CHAPTER TWELVE #2
“I don’t know,” I said quietly, and my own confession stung. “I’ve never really... done anything just because I wanted to. There was always a purpose. A reason. Something that served the family or my future or—” I stopped, pressing my lips together.
Elyssa’s brow furrowed. She didn’t respond immediately, and I watched the understanding settle across her features, slowly, carefully.
“What about you?” I asked, steering the conversation away from the hollowness that lived inside my chest. “What have you done for fun?”
Her eyes eventually softened. “You know what I did the summer before we started university?” she said, her voice a lot lighter than before.
“I drove to Joshua Tree with two friends I barely knew that I met at this shelter I used to volunteer at. We camped in the desert for three days. No planning. No itinerary. We just... went. We slept in the back of a pickup truck and watched the sunrise from the top of rocks that probably weren’t safe to climb.
I got sunburned so badly my shoulders peeled for a week. ”
Elyssa laughed, and the sound was warm and unguarded. “It was the best three days of my life. It was so… freeing. I didn’t know how much I had needed that until it happened.”
I tried to imagine it… sleeping under an open sky, climbing something unsafe just because it was there. The image of her experiences felt unnatural, so utterly foreign that I couldn’t quite process it.
“What else?” I asked, and I heard the longing in my own voice.
Each story she told me was a small, vivid world, and with every one she shared, I felt my lungs clench. It wasn’t with envy, not exactly. But it was a quiet, aching grief for all the things I had never done, all the experiences that had been deemed unnecessary, frivolous, and dangerous.
For the first time, I realized that I had never truly experienced life.
“You’ve done so much,” I said quietly when she paused. The words came out softer than I intended, almost reverent.
Elyssa looked at me, and her expression shifted. The warmth remained, but beneath it was a sadness that mirrored my own, not for herself. But for me.
She could see it. She recognized the emptiness inside me.
My throat tightened, the ache in my chest intensifying.
“It’s never too late, you know,” she said, gently but with a firmness that surprised me. “To do things. To try things. You’re almost twenty years old, Serafina. Your life hasn’t even really started yet.”
I opened my mouth to respond, but the words wouldn’t come.
Because what could I say? That every choice had been made for me.
That the freedom she took for granted was something I had only ever tasted in stolen moments—a burger, a shared laugh, a night spent in someone else’s bed because the silence of my own was too heavy to bear alone?
Before I could find a way to articulate any of my chaotic thoughts, Elyssa’s eyes drifted to my hair—dark, thick, falling past my shoulders in the loose waves—and a mischievous glint sparked in her expression.
“You know what we should do?” she said, sitting up straighter. The towel slipped slightly, and she caught it without looking. “We should dye your hair.”
The suggestion landed so far outside the realm of anything I’d ever contemplated that for a moment I simply stared at her, certain I’d misheard.
“Excuse me?”
“Your hair.” She gestured toward my head with both hands, almost excitedly. “We should dye it. Blonde. Like mine. Just for fun. Just because we can.”
I blinked. “You want to dye my hair blonde.”
“Why not?”
I stared at her blankly. She wanted me to dye my hair. To change the color that had been mine since birth, the dark, thick waves that my mother had taken great pride in.
The hair that matched every portrait on the Morelli mansion walls, every woman in every gilded frame stretching back generations.
Blonde.
The word felt like a small act of treason.
And that, more than anything else, was what made me want to do it.
“Okay,” I finally said.
The word left my mouth before the careful, more serious part of my brain could intervene. Before the voice that sounded like my father’s could list every reason this was unnecessary and beneath a Morelli woman.
Elyssa’s eyebrows shot up. “Seriously?”
“Seriously.” I got to my feet, and a knot I hadn’t realized was there loosened in my chest. “Right now?”
“Right now.” She was already moving, her bare feet padding across the carpet toward her bedroom, the towel clutched against her chest. “I have a box of bleach and blonde dye in my closet. I bought it last week thinking I might go lighter, but I never got around to it. Stay there, don’t move.”
She disappeared into her room and returned less than a minute later, holding a rectangular box with a photograph of a smiling blonde woman on the front. She pointed toward the bathroom.
“Go. I’ll grab the towels.”
I walked to the bathroom on legs that felt slightly disconnected from my body. Anxiety gnawed at me, my stomach twisting almost violently. Was I really going to do this?