Pierce, his beautiful brown hair soaked with blood, the back of his head a ruin.
Johnnie, standing over him with something gray and heavy in his hand, his face splattered with blood, with Pierce’s blood, his eyes almost like an animal’s, blank, uncomprehending.
Everything that followed was a blur. Screaming, running, yelling for Lara, for the police, for Noel, for anyone to help them, as Johnnie just let the heavy sculpture in his hands shatter against the stone floor, before collapsing heavily next to it, his upper body swaying.
In the end, she hadn’t been able to tell the truth, the whole truth, so help her God. She had left out seeing Johnnie there, the weapon in his hands, because, almost absurdly, she’d wanted to at least give him some kind of chance. Wanted him to have to explain why he’d done it, how it had all happened.
That was the part that still tortured her the most. Had Pierce been calling for her because Johnnie had already hit him? Had he just sensed that this fight would be different from the last? What had started it, and how had it progressed to Pierce lying dead in that hallway? If she hadn’t been so focused on finishing her book—the book that had changed her life—would Pierce still be alive?
She’d never know. Johnnie never told, and within six months of his sentencing, he’d hanged himself in his cell.
Mari stares at the blank page in front of her.
She starts to write.
She doesn’t tell the story how it happened. She tells another story, maybe a darker one, one in which she’s the one wielding the statue, she’s the one crushing Pierce’s skull. That’s better, isn’t it? Grander, more important, less.… pointless.
Mari writes and writes, feeling the way she did that night as she finished Lilith Rising, a way she’s never felt again. There have been other books, of course. Four in total, none as good as Lilith Rising, none she’d wanted to share with the world, but this story pours out of her.
When it’s done—when this other Mari in another life has put pieces of the bloody statue in a sleeping Johnnie’s hands and sworn this other Lara to secrecy—Mari expects to stop. Instead, she keeps going.
When Noel died in that plane crash in 1980, Mari hadn’t seen him in three years, and that had just been a quick hello at one of her book signings. Now, she gives them this final meeting in a dark restaurant on a snowy night in New York.
Tears stream down her face as she conjures him up, remembering the way he moved, the way he talked, the way he might have been in those last few months before he died.
They kiss goodbye in the story, just like they never got to do in real life.
And Lara, flighty, mercurial Lara, she makes the moral heart of it all. The one who won’t accept what happened so easily, who, in the end, has the noblest core of any of them.
As for Mari herself … well, she sends her off alone into the cold, because there are times when it feels like that’s precisely what’s happened to her. She has a life she loves, a life she very much doesn’t want to lose, and one much happier than what she implies for this Other Mari. She and Lara had stayed close, had visited each other’s houses nearly every chance they got, until Lara decided to have a little too much fun one night and climbed into her Jacuzzi bath when her blood was full of champagne and Quaaludes.
But there are times when Mari feels like she’s spent her entire life fending for herself, so it seems like a fitting end to this, her own version of her story.
When she’s done, she reads it back over and, for the first time since 1974, she feels something like peace.
She didn’t kill Pierce. Johnnie Dorchester did, in some kind of drug-fueled rage—a sad and stupid ending for both men, and one she’s never quite been able to reconcile.
But if she hadn’t insisted on staying, if she’d let Pierce leave when he wanted to, if she’d gone to him when he called for her …
And she can’t escape the thought that has haunted her as surely as her memories: If Pierce had lived, would there be a Lilith Rising? Would there be an Aestas?
Weren’t those works—wasn’t her life, and Lara’s, too—born from Pierce’s blood?
So, it feels better, letting herself wield the weapon.
Cleaner.
Truer.
But now, she sits in the fading sunlight and wonders what on earth to do with these pages.
It’s an exorcism of sorts, the lancing of a wound. Nothing she’d ever want to publish, but also not something she wants to tuck away in her flat back in Edinburgh.
They belong here, she finally decides. Hidden away, but here nonetheless, an alternate version of the story the house already holds. The house that changed the course of her life, all of their lives, forever.
But she won’t hide all of the pages together.
Together, they tell a complete story, most of it real, some of it not, but nothing about that summer has ever seemed so neat to her.
So whole.
It’s always been a series of fragments, beautiful and horrible, shifting like the light on the water just beyond the villa, hurting her eyes if she looks too close. It feels right, then, to break this story up into fragments. Read the first, and it’s sad, but there are moments of light, of joy, even if the reader senses the clouds rolling in.
Read the second, and now, the story twists. Heroine is villain, villain is victim, and that colors everything that comes before in a new light.
And yet that first bit still stands on its own, another kind of story, another universe of might-have-beens.
That’s good, Mari thinks. That’s how stories should work.
The first chunk of it, she hides in an easy spot, under the window seat where the M Johnnie Dorchester carved in the glass still occasionally catches the light.
The second, the parts detailing her very real fight with Pierce and her very fictional murder of him, those she tucks away somewhere more secret.
Only someone who has read Lilith Rising very closely would even think to look there, and it makes her smile as she pushes the papers into their hidey-hole.
If these are ever found, it will be by a true fan, and what will they do with them?
Mari doesn’t know or care. She’ll be dead by then, after all. She’s hidden them too well for them to be discovered before her inevitable and swiftly approaching end.
Maybe they’ll believe they’ve found the real ending to her story. Maybe they’ll think it’s some deluded piece of fiction. Maybe they’ll toss them in the fire, and be done with all of it.
It doesn’t matter to Mari. She’s done what she can, reclaimed the narrative for herself in a way that makes sense to her, and if it means the world one day believes she murdered Pierce, at least it ensures no one will ever separate them again.
The car comes for her early the next morning, and Mari’s last look at Villa Rosato—Villa Aestas—is of the house shining in the morning light, a perfect jewel waiting for some other story to unfold in its walls.
Mari presses her fingers against the back window, imagining she can still feel the warm stone under her palm.
She’ll be gone soon, but the villa will stand for much longer, she knows, and that means she’s never really gone. Neither is Pierce, or Lara, or Noel, or even Johnnie. They still walk those halls, and soon so will she.
So will others who come after her.