Who Is Molly?

Melody

I lasted twenty minutes.

I took my cup to the kitchen because the housekeeper was off on Mondays and because I needed something to do with my hands. I rinsed it, then rinsed it again. Through the window over the sink I could see the garden, the bench where I'd stood babbling at him with wine on my dress, the gravel he'd ground his cigarette into.

Who was Molly?

It wasn't my business. Nothing about him was my business. I said it to myself twice, and then I dried my hands and walked down the back hall toward the guest office anyway, because apparently I had learned nothing.

The door was half open. I heard his voice before I saw him, low and very calm, which I was beginning to understand was the most dangerous way he spoke.

"—you call my mother's house again, and you'll find out exactly how little patience I have left." A pause. "No. We're done. We've been done for a year." Another pause, longer. "Don't threaten me, Molly. You have no idea what you're dealing with.”

The line must have gone dead, because the silence that followed was absolute.

I should have walked away. I took one step back.

The floorboard creaked.

Of course it did. This house had been telling on me my whole life.

"Come in, Melody."

I froze. He hadn't raised his voice. He didn't need to.

I pushed the door open. He was standing at the window with his back to me, phone still in his hand, the morning light cutting him into a dark shape against the glass.

"I wasn't—" I started.

"Listening. Yes, you were." He turned. "You make more noise than you think when you're somewhere you shouldn't be. I heard you at the corner."

Heat crawled up my throat. "You make it sound like I'm stalking you."

"Aren't you?"

"You're the one who knows when I shower."

I didn't know where it came from. It was out before I could stop it, and the silence after it was so sharp I could have cut myself on it.

Something moved behind his eyes. Gone as fast as it came.

He set the phone down on the desk. He came around it slowly, and every step he took, my back found the doorframe a little harder. He stopped with a careful arm's length between us. He didn't touch me. I understood, with a strange cold clarity, that he was making very sure not to.

"Listen to me," he said quietly. "Saturday, you stay where I can see you. You don't drink anything you didn't watch being poured. You don't leave with anyone. If a dark-haired woman in red tries to talk to you, you walk away. Do you understand?"

"Is that Molly?"

His jaw locked.

"Words, Melody."

The same two words he'd said to me in that bathroom, with his mouth at my ear. My whole body remembered it before my mind did. I hated him for using them. I hated myself more for the way my knees went soft.

"I understand," I whispered. "But I want to know why."

"No, you don't."

"You don't get to decide that."

"I decide a great deal." He said it without arrogance, like a weather report. "And what happened in that bathroom stays there. Our parents don't hear about it. Nobody does. It was a mistake."

"Whose?"

It was the bravest thing I'd ever said to anyone, and it came out as barely a breath.

He went perfectly still. For one second, something cracked open in his face, raw and starved and almost frightened, and I saw that he'd been asking himself the same question for three days.

Then it was gone.

"Mine," he said. "It won't happen again."

He reached past me for the door handle, meaning to open it wider, meaning for me to leave. I don't know why I did what I did next. Maybe because he'd said it would never happen again, and some reckless part of me needed to know if he meant it.

I touched his hand.

Just my fingertips on the back of his wrist, where the sleeve was rolled and a thin pale scar ran along the bone.

He flinched.

Not the way a man flinches at a woman he wants. The way a child flinches at a raised hand. His whole body jerked back from mine, his breath hitched hard, and for one horrible heartbeat his eyes went somewhere I couldn't follow, somewhere dark and very far from this room.

I snatched my hand back. "I'm sorry, I—"

"Don't." His voice was hoarse. He wasn't looking at me. He was looking at the place on his wrist where my fingers had been, as if I'd left a burn. "Don't ever do that."

"Luca—"

"Get out."

It wasn't the voice from the bathroom. There was no threat in it at all. It sounded, impossibly, like begging.

I went.

I made it to the stairs before my legs started shaking, and to my room before I let myself sit on the floor with my back against the door.

Three doors down, I heard nothing. No footsteps. No water. Only the silence of a man standing very still in a room by himself.

All this time, I'd thought his coldness was meant to keep me out.

Now I wondered what it was keeping in.

And what Molly was holding that could make a man like Luca Moretti warn her not to threaten him.