leave it there.
I nod, because what else can I do? Confront him? Ask him why he's lying to me? I almost do, but then I remember who he is and how I got here in the first place, and suddenly all the bravado leaves me.
I need to think. I need to be alone and deal with what I saw before I explode.
"I think I'm going to lie down," I say through a wobbly smile.
"Are you feeling alright, tesoro?"
Am I feeling alright? I want to chuck the plate of bread at his face, so I guess not really.
"Just sad my friend left without a goodbye," I murmur and get up, turning to leave the room.
"Trust me, it's better that way," he says as I leave the kitchen.
Trust me.
I thought I did. Now? All the trust is gone.
The bedroom door closes behind me as I stand in the center of the room and look at what's become of my life.
His things. My things. The way they've started to cohabitate over the past weeks.
My sketchbook on the nightstand next to his reading glasses, my boots by the closet next to his shoes, a hair tie on the bathroom counter that migrated there without permission or ceremony.
It used to mean something. All of this proximity, this shared space we built together. Now it feels empty.
I don't cry, I can't let it out just yet. The grief has no container yet. It's still raw material. A series of images that haven't assembled into anything I can hold. Matt's shoulders jerking. The blade. The light on the wall.
So I stand in the center of the room, and I do not cry, but I think.
The day happens. That's the most accurate way to describe it. It occurs, and I occur inside it, and the two of us move through each other like water through spread fingers.
I read in the sitting room because that's where I'd normally be at this hour with a book in my lap. I can't make out the words, but I turn the pages anyway. My eyes track the lines and my hand turns the paper at appropriate intervals, and if anyone walked in, they'd see a woman reading.
Not a woman thinking.
When lunchtime comes, I say I've got a headache. It's almost true. There's a pressure behind my eyes that might be pain or might be the weight of keeping my face still for hours. Hard to tell. Doesn't matter. The excuse holds, and nobody pushes.
In the afternoon, I walk to the garden and stop in the doorway.
From here I can see the bench, the wall, the lemon trees, the mortar crack where the lizard went. All of it exactly as it was this morning, exactly as it was yesterday when Matt sat on the grass cross-legged with a grin that rearranged his whole face.
I turn around, unable to step outside. I don't look back as I walk down the corridor. The garden does not feel like an escape anymore. It feels like another prison.
At dinner, I sit next to Elio as he makes arrangements for the remaining girls to go home.
They're ready, he tells me, his intense eyes studying my face.
I just nod, and move my food around the plate.
Once the rest of the women from the compound leave, it'll be just Elio and I left in here.
Back to how it started. Back to a gilded cage I don't want to be in.
It's funny how a lie can ruin a carefully built foundation, like a crack beneath a load-bearing wall. Give it time and the entire building will collapse.
Underneath the table, my hand rests against my thigh, where the napkin daisy sits in my pocket. I press down once, just enough to feel the paper through the fabric, before I take my hand away.
I go to bed first, telling him I'm tired straight after dinner. Once again he asks me if I'm okay.
With a small smile, I place my hand on his cheek and say, "Of course. I'll see you in bed."
The performance of a lifetime. I should get an Oscar. Because I'm far from okay, I'm about to share a bed with a man who murdered my best friend, and I have no clue what to do. How to escape the situation I'm in.
I curl up on my side of the bed and close my eyes, listening. Around midnight the door opens. I keep my breaths even and my body still as I listen to Elio go through his routine.
The closet door, the soft sound of fabric, an electric toothbrush in the bathroom. Finally, the lights go down and the mattress shifts.
He is twelve inches away. The distance between the back of my neck and the chest that held me while I cried in a hallway full of spent casings. The distance between my spine and the hands that shook when they pulled me closer, that cradled my head, that—
That held a blade this morning.
He stays still. He must know I'm awake. Or he doesn't. It doesn't matter. What matters is that two people are lying in a bed pretending to be somewhere they're not, and the dark between them is full of a dead man neither of them is going to name.
His hand lands on my shoulder.
Light. Nothing demanding in it. Just the weight of his palm, the span of his fingers, warm through the thin fabric of my shirt. T
I stay still.
I don't move toward it. Don't move away. Don't lean in, don't flinch. I lie there and let his hand rest on my shoulder and give it nothing back. An absence so total it has texture.
"Violet."
I don't answer.
The hand stays. Five seconds. Ten. Then the fingers lift, one at a time, and the warmth withdraws, and the mattress shifts as he pulls his arm back to his side of the twelve inches.
The dark settles.
I wait. Count his breathing. In. Out. In. Out. The exhales lengthen. The inhales space out. When I'm sure, when the count has held steady for a hundred breaths, I reach into the pocket of the shorts I wore to bed.
The napkin daisy is soft. Warm from my body. The creases have deepened where I've been gripping it all day.
I hold it against my sternum.
I don't sleep.