The rain hammered the studio roof as if it wanted to get inside.
Grazielle didn’t turn around. She stayed there with her back to Giovanna, her hands braced on the counter and her head bowed, listening to Giovanna’s breathing behind her and the sound of the water outside. Two sounds that shouldn’t exist together. Two sounds that, together, made time fold in on itself and return Grazielle to a school locker room, sixteen years old, her hair dripping and Giovanna’s mouth three centimeters from hers.
“You can’t just show up like this,” Grazielle said. Her voice came out low, close to the counter. “Ten years, Gi. Ten years without a word. And you walk in here and ask me to tattoo that sentence on your skin and say you’re not leaving as if—”
“As if what?”
“As if I’d been waiting for you.”
Silence. Only the rain.
“And you weren’t?” Giovanna asked.
Grazielle turned around. Slowly. And looked at Giovanna face-to-face for the first time without the excuse of the tattoo, without the machine, without the gloves, with nothing between them but a meter of air and ten years of silence.
Giovanna stood in the middle of the studio, her arms at her sides, her right wrist covered in plastic wrap, her eyes red. She wasn’t crying anymore, but her face still carried the aftermath—the blotched cheeks, the clumped lashes. She looked smaller than she was. She looked sixteen again.
“I didn’t wait for you,” Grazielle said. “I carried you. It’s different.”
Giovanna opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I didn’t stand still waiting for you to come back, Gi. I moved on. I left home, I came to São Paulo, I learned to tattoo, I built a life. But you were in everything. In every design I made, every sentence I read, every time it rained and I stood there like an idiot staring out the window. You weren’t someone I was waiting for. You were something I carried inside me and couldn’t let go of.”
Her voice broke on the last word. Grazielle clenched her teeth. She wasn’t going to cry. She’d already decided that.
Giovanna took a step. Just one.
“Grazi. I need to tell you something.”
“Then tell me.”
“I tried to find you. Really tried. Not just open my computer and close it again. I went to Ribeirão once. Three years ago. I went to your old house. Your mother answered.”
Grazielle felt her stomach drop.
“She said you’d left. That she didn’t know where you’d gone. That you two weren’t speaking.” Giovanna swallowed. “And she said it was better that way.”
“Sounds like her.”
“I went back to Campinas and cried all night. And the next day I woke up and thought: it’s over. She left, and I’m never going to find her.”
“But you found me.”
“But I found you.”
The rain grew heavier. Water streamed down the studio window in crooked lines, and the streetlight blurred, as if the world outside were dissolving.
Grazielle folded her arms. She needed a barrier. Any barrier.
“So? What do you want, Gi? You want us to hug and pretend ten years didn’t happen? You want me to say everything’s okay? Because it’s not. It’s not okay. You disappeared. I know it wasn’t your fault, I know it was your parents, but you disappeared. And I stayed. I stayed here, alone, trying to understand why loving someone was reason enough to be punished.”
“I know.”
“You don’t know. You don’t know what it’s like to stay. You left.”
“I was taken away.”
“And you never came back.”
The sentence fell between them like something solid. Giovanna took half a step back, as if she’d been shoved.
“You’re right,” she said after a moment. Her voice was nearly a whisper. “I never came back. And I could have. When I turned eighteen, when I left home, when I came to São Paulo. I could have really looked for you. And I didn’t.”
“Why?”
Giovanna looked at the floor. At her own closed-toe shoes, wrong for that heat, wrong for that rain, wrong for everything.
“Because I was ashamed. Ashamed that I hadn’t fought. That I’d let them take me without saying anything. That I’d stayed quiet while my mother screamed that what we had was a sickness.” Her voice trembled. “I thought you hated me for it. And I couldn’t bear seeing that in your face.”
Grazielle slowly unfolded her arms. Like someone disarming something.
“I never hated you, Gi. Never. Not for a second.”
Giovanna raised her eyes. And there it was—that look. The same look from the library, from the last row, when Grazielle reached her hand beneath the desk and Giovanna laced her fingers through Grazielle’s without looking, without speaking, just feeling. The look of someone handing over something they don’t know will be returned whole.
Grazielle felt her chest tighten so hard that for a moment she thought she was going to faint.
“I need to go,” Giovanna said suddenly. Her voice changed. It turned practical, almost brusque, as if someone had pulled a curtain shut. “I have to—Rafa’s waiting for me for dinner. I said I’d just—”
She stopped.
The name hung in the air.
Grazielle didn’t move. But something in her face must have changed, because Giovanna closed her eyes and took a deep breath, like someone bracing for impact.
“Rafa,” Grazielle repeated. Her voice was flat. “Who’s Rafa?”
“Rafaela. My—” Giovanna opened her eyes. “My fiancée.”
The studio fell silent. Even the rain seemed to retreat.
Grazielle looked at Giovanna for an amount of time she couldn’t measure. She looked at her face, her red eyes, her wrist covered in plastic wrap with the sentence that belonged to both of them. She looked and understood—understood everything all at once, like a punch to the stomach: Giovanna hadn’t come there by chance. Giovanna had come there carrying an entire life on her back, a fiancée at home, a wedding date set, and even so she’d sat in that chair and asked Grazielle to write on her skin a sentence about rain and longing and coming back.
“Go,” Grazielle said. “Go have dinner with your fiancée.”
“Grazi—”
“Go, Gi.”
This time it didn’t come out hard. It came out tired. It sounded like the voice of someone who’d just realized the weight she carried wasn’t going away—it was only going to change shape.
Giovanna stood there another moment. Then she picked up her bag. She walked to the door. Stopped with her hand on the doorknob.
“Can I see you again?”
Grazielle didn’t answer.
Giovanna opened the door. The rain came in—noise, wind, the smell of wet asphalt. Giovanna left. The door closed.
Grazielle was left alone in Camila’s studio, with the smell of ink and disinfectant, the machine switched off, and the rolling stool still warm from where Giovanna had been sitting.
She lit a cigarette. This time, she smoked the whole thing.
Outside, the rain didn’t stop.