Epilogue #2
The sister dinners are a ritual now. Not perfect, never polished, but real.
Giulietta doesn’t remember when they became a fixture, only that she no longer braces for them.
They rotate hosts, but tonight it’s Catherine’s turn, and her wife Sloane has worked her quiet magic on the garden, raised beds of lavender and thyme spilling over in deliberate, fragrant chaos.
It smells like wild summer and intention, like something that was supposed to grow here.
Catherine pretends to roll her eyes at the mess, but she leaves it. She always leaves it.
Olivia arrives first, carrying a bottle of wine from some tiny vineyard near the retreat. Her blonde curls are pulled into a loose braid, and she hugs Giulietta with the kind of sincerity that still catches her off-guard, firm, grounding, and with one hand pressed briefly to her back.
Roz is next, stomping through the back gate with firewood over one shoulder and indignation in her stride.
“If I get another splinter for this bloody bonding session, I swear to God.” But she’s smiling, even if it’s twisted sideways and buried beneath sarcasm.
She dumps the logs beside the fire pit, catches Catherine’s eye, and the smirk that passes between them is older than any grudge they’ve ever carried.
Lillian shows up last, half-hiding behind Olivia, a Harrington Memorial hoodie cinched tightly around her.
It’s too big, sleeves swallowing her hands.
Giulietta recognizes it immediately, not Lillian’s, not hospital-issued, but her wife Rebecca’s.
The letters are slightly faded from too many washes, and Lillian is blushing the kind of deep, undeniable red that speaks volumes.
Giulietta catches her eye and grins, slow and merciless.
Lillian sticks out her tongue in return, but her posture softens. She doesn’t shrink. Not anymore.
Emma’s there, already helping with the chairs, sleeves rolled up, laughter warm and unguarded.
She lights candles without asking and checks on the couscous Catherine’s obsessively timing on her phone.
When Ivy arrives beside her, fingers intertwined with Giulietta’s, it feels like the missing beat in a rhythm that has finally settled.
They eat at a long, worn table beneath string lights that Roz and Sloane hung one wine-drunk evening.
The food is good, nothing fancy, but made by hand.
The wine flows, and the stories get louder.
Catherine actually laughs. Like, really laughs, the sound unfastened and full.
She’s seated beside Sloane, and when Sloane tucks a piece of hair behind her ear, Catherine doesn’t flinch.
Giulietta catches her sister’s eye and sees something raw and luminous there: peace, hard-won and still learning how to breathe.
When Roz makes a sarcastic toast, “To dysfunction, delusion, and undeniable DNA!”, everyone groans, but no one gets up.
No one leaves. Catherine mutters, “God help me,” but clinks her glass anyway.
Olivia grins, leaning her head on Emma’s shoulder.
Lillian reaches for the bread without asking anyone to pass it.
Sloane wipes tomato off Catherine’s chin like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
Giulietta sits back, Ivy’s hand warm and steady on her thigh beneath the table.
They’re not performing for each other anymore.
There are still sharp words sometimes. Still silences that stretch a beat too long.
But no one pretends. No one runs. They cut across each other in conversation.
They disagree. But it doesn’t break anything. Not anymore.
There was a time Giulietta would’ve counted the seconds until she could leave.
But tonight, the seconds stretch, and she wants them to.
She doesn’t need to prove herself. Doesn’t need to defend who she is or what she’s built.
These are her sisters. This is her family.
And Ivy, beside her, squeezing her knee in a quiet echo of love, is her future wrapped in the present.
After dessert, something Catherine claims was accidentally vegan, they stay late.
The fire crackles low, and the night settles deep.
No one talks about the hospital. No one brings up Evelyn.
There’s laughter and layered stories, and when it’s finally time to go, no one rushes to leave.
Lillian hugs Ivy tight. Roz slaps Giulietta’s shoulder with the affection of a bear cub.
Olivia insists everyone takes leftover wine.
In the car, Ivy drives. Giulietta rests her head on her shoulder at the red light. Neither of them says anything.
She doesn’t need to. This is what it means to have stayed.
Not to endure.
But to belong.
Giulietta doesn’t wear jewellery. Not for vanity, not for tradition.
It’s never felt right, heavy, performative, too visible in a world that’s always been eager to look.
But this chain is different. Slim, quiet gold.
Hidden beneath the collar of her scrubs or the neck of Ivy’s borrowed T-shirts.
It’s the one thing she never forgets to put on.
A constant against her skin. A story she doesn’t have to explain.
Now there is a ring on it. The ring on it isn’t flashy.
No diamond. No engraving. Just a simple circle, worn smooth by time.
Ivy’s grandmother kept it tucked in a velvet box, stored away.
And Ivy had told her once, offhandedly, in the kind of quiet reserved for dishes and dusk, “She used to say: when you know, you’ll know. ”
Giulietta hadn’t known what that meant back then.
Not really. Love had always felt like something she needed to outrun or conquer.
But now, it’s something else entirely, something she lets herself walk toward.
One night, in the lull between a finished meal and a song Ivy was humming absently from the studio, Giulietta had opened the drawer and found the ring.
She’d held it in her palm for a long time.
It didn’t shake. It didn’t burn. It just sat there, weightless and sure.
She’d threaded it onto the chain, slipped it over her head, and let it rest against her chest.
Ivy hadn’t said a word when she saw it. She had simply stepped closer, hooked a finger through the chain, pulled Giulietta in, and kissed her. Long. Certain. Like she’d been waiting, too. Not for a proposal. But for a knowing.
They’ve never discussed weddings. There are no Pinterest boards.
No dress fittings. No date circled on the calendar.
But they’ve bought furniture together. Chosen new shelves for the clinic and argued about the lighting in the kitchen.
They’ve built a life in fragments and mornings and the decision to stay.
And still, Giulietta wears the ring. Not because she needs Ivy’s name stitched into her paperwork. Not because she wants to change her own. But because when she presses her hand over her heart, she can feel it there—cool, steady, a quiet answer to every question she no longer needs to ask.
Sometimes, when Ivy kisses her neck, her fingers brush the chain.
She’ll smile against Giulietta’s skin and say nothing.
Because the story is already written. It’s in the meals they cook together.
The patients they carry together. The nights they sleep skin to skin without words.
The arguments that end with understanding, not absence.
Giulietta once thought love was something loud. Something that had to be fought for. Proved. Earned. But this chain, the way it never leaves her, the way Ivy never makes her explain it, tells her otherwise.
The ring doesn’t sparkle. It doesn't shout.
But it stays.
And Giulietta, who once feared permanence like a curse, now lets it rest above her heart like a vow unspoken but never undone.
This is enough.
And she believes it with everything she is.
Ivy is working on something new. The workbench has become a shrine of scattered pencil shavings, ink tests, reference sketches taped to the walls with blue painter’s tape.
Her tools are set out neatly but untouched, her focus absorbed entirely in the slow evolution of a single image.
Giulietta watches from the doorway most evenings, wrapped in an oversized hoodie, her tea cooling in her hands, saying nothing.
It feels like entering a sacred space, like walking in on someone mid-prayer.
The sketch started weeks ago. At first, just the outline of a woman’s shoulders and chin.
Then came the sword—long, purposeful, angled downward not in defeat, but rest. Strength ready to be summoned, not flaunted.
Slowly, Ivy began to shape the second hand: not clenched in defence, but open, offering a heart held delicately in her palm.
The composition felt impossible at first, two conflicting forces in one frame.
But Ivy, as always, found a way to make contradiction feel like harmony.
There is no fear in the woman’s stance. No apology in her softness. Her strength is not a performance, it’s inherent. Her gaze is steady, her spine drawn in bold, patient strokes. She is not fighting. She is not hiding. She simply is complete and unafraid.
Giulietta doesn’t ask who the piece is about.
She doesn’t need to. It isn’t a portrait, not really.
There’s no resemblance in the facial structure, no deliberate mimicry of form or stance.
But the essence is unmistakable. It’s the way the figure holds both vulnerability and power without letting one dilute the other.
It’s the quiet steadiness of someone who has been through fire and now chooses peace without forgetting the heat.
It’s her. It’s always been her.