Unravel Me, Pakhan

Marco Knows Something Is Wrong

Marco Ferretti had not survived twenty-four years of life, three brutal seasons of competitive football, and two decades of shared history with Aria without developing a highly specific, nearly supernatural radar for when his sister was lying. It wasn’t just a hunch; it was a physical sensation, a slight prickling at the back of his neck that signaled the narrative was shifting.

She was lying to him now.

In fact, she had been lying for four days straight—about where she went during the long gaps between her afternoon lectures, about the sudden influx of texts she seemed to delete with frantic precision, and about why she’d started taking convoluted, nonsensical routes home. She was even keeping the curtains in their small apartment more closed than usual, a detail that screamed of a need for privacy or, more accurately, protection. On the surface, nothing had changed. She laughed at the same intervals, talked with her usual animated hand gestures, and made the same terrible, dry jokes over their nightly dinners. To anyone else, she was just Aria.

But she was watching the street.

Marco had inherited that particular "tell" from their father—a man who had spent thirty years in Naples looking over his shoulder for reasons Marco had only fully understood after the old man was in the ground. It was a specific way of standing near a window, a subtle tilt of the head toward the door when a floorboard creaked in the hallway. When someone you love starts instinctively scouting the exits of every room they enter, it means the world has stopped feeling safe.

"Are you in trouble?" he asked that evening. He chose his moment with care, cornering her while she was doing the washing up. She had her earphones in, lost in some dense literary podcast or a playlist that probably had too much cello in it.

She pulled one earbud out, the soapy water dripping from her hands back into the sink. "What? Did you say something about the laundry?"

"I asked if you are in trouble, Ari."

She looked at him with those dark eyes—eyes that had always been far too perceptive for her own comfort. For a split second, the mask slipped. He saw a flash of something ancient and weary, a look that didn't belong on the face of a university student. "No," she said, her voice steady. "Why would you ask that? I’m just stressed about the thesis."

"Because you've taken the east street home every single day this week," Marco countered, crossing his arms and leaning against the refrigerator. "And you hate the east street. You’ve complained for three years that it smells like a rotting fishmonger’s back alley. You don’t walk that way unless you're avoiding something on the main road."

A beat of silence followed, thick and heavy. Something moved behind her expression—something quick, calculated, and entirely controlled. It was the look of a person playing a high-stakes game of chess against an opponent she hadn't expected.

"I'm fine, Marco. Truly. Just trying to get my steps in," she said, though the excuse was flimsy even by her standards.

"Aria. Look at me."

"I'm fine." She turned fully toward him and gave him a smile. It was a genuine, warm smile—the kind she used to heal his bruised ego after a lost match—but it was also the smile that had never once in her life successfully hidden the fact that her brain was working at triple speed beneath the surface. "I'll tell you if something is real-world wrong. You know I will. I’m just in a Nabokov-induced fugue state."

He did know that. Historically, she had always come to him—every minor disaster, every academic mistake, every one of her "catastrophic shortcuts" had eventually landed on his doorstep for him to help untangle. He wanted to believe her. He wanted to believe that the shadows under her eyes were just from late-night library sessions and not from the kind of people who drove black SUVs with tinted windows.

He watched her carefully as she sighed and put the earphone back in, returning her attention to a stubborn lasagna stain on a plate. The tension in her shoulders didn't dissipate, even as she started humming along to her music.

He decided then and there to give her a week. Seven days to come clean, to tell him what kind of mess she’d stepped into this time. But as he walked to the window and caught the briefest glimpse of a dark sedan idling at the corner, Marco knew one thing for certain: if she didn't tell him by Friday, he was going to find out himself. And heaven help whoever was making his sister watch the exits.