Chiara Rose

dieci

hi, enjoy the chap. leave some comments as u go, ily

tw - mention of rape, sexual assault, abuse, panic attacks and anxiety

Agostino's POV

"Somethings not right." I say, breaking the silence that had settled upon the room.

I have no fucking idea why Gi and Dad are sitting in my office right now, they're not offering anything to the environment. They're just sitting there on their phones, not even conversing with each other. I was working quite productively before they waltzed in here as well.

"Are you going to give us any context to that? Or are we just supposed to read your mind?" Dad says, looking up and peeking at me from over his glasses. Gi puts his phone in his pocket, and then stretches his arms out behind his head, resting them there.

"With Chiara. Somethings not right." I say, scratching my hand along my jaw. And from the way Dad clenches his jaw and Gi scrunches his nose, they both know what I'm talking about.

There've been so many red flags from the moment she walked in here, even though she does a damn good job at trying to hide them. She's awfully skinny. She flinches a lot, even at the smallest things. And she thinks she's hiding them, but she's not. And her reluctance to eat, she tries to act confident around food, but it's obvious she's not. So many alarm bells go off in my head every time one of these things happens.

"There isn't much we can do about it, Tino." Dad says softly. He's my Dad, and as much as I hate to admit it, I do love him to bits. But right now I want to slap some sense into him. Because there's a lot we can do about it, he just refuses to actually do it.

"C'mon Dad, you've seen her flinch. She's flinched because of you before." Gi says desperately. It's something we've all noticed, even Rocco brought it up to me in private the other day. And not to be mean, but he isn't exactly the most switched-on when it comes to things like that.

"First off, she didn't flinch because of me. She just wasn't ready for me to tap her shoulder, which is a completely normal reaction. She met us like five days ago, you've got to let her get settled." He says calmly. He's got a good point, it's a good point actually. But I don't think he's getting what Gi and I are saying.

But five days. It most certainly does not feel like five days. Five days with an extra sibling bounding around the house. Five days with an extra placemat set at the dining room table. There are little extra things of hers turning up around the house. Hair ties are floating around everywhere. There's always a book of hers sitting around somewhere. And I swear there's a chapstick left in every single room.

The worst thing is, these types of things shouldn't be new. I shouldn't be getting used to having a little sister running around the house. I should be used to these types of things, I should've grown up thinking that they were normal. But no, Rosalia took that from all of us.

"Okay, that's fair enough. Explain how skinny she is and how scared she is around food." Gi counters and Dad lets out a tired sigh. He's been up until at least 4 am for the past 5 days, and then waking up at 6 am. It's not healthy, and now's probably not a good time to be bringing all of this up. But it's something that needs to be talked about.

"Not everyone loves food as much as we do, Gi. And she mentioned something about not having a lot of money in Sydney, so she probably wasn't eating a lot because they couldn't afford it. You're the doctor, you know it's not easy to go from eating nothing to eating a healthy amount of food." Dad sighs, running a hand tiredly over his face.

"What about the bruises?" Gi quickly adds, causing Dad and myself to freeze. Bruises? He's seen bruises? My mind catapults, up until now the thought of her possibly being abused was just a theory. A theory that had not much evidence. But now there's evidence, and that absolutely terrifies me.