Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen - Giulietta
She didn’t cry when the plane landed. Not when the car passed the old corner bookstore nor when she turned the brass key that had sat untouched at the bottom of her bag for years.
But as the door creaked open, protesting as though even the hinges remembered her abandonment, Giulietta stood in the doorway of her father’s apartment and felt the kind of ache that didn’t announce itself with tears; it settled into the bones, into the deepest crevices of memory, into the weightless hush that comes when grief has long since turned to dust.
The air inside was still and stale with time.
There was no scent of tobacco anymore, no trace of espresso or cologne lingering like it used to on his clothes and in the crook of her childhood dreams. Just dust, coated across the windowsills, softening the spines of the books he’d once read aloud to her in the evenings when the world was too cruel and the only thing she trusted was the sound of his voice.
They were all still there, L'Ombra del Vento, The Little Prince, the tattered poetry collections he’d marked in the margins with his looping scrawl.
Nothing had moved.
The same postcard from Naples was still pinned crookedly to the corkboard near the kitchen.
The ceramic bowl by the door still held two rusting keys and a broken watch.
His coat, the navy one with the frayed lining and the faint smell of cinnamon from winters past, still hung limp on the back of the chair.
It was like the apartment hadn’t realized he was gone.
As if time had refused to pass without his permission.
And Giulietta, standing there in her silence, wasn’t sure if she was the intruder or the only one left who remembered how it had once felt to belong.
She closed the door softly behind her and walked barefoot across the cool tiles, her suitcase abandoned at the threshold.
The weight of everything pressed into her skin—the ghosts of who she’d been, the shame of who she was now, and the terrifying blankness of who she might become if none of it could be stitched back together.
The last time she’d stood in this room, she was nineteen and angry, heartbroken over a love that wasn’t allowed, screaming that she would never come back.
Her father had just stood there then, tired, weathered, loving her with his whole face and none of his words, and had simply said, “Then don’t.
” And she had walked out with her chin high and her heart split clean down the middle.
Now she was back.
And the apartment hadn’t changed.
But she had.
She was older now. Softer in places she hadn’t meant to be.
Harder in others. She no longer believed that rage was the only proof of feeling or that love could conquer everything if you just clung hard enough.
She had learned, in all the wrong ways, that love could lie.
That people could see your insides and still walk away.
That trust wasn’t always rewarded. That sometimes, the people who held you the tightest were the ones who let you go first.
She trailed her fingers along the spines of his books, letting them speak to her in silence.
In another life, in another version of herself, she would have collapsed into that old armchair and cried until her chest ached and her throat gave out.
But now she just stood still, letting the grief bloom slowly like a bruise behind her ribs, unspoken and familiar.
This was the house that built her. And somehow, it felt less like coming home and more like opening a wound that had only just begun to scab.
On the bathroom mirror, in faded lipstick the color of wine, was the last message he’d written her.
“Per sempre, piccola.” (Forever, little one.)
She didn’t touch it.
She couldn’t.
Because if she did, it might disappear. And she needed one thing, just one, to stay the same.
Giulietta turned toward the bedroom and pushed open the door with a breath caught halfway up her throat.
The bed was still made, the linens folded with his usual precision, like he’d expected to return.
His reading glasses were perched atop a half-finished novel on the nightstand.
His slippers were tucked neatly beneath the frame.
It was a room paused in time, held in suspension by memory and grief and a thousand unsaid goodbyes.
She sat on the edge of the mattress and let her fingers knot into the blanket.
And for the first time since leaving Ivy’s studio, for the first time since her name had been flung across headlines, she let herself feel everything she had been holding back.
Not the guilt. Not the shame.
Just the ache of being a daughter.
A woman shaped by a man who had loved her fiercely, silently, and with everything he had.
And for a moment, brief and blistering, she let herself pretend that maybe he was still here. Just in the next room. Just waiting for her to speak.
She left the apartment in the early morning, before the sun had climbed high enough to turn the streets gold, when the light still felt forgiving and the city hadn’t quite woken up.
She walked without purpose, no destination in mind, only the pull of muscle memory guiding her feet along the uneven cobblestones that had once carried every version of her: girl, student, daughter, secret.
Rome hadn’t changed. Not in the ways that mattered.
The shutters were still crooked on the corner bakery; the old man who fed pigeons in the piazza was still there, older now, skin like sun-creased parchment, but his hands moved with the same slow grace, scattering crumbs like blessings.
The florist still arranged bouquets with obsessive care in the little shop near the fountain, and the scent of lavender and rosemary bled out into the street like a familiar perfume she hadn’t realized she’d missed until it caught in her throat.
She passed cafés where she had once sat and pretended to belong—young, eager, uncertain, a girl with eyes too wide and shoulders too tense, always watching, always wary, always waiting to be found out.
She remembered the way she used to hold her coffee cup—deliberate, poised, the performance of comfort when everything inside her screamed of exile.
It was strange to see those places now. Like walking through a painting of her own memory, each brushstroke laced with longing and the soft, persistent sting of distance.
And yet, the city saw her.
Not as she was, but as she had been. A face half-remembered. A rumor resurrected.
The butcher’s wife gave her a double-take near Via dei Banchi Vecchi, eyes widening just slightly before softening into something like recognition.
Two girls outside the gelato parlor whispered as she passed, one nudging the other too obviously.
A man at the tobacconist stared for too long before pretending to look away.
She offered nods in return but didn’t pause.
Because here, in this city that had once cradled her dreams and buried her secrets in equal measure, Giulietta Romano had always been both visible and invisible.
She had walked these streets once as a girl trying to disappear into the life she’d crafted.
Now she walked them as a woman who had already been exposed, stripped bare, laid out like a puzzle that no longer belonged to her alone.
Rome was still beautiful.
Unapologetically, relentlessly so. The kind of beauty that didn’t ask for attention because it simply existed, eternal and unbothered.
Sunlight spilled across terracotta rooftops and spilled into alleyways like gold.
Church bells sang their ancient song in the distance, indifferent to who listened.
Fountains still danced in courtyards where time didn’t touch them.
Lovers still kissed under arches. Life went on, indifferent to her ache.
But the beauty didn’t soothe her.
It didn’t offer comfort.
It held up a mirror instead.
And in it, Giulietta saw reflection. She had come here hoping the city would hold her like it once had, like her father’s arms or Ivy’s hands or the quiet of her own solitude. But it didn’t. Rome didn’t hold her. It revealed her.
The cracks she carried. The longing she couldn’t name. The truths she still hadn’t faced.
And so she walked.
Until her feet hurt. Until the ache in her chest settled into something quieter. Until she could breathe again, not without pain, but with the kind of clarity that only comes after letting yourself be seen and choosing not to hide.
She hadn’t expected to dream of that exact moment when Ivy had kissed her wrist like it was sacred, like her pulse beneath the skin was something that needed worshipping.
But the dream came anyway, vivid and unforgiving, wrapped in velvet shadows and the scent of ink and sweat and safety.
Giulietta saw herself as if from the outside, back in that quiet, golden-lit room where the world had fallen away, where names and fears and family legacies hadn’t mattered, only the feel of Ivy’s hands, the roughness of her fingertips, the reverence in her eyes.
In the dream, Ivy didn’t speak much. She didn’t need to.
Her mouth said everything. On her shoulder, her ribs, the soft flesh of her inner thigh.
But there was one moment, one breathless, breaking point between wanting and surrendering, when Ivy had looked up, pupils wide, mouth parted, and whispered, simply, achingly: “Stay.”
And Giulietta had said nothing.
Not in the dream. Not in real life. Not when it would’ve mattered most.
She woke with the taste of regret still thick on her tongue.