Marco Ferretti had not survived twenty-four years, three competitive football seasons, and two years of living with Aria without developing a very specific radar for when his sister was lying.
She was lying now.
She'd been lying for four days — about where she went between lectures, about the texts she kept deleting, about why she'd started taking different routes home and keeping her curtains more closed than usual. She laughed the same. Talked the same. Made the same terrible jokes over dinner.
But she was watching the street.
Marco had learned that tell from their father — a man who had spent thirty years in Naples looking over his shoulder for reasons Marco had only understood after he was gone. When someone you love starts watching the exits, something is wrong.
"Are you in trouble?" he asked that evening, direct, while she was doing the washing up with her earphones in.
She pulled one out. "What?"
"Are you in trouble, Ari."
She looked at him with those dark eyes that had always been too perceptive for her own comfort. "No," she said. "Why?"
"Because you've taken the east street home every day this week and you hate the east street, it smells like the fishmonger."
A beat. Something moved behind her expression — quick, controlled.
"I'm fine, Marco."
"Aria."
"I'm fine." She smiled at him — genuine, warm, the smile that had never once in her life successfully hidden the fact that her brain was working very fast beneath it. "I'll tell you if something is wrong. You know I will."
He did know that. She always had — every disaster, every mistake, every catastrophic shortcut, she'd always told him eventually.
