Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty - Ivy
The key turned in the lock with a sound too loud for morning.
Ivy winced at it. Now, the studio felt colder, the shadows somehow longer than they should have been, stretching across the floor in pale morning light that failed to warm the walls.
She didn’t usually come in this early. She hadn’t needed to.
There was always a reason to linger in bed, to move slow, to make two coffees instead of one.
But today she needed to move, to pretend, to conjure something resembling routine from the ache in her chest.
The incense was already by the sink, the end of the stick burnt down to ash from last night, when she’d sat in the dark long after the world had gone quiet.
She lit another one, jasmine and cedarwood, the flame dancing before she blew it out.
The smoke curled toward the ceiling. Then came the music, instrumental today because she didn’t have the strength to hear words that might echo too closely to what she already couldn’t say.
The first few notes bled through the studio’s silence like ink into paper. Still not enough.
She exhaled slowly, let the air push against the hollow inside her ribs, and stepped into the center of the space.
It should’ve felt grounding, her place, her domain, the one thing she’d built with her hands and sweat and stubbornness, but nothing about it felt like hers anymore.
Not the shelves, not the chair, not the battered metal cart with pigment pots lined up like little altars.
Even the walls felt indifferent now, as though they’d forgotten the way Giulietta’s laugh had once bounced between them.
Ivy moved on instinct, flicking on the overhead lights, adjusting the blinds, wiping down the table although it was already clean. She was going through the motions like muscle memory because if she stopped moving, she was afraid she’d dissolve into the stillness. And the stillness had teeth.
She touched the armrest of the tattoo chair like she might find warmth in it.
It was stupid, but for a moment, she imagined Giulietta’s body there again.
The way she always perched rather than sat, spine too straight, like she didn’t know how to let her weight be held.
Ivy remembered every detail, the slight tremble in her fingers the first time she touched the ink gun, the way she asked too many questions and then clammed up the second something felt personal.
The contrast had fascinated Ivy. The precision of a surgeon’s control wrapped around a woman still learning how to be seen.
And now…she was gone. She sat at her desk, opened the sketchbook that always waited for her beside her morning tea.
The paper was blank, untouched since the last time Giulietta had leaned over her shoulder and made a joke about her handwriting.
Ivy closed her eyes and let the tip of her pencil rest against the page, not yet moving.
The silence roared louder than the music now.
The scent of jasmine curled under her nose, teasing a memory she didn’t want to chase.
She drew the curve of a shoulder, the line of a jaw, not because she was trying to recreate Giulietta, but because it was the only language her hands still trusted.
Ivy didn’t draw faces when her heart was full.
She drew them when she needed to understand.
When she needed to remember what not touching felt like.
The woman on the page took shape slowly, half in shadow, hair pulled back, lips parted as though she’d just started to speak but had changed her mind.
There was something aching in her posture. Something Ivy recognized too well.
She would title it later, but the name had already formed before the pencil lifted from the page.
“Ink for the Unseen.”
It wasn’t a project now. It was grief. Raw and quiet and not yet ready to die. And Ivy, for all her silence, knew this much—sometimes the only thing you could do when someone left was keep building the thing you’d promised them. Even if they weren’t here to see it.
It had been weeks since Ivy last walked through the sterile white corridors of the hospital’s volunteer wing, but it felt like no time had passed at all yet far too much all at once.
The walls still bore the same faded prints of watercolors that tried and failed to make the space feel less clinical, less heavy with the weight of stories it couldn’t contain.
The air smelled of antiseptic and old coffee.
Her boots clicked against the tile with the kind of quiet certainty that betrayed nothing of the chaos lodged in her chest.
She had almost turned back when she reached the front desk.
Had almost whispered a polite excuse about scheduling conflicts or needing to reschedule.
But her name was already on the volunteer log, already printed neatly beneath the heading: Restorative Tattoo Consultations.
And there were people waiting, women whose bodies bore maps of pain, survivors who had been asked to find strength in the absence of what once made them feel like themselves.
So Ivy didn’t leave.
She signed in, nodded to the receptionist, and let her body move forward even as her soul lagged behind.
The consultation room was small, just a desk, two chairs, a mirror, and her own equipment kit she’d left behind last time, half-stocked and waiting like it had known she’d return.
She took a breath, one hand brushing the leather edge of her sketchbook, the other curling around the softened strap of her tattoo machine bag.
And when the first patient walked in, a woman in her early fifties with tired eyes and a guarded smile, Ivy remembered why she had come back.
The woman sat carefully, the collar of her blouse already tugged aside, revealing the scar tissue that curved above her reconstructed breast. She didn’t look ashamed. But she didn’t look comfortable, either. Ivy knew that look. Had worn it herself once, in different ways, for different reasons.
“I was thinking of a magnolia,” the woman said softly, voice hoarse. “They bloom after the worst of the frost, don’t they?”
Ivy nodded, something twisting quietly beneath her ribs. “They do,” she said. “And they’re stubborn about it. Even when the ground hasn’t quite thawed.”
The consultation moved slowly. Ivy sketched as they spoke, petals unfolding across scar tissue, leaves curling with deliberate softness.
They talked about size, about shading, about the meaning behind the bloom, but beneath it all was something unspoken and sacred: the act of reclaiming.When the woman stood to leave, holding the preliminary design close to her chest, she smiled. “Thank you,” she whispered.
Ivy smiled back.
But it didn’t reach her eyes.
Because as the door closed again and the room emptied, the ache crept back in, the quiet, insistent kind that made its home in silence.
It wasn’t about the work. The work was good.
It was necessary. It filled something inside her that had long needed a name.
But the space where Giulietta used to live, in Ivy’s day, in her studio, in the cadence of her thoughts, was still hollow.
Still echoing. And no amount of ink or intention could fill it.
She looked down at the sketch on the table, traced one delicate petal with her fingertip. The work mattered. It did. It grounded her. It reminded her that transformation was possible, not just survival, but beauty in spite of the wound.
But today, the beauty hurt.
Because the one person she wanted to show it to was still gone.
And Ivy, for all her quiet strength, didn’t know how much longer she could keep drawing without knowing if Giulietta would ever look again.
Her phone sat face-down on the edge of the bed for hours, like it knew it carried too much weight to be held lightly.
Ivy didn’t reach for it at first. She paced the studio instead, slow and restless, brushing her fingertips across the edge of her workbench, folding the same cloth three times without reason, lighting incense that burned down without her ever really noticing the scent.
But eventually, as the dusk leaned in through the blinds and cast long, golden shadows over the half-finished sketches and unopened notes, she gave in.
She picked it up like it might burn her.
And maybe it did.
Because the second the screen lit up, her thumb hovered, almost of its own accord, over the search bar. And before she even registered the movement as a choice, it was there: Giulietta.
The thread opened like a pulse that had never stopped beating.
Texts stacked like breadcrumbs across time—some playful, some tender, others weighted with need.
Ivy read them all again, not because she needed to remember, but because forgetting felt like betrayal.
The messages weren’t just words. They were traces.
Proof. Evidence of the thing they’d built between silences, between nights, between the heartbreaks they hadn’t yet admitted were inevitable.
Her fingers trembled slightly as she scrolled down, past the last photo Giulietta had sent from her hospital shift, flushed cheeks and untamed hair, captioned, Survived another Monday, barely.
Past the voice note Ivy had once left half-whispered at 1:17 a.m., nothing more than breath and the words, “Come over if you can’t sleep. ”
And then, there it was.
The last message.
Not hers. Giulietta’s: I didn’t want to be her.
Ivy stared at it like it might change. Like if she blinked long enough, the screen might offer a different ending, something gentler, less final. But the words didn’t move. They just sat there, brutal in their honesty, soft in their sorrow.
It hadn’t been a confession.
It had been a fracture.
A crack in the armor Giulietta had spent years polishing, pretending she could be untouched by the mother who created her and the silence that followed. And Ivy hadn’t known how to hold it. Not then. Maybe not even now.
Her thumbs hovered over the keyboard, the ache in her chest blooming into something sharp. She typed.
You don’t have to be.
Paused.
Deleted it.
Typed again.
You are more than what she gave you. You are more than what she took.
Deleted it again.
She sat with the blank message box for a long time, the cursor blinking like a heartbeat.And in that breathless space between sending and silence, Ivy realized something that made her press the phone flat to her chest, as if that could calm the storm rising inside her.
She didn’t want to say the wrong thing.
But more than that,
She didn’t want to say anything too soon.
Because Giulietta had run away from the part of herself that still believed she could be loved without proving, without hiding, without bleeding for it.
And until she came back on her own terms, if she came back, Ivy wouldn’t force the door open with words that might only sound like echoes of a life Giulietta was trying to outrun.
So instead, Ivy did what she’d always done best.
She waited.
Not with bitterness.
Not with blind hope.
But with the quiet, steady kind of love that didn’t demand answers, only space.
And when she finally set the phone down again, unsent message still glowing softly like a whisper left on the wind, she didn’t cry.