Chapter 21
Chapter Twenty One - Giulietta
It was nearly dusk when the knock came. Giulietta didn’t move at first. She stood in the center of her father’s old living room, fingers curled loosely around a chipped espresso cup.
The light was gold and thick through the curtains, making the dust in the air look almost beautiful.
She was wearing a thin vest, barefoot on the cold tile, the kind of stillness she’d been drowning in for days thickening around her like fog.
Then the knock came again. Three measured raps. A pause. One more.
She opened the door slowly, not expecting anything. Not bracing for what she saw.
Lillian.
Hair damp and twisted into a knot at the base of her neck, wearing a black hoodie and jeans. Her eyes—those soft, warm eyes so different from the Harrington sharpness—looked older than Giulietta remembered. Worn. Determined. A little lost.
Neither of them spoke for a long moment.
Giulietta’s breath caught, held. Her voice, when it came, was thin as a thread. “How did you—”
“Olivia,” Lillian said. “She guessed. I asked.”
Giulietta stepped aside. She didn’t invite her in with words. She didn’t need to. Some griefs didn’t require formalities.
The apartment was dim, the smell of old books and lingering incense clinging to the walls.
Lillian moved inside slowly, like she didn’t know where to put her body.
Like she wasn’t sure this visit was allowed.
She didn’t sit. She stood by the bookshelf, fingers brushing the spine of an old medical text written in Italian.
Giulietta stayed near the window, arms folded, defensive even though she hadn’t meant to be.
“I didn’t think anyone would come,” Giulietta murmured, not looking at her. “I figured if anyone did, it would be Olivia. Or Roz. Catherine maybe, with a lecture.”
“Roz is furious,” Lillian said, not unkindly. “Catherine’s pretending she doesn’t have an opinion. Olivia’s worried. But I…” She hesitated. “I needed to see you.”
“Why? To see the family scandal in the flesh?”
Lillian flinched. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Make it easier for me to hate you,” Lillian said softly, stepping closer. “I don’t. I tried. But I don’t.”
That stopped her.
Giulietta turned then, fully turned, and really looked at her sister. Her baby sister. The one she hadn’t grown up with. The one who had Evelyn’s clinical precision but none of her cruelty. The one who’d spent her whole life chasing scraps of affection in a house built on duty.
“You’re not even angry?”
“I am,” Lillian said. “But not because of you. Because of what this family does to women like us. Because of the silence. The secrets. The way we’re made to believe we have to earn love with perfection.”
Giulietta blinked, stunned. Her throat burned.
“I read the article,” Lillian said, voice shaking now. “The leak. Your name. Your records. Rome. All of it. And I knew, I knew, you didn’t do this. That you wouldn’t choose to expose yourself like that.”
“I didn’t.”
“I know.”
Giulietta’s hands trembled. She tried to fold them tighter across her chest, but the ache in her sternum wouldn’t let her. “I thought maybe Ivy, ” Her voice cracked.
Lillian nodded, quiet understanding blooming between them. “Ivy loves you. That much is obvious to everyone.”
“She didn’t chase me,” Giulietta whispered.
“Maybe she was tired of chasing people who don’t stay.”
That landed like a punch to the ribs.
“I’m not good at staying,” Giulietta admitted, and her voice felt like it was coming from some distant, cracked part of her chest. “Every time I try, I end up back in ruins.”
“But you came here,” Lillian said. “That means something.”
Giulietta sank into the armchair, elbows on her knees, head in her hands. “I didn’t know where else to go. I kept thinking of my father. This place. The only place that felt like mine, even if it was never really mine.”
Lillian crossed the room then, sat beside her on the coffee table, knees brushing Giulietta’s. She didn’t reach out. She didn’t intrude. She just sat in quiet proximity, giving space, holding presence.
“I came here to tell you something,” Lillian said after a beat. “Something you deserve to know.”
Giulietta looked up slowly.
“I leaked it.”
The silence that followed was louder than any scream.
“What?”
Lillian’s voice broke. “I panicked. I saw a reporter asking questions, someone sniffing around the hospital. I thought if it was going to come out, maybe I could soften the blow. Control it somehow. But I never meant—” Her breath hitched.
“I didn’t know it would be everything. I didn’t know it would do that to you. ”
Giulietta stared at her. The room tilted, the walls pressing in close, her heart thudding like it was trying to claw its way out of her chest.
“You, what?”
“I’m sorry,” Lillian said, tears streaking silently now. “I didn’t do it to hurt you. I did it because I was scared. Because Evelyn started asking questions. Because Roz was getting suspicious. I thought if I could, if I could just make it official, on our terms…”
Giulietta stood so fast the chair scraped against the floor. Her breath was ragged, disbelief written in every line of her body. “You were the one person I didn’t expect this from.”
“I know,” Lillian whispered. “That’s why I had to come. That’s why I didn’t let Olivia come instead. I needed to say it. To your face.”
Giulietta turned away, pressed a hand to her mouth like the words would break her open if she let them out.
“I was wrong,” Lillian said. “And I’m sorry.”
The silence stretched again.
Giulietta stood at the edge of the room, arms wrapped tight around herself like scaffolding, like a structure barely holding.
Her eyes didn’t leave Lillian’s face, didn’t blink, didn’t soften.
The words had been spoken. The damage had been done.
And now all that remained was the long, low ache of consequences settling into the floorboards between them.
“You leaked it,” she repeated, not like a question but like a taste she couldn’t get off her tongue. “You.”
Lillian didn’t move. Her tears were quiet now, steady, unremarkable in their persistence, as though her body had been waiting for this confession for days and now that it had arrived, there was nothing left to do but drown slowly in its wake.
“I didn’t mean for it to happen like that,” Lillian whispered. “It was a moment of panic. You’d just arrived. Everyone was talking. Evelyn was—" She shook her head. "I thought if the truth came out on our terms, if I controlled the narrative, it would hurt less.”
Giulietta laughed. A breathy, broken sound that didn’t carry humor, only disbelief. “You thought leaking my identity would protect me?”
“I thought you were going to take everything.” Lillian’s voice cracked wide open, and the rawness inside spilled out like blood.
“The hospital… the attention… the place I fought so hard to carve for myself under her shadow. I’ve spent my whole life trying to be good enough for a mother who doesn’t even see me, Giulietta.
And then you arrived, and for a moment, I was terrified you’d just…
slide into the space I’d been bleeding to earn. ”
The room was silent again, save for the soft patter of evening rain against the windowpanes and the slow, deliberate creak of Giulietta’s steps as she walked back across the room, stopping just far enough from Lillian that the air between them still trembled.
“You hurt me,” Giulietta said. Her voice wasn’t loud.
It didn’t rise. But it sliced with surgical precision, clean and devastating.
“You put my name on a screen before I had even said it aloud to myself. You exposed everything, not just the facts. My childhood. My father. My mother. The parts of me I hadn’t finished claiming.
You didn’t just rip off a bandage. You took the skin with it. ”
Lillian covered her mouth with one hand, a sob slipping out unbidden.
But Giulietta didn’t yell.
She didn’t pace or throw or shatter.
She just stood there, exhausted by a lifetime of people expecting her to erupt.
“I’ve spent so long being made of fire,” she whispered, more to herself than to anyone else. “But I’m tired of burning. I’m tired of having to be a force just to survive. And I’m so fucking tired of being the thing everyone either fears or wants to use.”
Lillian reached out then. “I was scared,” she said. “But it wasn’t about you. It was about me. About never feeling like I was enough for this family, and then watching you walk in and be seen in a way I’ve never been.”
“I didn’t ask to be seen,” Giulietta said flatly.
“I know,” Lillian whispered. “But you were. And I was small. And I was stupid. And I’m sorry.”
Giulietta studied her, her gaze not unkind but unflinching, like she was seeing her sister clearly for the first time. Not as competition. Not as Evelyn’s golden youngest. But as a girl so hollowed out by expectation that even kindness had turned sharp in her hands.
And maybe that was the worst part, how familiar it felt.
She inhaled slowly, and when she spoke again, her voice was quieter than ever. “You’re not the only one who grew up lonely, Lillian.”
Lillian broke. Not loudly. Not theatrically. Just folded into herself like someone who had been holding breath for too many years and had finally, finally exhaled.
Giulietta didn’t comfort her. But she didn’t leave the room either.
The terrace was small, barely more than a ledge, with enough room for two wrought-iron chairs and a table scratched by years of forgotten coffee cups and ashtrays no longer in use.
Giulietta had cleaned it the day after arriving in Rome, almost compulsively, as if restoring this sliver of sky-facing space might offer a fragment of control she couldn’t find anywhere else.
The sun now cast a soft gold over the city, staining the buildings amber, lighting the distant domes and shuttered windows in that uniquely Roman glow, the one that made even grief feel cinematic.
Lillian sat across from her, knees pulled up under her, cradling a chipped mug between both hands like she was afraid to let it go.
The coffee had gone lukewarm but neither of them seemed to mind.
It wasn’t about the heat. It was about the ritual.
About sitting in the quiet after the storm, not knowing what came next, but deciding, at least for now, not to walk away.
They had cried. Not together, not at the same time, but in the same space.
And that mattered. They had spoken the truth—not the polished, palatable version, but the kind that ached to say aloud.
And now they sat there, two daughters of a woman who had taught them both how to be sharp, how to endure, but never how to love each other.
The silence between them was tentative, not tense.
It felt like walking on a frozen lake, uncertain of the cracks beneath, but moving anyway because the stillness had already done its damage.
Then Lillian laughed, a small, broken, surprised sound that escaped her like air from a balloon she hadn’t realized she was gripping too tight.
“What?” Giulietta asked, one eyebrow raised, though her mouth tilted slightly at the corner, betraying the flicker of a smile that hadn’t fully formed.
“It’s just…” Lillian shook her head. “I never imagined we’d be drinking coffee together in Rome. I mean, I’ve spent my entire life being compared to a woman I didn’t even know, and now here you are, real, and I don’t hate you. I thought I would.”
Giulietta looked at her for a long time, then reached forward and picked up her own mug, letting the ceramic weight settle into her palm. The breeze carried the faint smell of espresso, city dust, and the flowers from someone’s unseen balcony.
“We don’t have to be perfect sisters,” she said softly. “God knows we’re never going to be. But maybe we could be honest ones. That’s something our family’s never had much of.”
Lillian nodded slowly, and the movement was almost reverent. “Honest sisters,” she repeated. “I could try that.”
That night, after Lillian had left, after the awkward hug and the promises to text and the strange, hollow warmth that followed Giulietta all the way back up the stairs, she sat cross-legged on the floor of her father’s study, her phone heavy in her hand.
The windows were open. A breeze drifted in from the street below, warm and scented faintly with car exhaust, melting gelato, and the roses blooming around the courtyard gates.
Rome was always a symphony of contradictions: ancient stone and neon signs, quiet churches and noisy scooters, solitude and togetherness held in the same breath.
It reminded her of Ivy. Of the studio that smelled like ink and lavender.
Of the woman who had drawn on her skin like it was sacred.
Of the one person who had never asked her to be anything but exactly what she was.
She unlocked the phone.
Her thumb hovered over Ivy’s name.
She didn’t rehearse the words. She didn’t draft and delete or weigh every syllable like a surgeon planning an incision.
She just typed it: I was wrong.
Just the truth, naked and unguarded.
She hit send before she could unfeel it.
Before she could let pride interfere, or shame rewrite the sentence, or fear of what wouldn’t come back stop her from trying.
Then she set the phone down, leaned her head back against the cool plaster wall, and let the silence fill the space.