The villa did not feel like a house at first.
It felt like a museum that accidentally allowed breathing inside its walls.
For the first two days, Lana walked through its vast corridors with cautious steps, as if expecting someone to appear and tell her she had wandered somewhere she did not belong. Every surface gleamed. Every room had intention. Every window framed an expensive silence.
It was beautiful.
It was overwhelming.
It was lonely.
She learned the rhythms slowly — the way sunlight spilled through the east wing in the morning, the faint echo of her footsteps across the marble floors, the quiet hum of the climate system that never truly allowed silence to exist.
She discovered a reading room she instantly claimed as hers, a terrace overlooking the gardens where she drank coff
