Chapter 9 #3
Until it felt like drowning.
When she finally turned off the water, the silence was unbearable.
She stepped out of the shower, leaving wet footprints on the bathroom tile, her clothes dripping around her like a second skin she hadn’t agreed to wear.
She didn’t change.
She didn’t towel off.
She sat down on the edge of the tub, arms wrapped around herself, and stared at nothing for a long, long time.
And in that silence, she understood something terrifying:
This was the moment she had always feared.
Not exposure.
Not recognition.
But the look in their eyes when they realized she was sort of a Harrington. But not.
And not one of them.
That night, long after the water had stopped dripping from her clothes, long after her skin had cooled and the weight in her chest had calcified into something heavy and unmovable, Giulietta stood in front of the mirror.
She hadn’t turned on the main lights, just the one above the sink, dim and yellowed, flickering once before steadying, the kind of lighting that wasn’t meant to flatter or obscure but simply to exist, functional and unkind in its honesty.
Her reflection stared back at her, blurred slightly by the faint steam clinging to the corners of the mirror, and for a moment, she considered wiping it away with her palm, but didn’t.
There was something appropriate about the distortion, about not quite seeing herself clearly, about existing in fragments.
Her hair hung damp around her face, curling in uneven strands that clung to her jaw, her neck, her collarbone.
Her lips were pale, her skin paler still, a contrast to the bruises that bloomed faintly along the curve of her hips, the quiet remnants of Ivy’s mouth, Ivy’s hands, marks not of harm, but of having been held.
They ached in the way memory does when it settles deep into the body, in places you can’t name, can’t touch, only feel.
She didn’t touch them.
Instead, she looked into her own eyes, and that was the part that made her stomach twist. Because they weren’t just hers.
They had never been. She’d seen them before.
In photographs, in articles, in award features, in the steely glint of a face projected across glossy pages and hospital walls and the polished surface of legacy.
They were Evelyn’s eyes.
And no matter how much she ran, how many names she wore like borrowed coats, how far she reached into other cities and other languages and other lives, she could not scrub that inheritance from her face.
She touched her jaw, tracing the line from ear to chin, the sharp angle that people called striking, the shape that patients trusted and men admired and strangers felt belonged to someone of importance.
She had always known it wasn’t just hers.
She had worn it like armor, but tonight it felt like glass—transparent, fragile, inevitable.
Same line.
Same shape.
Same silence.
It wasn’t the name that haunted her. Not really. Names could be changed. Forgotten. But bone? Bone remembered.
And that was what broke her.
She wanted to scream. Wanted to reach into the mirror and shatter the glass and scatter the truth across the floor like so many shards she could finally sweep away.
But her mouth stayed closed. Her throat constricted around the scream until it shrank and collapsed into something smaller, something more dangerous: quietness.
The kind that vibrated in your chest, a storm held in stasis.
She pressed both palms flat against the sink, feeling the chill of porcelain seep into her skin, grounding her, anchoring her when her thoughts wanted to spiral outward and take her body with them.
Her voice, when it finally came, was hoarse and low, barely audible even in the stillness of her own apartment.
“It’s not her name that hurts,” she whispered, breath catching somewhere between defiance and despair. “It’s the part of me that still wants it.”
She didn’t know if she meant her mother’s name or her mother’s approval or her mother’s gaze, because maybe, in the end, they were all the same thing. Different doors leading to the same room. A room she had never been allowed to enter.
Evelyn had been working in Rome for a year when she met her father. By the time she realized she was pregnant it was too late. Her father had wanted to keep the baby in Rome. She had allowed it. What kind of mother leaves their baby in another country?
The apartment was silent.
So was she.
There was no revelation. No epiphany. No cinematic swell of resolution that told her who to become next.
There was only the mirror.
And the recognition.
That what she had tried to carve out for herself had been built on the hollowed bones of what she had been trying to avoid.
That she had studied so hard to be the best because she knew the weight of expectation even when it had never been spoken.
That every name she had used was a layer of protection against the one that now echoed in every hallway she walked down.
Harrington.
She hadn’t claimed it, but it had claimed her.
And she hated how much that mattered.
She pushed away from the sink slowly, her reflection tilting with her, following her as though it refused to be left behind. The bruises would fade. The steam would disappear. The hallway whispers would eventually quiet.
But this?
This lived beneath her skin.
This had always been waiting.
And now, it had found her.