Chapter 10
Chapter Ten - Ivy
The first comment slid in beneath the surface of an otherwise ordinary afternoon, the kind of moment you’d forget if not for the way it altered the air just slightly, like someone cracked a window in a storm and let the pressure shift.
Ivy was setting up her station, gloves on, wiping down her tray with antiseptic when a regular—Jenny, breast cancer survivor, full sleeve in progress—tilted her head and said with a teasing lilt, “So, what’s it like dating a Harrington? ”
Ivy blinked, halfway through arranging the ink caps. “A what?”
Jenny laughed, unaware of the tiny fissure she’d opened. “Come on. Everyone’s talking about it. She’s one of the Harringtons, right? The hospital dynasty?”
Ivy smiled, not with her mouth but with habit, and said something forgettable, “She’s just Giulietta to me”, and then carried on, her hands steady but her pulse suddenly louder than the buzzing machines around her.
That night, it happened again. A walk-in client, medical badge still clipped to her jacket, asked if “the surgeon girlfriend” would be in. Ivy didn’t respond. Just handed over the waiver and checked her own phone under the desk after.
Roz had texted hours ago:
Did she tell you?
No greeting. No build-up. Just that. Direct, sharp, very Roz.
And then, Lillian. The polar opposite. A missed call, followed by:
Hey. Call me if you need anything. I mean it.
Ivy didn’t respond to either. She didn’t know what to say yet.
She wasn’t angry. Not in the way she might’ve been if this were someone else.
Someone she hadn’t already stitched into her bones.
She didn’t feel lied to, not exactly. It was more the sensation of being left outside a house you thought you already lived in, watching the light on through the curtains and wondering if they’d just forgotten to leave the door unlocked.
By the time Leah brought it up, Ivy already knew the story had legs.
They were wiping down stations in the lull between clients when Leah, usually the last to gossip, said carefully, “You know, if you ever want to talk, I can shut the shop early.”
Ivy looked up. “About what?”
Leah didn’t smile. Just gave her that look. The one people reserve for someone who’s about to learn something hard.
And Ivy felt it again, that tightness in her chest—not quite jealousy, not quite fear, but something sharp enough to leave a mark. She hadn’t even realized how many people knew. And maybe it wasn’t all of them. Not yet. But enough. Enough to make it real.
Giulietta Harrington.
It tasted strange on her tongue. Not bad. Just different.
Like finding out the woman you’ve been undressing with your hands for weeks had been undressing her past, piece by piece, and never once invited you to look.
She thought about the quiet after their last kiss. The way Giulietta never quite said anything about her family, not even in the offhand, casual way people do when they think you already know. She’d mentioned Italy, Rome, the medical training. But never the mother or sisters.
It left something raw inside her, a stretch of skin that now felt exposed.
It wasn’t the name. It wasn’t the bloodline. It was that Ivy knew her sisters and the realization that everyone else seemed to have known before she did.
That they were whispering about Giulietta. And, by extension, whispering about her.
And Ivy didn’t like being whispered about.
Not now. Not when she’d opened herself up more than she had in years, maybe ever.
Because Ivy had believed that. So now she sat in the quiet of her studio, late, long after the machines had gone still, the ink bottles lined up like soldiers, the shadows stretched long across the walls, and wondered whether Giulietta had kept the truth to protect herself or to protect Ivy from knowing what she was.
And either answer felt like a bruise that hadn’t yet bloomed.
The studio had never felt this quiet. Not even in those late hours when the blinds were drawn and the machines sat dormant, their hum silenced until morning.
This was a different kind of quiet, a stillness that crept into Ivy’s bones, settled behind her sternum, and stayed there like a weight she couldn’t shift.
It wasn’t silence, not really. The music still played, the door still chimed when clients entered, and Leah still swept the floor.
But inside Ivy’s head, the noise had turned in on itself. Looped. Echoed.
She worked slowly. Her lines were perfect, every movement of the needle deliberate to the point of unnaturalness.
Her hands, always steady, moved with the restraint of someone double-checking their own instincts.
Clients didn’t notice, at least not aloud, but Ivy did.
She felt it in the tension of her shoulders, in the way her body no longer relaxed between sessions.
She found herself staring at her phone between clients.
Scrolling back through texts, as though context had changed.
They weren’t romantic, not exactly. Giulietta wasn’t the type.
There were sharp one-liners. The occasional reference to a night Ivy couldn’t forget.
A single message, You’re too good at this.
It’s unnerving. Ivy had taken it as flirtation at the time. Now, rereading, it felt like a warning.
She didn’t feel lied to. Not in the traditional sense.
Giulietta hadn’t fed her a story. Hadn’t pretended to be someone else.
She was who she was—at least in the studio and sheets.
But that name, that lineage, that bloodline, it wasn’t nothing.
It changed the frame, even if the painting stayed the same.
Ivy started questioning things she hadn’t thought to question before: the way Giulietta had never stayed the night in those first few weeks, how she always got dressed in silence, her movements precise.
The way she stiffened slightly when Ivy said her name in public, not enough for most to notice, but Ivy had. She just hadn’t connected the dots.
And now those dots formed a wall. Not one Giulietta had built intentionally, but one Ivy couldn’t seem to stop running her hands along, searching for a door that may not exist.
She tried, in small ways, to push against it. That afternoon, when Giulietta came by the studio to drop off a coffee—still warm, almond milk, just how Ivy liked it—she leaned over the counter and said, “We could go away for the weekend. Close the shop. Find somewhere quiet.”
Giulietta blinked, caught off guard. “You want to go away?”
“I want to be somewhere no one knows your name,” Ivy replied, voice soft, steady. “Or mine.”
Giulietta smiled then, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “You hate holidays.”
“I hate chaos,” Ivy corrected. “Not quiet.”
But Giulietta didn’t say yes. She didn’t say no either. Just kissed her cheek and said she’d think about it. And that was the moment Ivy realized she wasn’t just waiting for an answer; she was waiting to be let in.
Because Giulietta wasn’t cruel. She wasn’t deceptive.
But she was still hiding, even now, even here.
Ivy could feel it in the way she kissed with restraint, in the way she always seemed one heartbeat away from flight.
And the more Ivy noticed it, the more she questioned every soft moment they’d shared.
Not because they weren’t real, but because she didn’t know what part of Giulietta she’d been holding when she held her.
The studio became her anchor. She threw herself into designs, spent hours refining custom work, sketching elaborate florals and abstract wings that mirrored the way she wanted to feel: bold, deliberate, free.
She didn’t realize until later that almost every face she drew bore a resemblance to Giulietta: brows slightly furrowed, eyes too knowing, mouths always closed as if guarding something sacred.
Leah noticed the shift. She didn’t mention Giulietta by name. Just said one night as they closed up, “You’re making beautiful work, but I think you might be bleeding into the ink a little.”
Ivy didn’t deny it.
She sat on the floor that night, sketchbook on her lap, knees pulled up beneath her hoodie, and stared at a half-finished design she couldn’t quite make herself complete. A woman’s back, draped in constellations. It looked too familiar.
She picked up her pencil, paused, and then, softly, gently, began to shade in the stars.
It was late when Giulietta returned to the studio, the way a person returns to a place where their skin still lingers, where their scent hasn’t faded from the sheets, where their name might still be safe even if it’s not yet spoken.
She didn’t knock.
She never did.
The bell above the door jangled softly.
Ivy was in the back, wiping down the station even though it had already been cleaned. She always lingered when her thoughts refused to settle. And tonight, they were loud, louder than usual, layered with want and wariness.
She didn’t look up right away, but she knew it was her.
When she finally turned, Giulietta was standing in the doorway, still dressed in her hospital scrubs, dark circles beneath her eyes, one sleeve pushed up like she’d forgotten how to be careful with herself. She looked both out of place and utterly at home.
“I didn’t know where else to go,” she said.
Ivy nodded to the chair near the far wall, the one she always kept empty.
Giulietta sat. For a while, neither of them spoke. The room was filled with the hum of the sterilizer, the faint beat of something soft on the speakers, and the weight of everything unsaid pressing against their skin.
Ivy didn’t ask about the gossip. She didn’t say “Why didn’t you tell me?” because she already knew the answer, even if she didn’t like it.
Fear.
Not of Ivy, but of what closeness required.
Instead, she sat across from her and said quietly, “Will you let me draw you?”
Giulietta blinked. “Now?”