Marcello
Three things happened the year I turned twelve.
Not the kind of things you celebrate with cake and candles.
No smiling photos.No neat little memories tucked into a scrapbook.
It was the kind of year that cracks a boy open and leaves the pieces where they fall—the kind that decides, long before he understands it, what sort of man will crawl out of the wreckage.
Lamb.
Alessio.
And my mother.
I used to think my childhood was full of small, forgettable moments—sunlight in the vineyards, my mother humming in the kitchen, Atlas teaching us how to throw a punch without breaking our knuckles.But grief has a way of rewriting memory.It strips everything back until only the wounds remain, bright and undeniable.
Lambada was the first.
She was younger than us.Too soft for the world we were born into.She laughed too easily, trusted too freely.My mother called her the gift, because she’d been told after having me that she couldn’t have any more children.She was, indeed, a gift.
Then Neve’s father ran her down.
An accident, they said.Wrong place, wrong time.
There is no such thing as wrong time when fate wants blood.
Her death hollowed our house.Atlas stopped smiling.I started breaking things.
My father couldn’t stand the silence that followed her.He couldn’t stand watching his sons dwelled inside their own grief.So he did what men like him always do when faced with something they can’t fix.
He gave us a new toy.A sibling to coddle and smother with our love.He brought Alessio into the family.It was sweet, reckless Alessio who cured the ache in our hearts and gave us a renewed purpose in life.
He was a well timed distraction, and it worked.At least for a while.
Alessio threw himself into our family with the same open heart he gave to everything.He wanted to prove he was worth keeping.Worth loving.Worth not losing.
God, I wish I had stopped him.
My mother was the second to go.
Lamb’s death broke something inside her that never healed.
People say she died of a broken heart.
I think she just got tired of surviving.
And when she went, the last gentle thing in our house went with her.
Atlas became harder.
I became angrier.
And Alessio became… more desperate to hold us together.
Then fate threw Neve into our lives.
Atlas was supposed to kill her.Everyone knows that.He saw something in her instead—something small and wounded and familiar.I know now what it was.