Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen - Ivy
Giulietta didn’t slam the door, but the sound it made as it clicked shut behind her might as well have been an explosion.
It echoed through Ivy’s bones like a final verdict, sharp and cold and somehow louder than shouting would’ve been.
The studio, moments ago filled with the heat of confrontation, felt suddenly cavernous, like all the air had been sucked out and left her standing in the wreckage of something she’d only just dared to believe in.
Ivy didn’t follow her.
She stood exactly where she was, near the doorway, hands loose at her sides, her breath shallow but even, because this pain, unlike the others, didn’t come from guilt or shame.
It came from watching someone she loved walk away with eyes full of accusation and a heart too bruised to see clearly.
And Ivy knew from too many years of silence and survival that chasing someone mid-flight only made them run faster.
So she didn’t.
She stepped back instead, her spine straightening as her eyes dropped to the floor where Giulietta’s shadow had just been.
The air still smelled like her shampoo, vanilla and something faintly citrus, and Ivy swallowed against the ache of that, how quickly closeness turned into absence, how easily touch gave way to cold.
She turned away from the door then, toward the back of the studio, where her half-drawn sketches waited, lines she couldn’t finish because the face she knew best had turned away.
Somewhere beneath all of this, beneath the suspicion and the silence and the storm of it all, Ivy still believed in the woman who had once clung to her in the dark and whispered, “You don’t have to beg to be loved.”
So no, she wouldn’t beg either.
But she’d wait.
Not forever.
But long enough for the truth to catch up.