Seek happiness in sorrow.
~Fyodor Dostoevsky
As Matteo cradled Lucia in his arms, he found it unbelievable that he hadn’t seen he had fallen for her. The warmth of her breath on his neck pulled the past into sharp focus.
He should have seen it in the way he noticed little things about her: the way her curls fell forward as she read, head tilted slightly, a nail between her lips. Whenever she looked up and caught him watching her, something in him faltered. Her dark brown eyes, unblinking, cut through him as if she saw what he’d been trained to conceal.
It was nothing, he told himself, a play of light and timing. But these moments stayed with him. The way she seemed both fragile and unbreakable, a paradox that haunted him. By the end of their freshman year, he enjoyed sitting with her in a corner of the library surrounded by dusty books. He pushed aside the pull of her because he had a girlfriend, one his family claimed to love. A single rule carried him through every hard choice: stay in control or watch his family take the reins again.
A long summer stretched before him. He left for Mallorca at the end of May. Surfing, traveling, even among friends, he couldn’t stop thinking of Lucia sitting at the library, dust motes dancing in the light hitting her face. The growing ache of missing her threaded through everything he did.
Only now did he understand why he had written so many letters from the other side of the world. He began writing to her at the school bookstore because he didn’t even have her home address. His letters were restless, full of parties, cliffs, and distant waves. He told himself the letters were harmless, just summer chatter, but he knew it was more.
In Bali, in Jeffreys Bay, wherever he went, the rhythm was the same: he surfed, networked with his grandparents’ friends, partied, and wrote to her. No distraction worked. Not the travel. Not even the attention from the girls that he never had to ask for. They just made him miss her. He caught himself asking at the front desk for mail more often than he wanted to admit, irritation sharpening into need.
Then, after Côte d’Azur, he reeled at the stack of letters waiting for him in Mallorca. Without thinking, he had written the villa as his return address. Laughing at himself, he opened the letters. She didn’t write about her life; she asked questions about the places he’d been and the books he read. Her restraint made him wonder what she was holding back. The way she sometimes flinched as she sat down, the shadows marking her skin, returned to him now.
The letters stayed with him, but so did his family obligations. Mamà gran, his grandmother, leaned forward. “Your girlfriend is an interesting young woman.”
Matteo shrugged, hating the formal dining room when it was just the three of them, but his grandparents insisted. Padrí, his grandfather, had Matteo seated to his right, positioned like heir apparent, as if the title belonged to him rather than his mother.
“Is it customary for a young woman like her to read so many books?”
His blue eyes narrowed, cold and cutting. She wasn’t speaking of Carol, Mamà gran had read Lucia’s correspondence. The breach hit him with unwelcome clarity. For a moment, control slipped, and he crumpled the napkin in his hands.
“Curious.” Her tone was cool and dismissive. “How does one move from Crime and Punishment to Princess Daisy in scarcely a week?”
“She just does.” His voice a blade drawn clean, he added, “Simple as that.” Her judgement of Lucia was also a judgement of him, and it felt like a hand closing around his throat.
Padrí’s eyebrow lifted, a quiet but unmistakable warning. Everyone noticed the bitter tone of his voice, even if they all pretended that years of being treated like a child hadn’t shaped it.
Matteo checked himself. He smiled. It was a polite, forced thing. For the sake of family peace, he had spent the day pretending to love the Balearic and Mediterranean Seas, following the script they kept writing for him.
“Lucia is not my girlfriend.” Saying it out loud sharpened the bitterness of wanting her. He missed the Pacific. But he missed Lucia most. Fuck. For all he knew, she was dating someone in the barrio. He would find out.
“If you can’t manage a little girl, how will you handle a woman?” Padrí’s expectation, complete mastery, absolute control, pressed down on him.
Matteo’s jaw tightened, the only sign of tension as he pulled himself back under control. “I’ve never been interested in little girls.”
Padrí’s smile thinned. He’d lived under his grandfather’s expectations all of his life, even the smallest action a lesson that control was the only acceptable form of manhood. Matteo knew he’d pay for his sidestep, but his thoughts kept returning to Lucia.
Next Chapter: 5. A Silent War
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