4: GHOST IN HER FACE

“ She had Giulia eyes but she didn’t know what they’d seen”

The rain hadn’t stopped, but Amy barely noticed.

She sat in the back of the black car, the leather interior cool against her spine. The window fogged slowly as she stared out at the passing streets of the Lower West Side half empty, half rotting. The city never slept, but some parts of it knew how to go quiet.

Ellie Marchetti, Eliano. That name shouldn’t have shaken her but it had deeply, quietly like a match dropped in gasoline. Amy didn’t move she didn’t blink, she only let the girl’s name echo through her until it turned into something worse. Giulia, the car pulled up in front of her brownstone. Her driver opened the door, but Amy didn’t get out right away she waited until she was the last person in the car with her thoughts. That girl, that girl didn’t even know the name she carried she didn’t know the history sewn into her bones. She was Marchetti blood, yes but she had Giulia’s eyes, Giulia’s stillness, Giulia’s fire. Amy closed her eyes, leaned back, and for the first time in years she let the past creep in.

Ten Years Ago, 1939.

The last night, they were sitting in Amy’s bedroom back when the apartment was smaller, less cold, when she still thought love could survive in New York. Giulia sat by the window, legs tucked up under her, hair wet from the rain they’d just danced through. The radio played soft in the background— Billie Holiday, something about heartbreak, always.

“My father’s sending me away,” Giulia whispered. Amy looked up from her desk, Again? This time for good. Some estate upstate, he said it’s time I started

preparing for a real life. A husband. A future. Amy stood, He can’t do that.

He can, He is.

Giulia’s voice cracked on the last word, and Amy hated that she couldn’t fix it, hated that she wasn’t born powerful enough to burn the entire Marchetti name to the ground.

She crossed the room, knelt in front of hercupped her face. Then come with me, Amywhispered, where would we go? Somewhere that doesn’t know our names, somewhere quiet. Giulia laughed; sad, but soft. You and me on the run? What would we eat? Each other, Amy smirked. Giulia rolled her eyes, Amy… But the moment hung there longer than it should have.

Do you love me? Amy asked, suddenly.

Giulia’s lips parted and then she kissed her hard, desperate, full of something that already tasted like goodbye. Amy held her so tightly that night, like if she let go even a little, the whole world would collapse. She didn’t know it already had because three weeks later, Giulia was gone, no note, no goodbye, no explanation just whispers: pregnant, shipped off, a disgrace. Her name was never spoken in full sentences again.

Amy tried not to remember that night but now seeing Ellie? She couldn’t forget it back in the present Amy opened her eyes, rain streaked down the car window, blurring the city lights into something soft and sad.

The girl was back and not just in the streets she was back in Amy’s chest, curling under her ribs like a spark ready to burn Giulia’s eyes, maybe she didn’t know for sure not yet.

But she knew one thing:

That girl was going to unravel her.