How It All Began

Melody

I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes until colors burst.

Down the hall, a door opened. Footsteps—heavy, unhurried. It was Luca’s. They passed my room without slowing. A minute later the shower started.

I stared at the ceiling, trying not to picture water running over the same body I had already seen too much of.

I flipped onto my side and dragged the pillow over my head.

*

It started the way most invisible things do—quietly.

After my mother died, my father became distant. Present enough to sign forms and pay bills, gone the second the practical work ended. He buried himself in work while expecting me to simply grow up. I felt invisible, constantly searching for someone who would look at me and not glance past.

One cool evening, my father returned home from a trip with a woman. His new wife.

Eleanor Moretti.

She was calm, lovely, and had the kind of beauty that didn’t need to announce itself. She spoke lightly of a son who lived in the city close by.

My father and Eleanor decided to do things right from the start. First dinner as a family. Introductions.

On the night of the dinner, Luca was already seated when I came in.

He wore a dark shirt. His posture was easy and his expression closed. He looked like someone who had agreed to be present and nothing more.

A maid drew out a chair. I sat.

Throughout the meal, he didn't look at me once. When Eleanor tried to introduce us properly—Luca, this is Melody; Melody, my son—he snubbed the attempt without effort, attention already elsewhere, as if I were furniture that had briefly moved.

My father made a joke that died in the candlelight. Eleanor’s smile thinned by a millimeter.

Just then, at an awkward moment, my hand slipped.

Wine spilled down the front of my gown, blooming ugly red across the fabric. Heat flooded my face. I excused myself and fled upstairs while my dad made soft excuses behind me.

After dinner, I found Luca outside in the garden, smoking. The mansion lights cut him in half—sharp jaw, the glow of the cigarette, the rest of him in shadow.

I approached him because some stupid hopeful part of me still thought a conversation could rewrite the first encounter.

He stared at me while he smoked, his eyes unreadable, saying nothing.

When I ran out of words, he flicked the leftover filter to the ground, stepped on it once, and walked back inside without a sound aimed at me.

The following morning, Luca didn't show up for breakfast. Eleanor and my father sent me to call him to join us.

I went to the room he had slept in and knocked twice. On the third knock, the door swung open. My hand froze in the air as if I'd been about to hit him.

He stood there half-ready for the day, looking down at me like I had already wasted his time.

“Breakfast is ready,” I said. My mind still swirling from the humiliating ritual the night before.

I turned around and left without waiting for a response. He only watched me go.

After breakfast, when he was preparing to leave and was about to enter his car, I approached him one more time—some thin last attempt at not being strangers now that our parents were married.

That was when he finally used his voice on me.

“Keep your fucking distance.”

Quiet and final.

Disdain had been the temperature between us ever since.

He looked at me like a smudge on glass. He warned me off with nothing more than a glance whenever I entered a room he already occupied.

We shared neither a bond nor a last name. The only thing we shared for weeks was walls, and the kind of silence that made me feel invisible in my own home.

I had done everything he asked.

Until the guest bathroom, while our parents were away, when my name left his mouth like a secret he hated, and his body told on him in ways his cruelty never had.

*

The shower was still running down the hall, and my sheets still smelled like the dream, and every warning he’d ever given me sat in my chest like a swallowed stone.

My mind refused to settle. The shame. The heat. The guilt. Every warning Luca had ever given me echoed in my head, yet none of them silenced the one truth I hated most.