Eventually Gia was back on her feet and with the help of the nanny who was hired to replace their mother, she and her brother tried to lead a normal life while their father was rarely seen. Dr. Nalate lost his right to practice, and with a nice severance package, he retired into his den or bedroom and rarely surfaced. That was when Gia became determined to bring some semblance of honor back to the Nalate name. She focused on her gymnastics and science classes, but struggled with her insecurities with the scarring visible in her gymnastics uniform, and moved onto ballet, where she could keep her legs covered with black tights.

Genetics fascinated her from an early age, and would end up being her focus when she attended Stanford. She fell into an interesting group of like-minded nerds, enjoying the world of Dungeons and Dragons with their own jungle juice instead of hanging with raging fraternity men, but tried her best to remain somewhat neutral, brushing the edges of every social group she could. Gia wanted to try everything, wanted to be everything, but mostly she wanted to be the doctor her father once was. First, though, she needed to put some distance between them, and after her undergraduate was spent at Boston University, she took a plane across the country.

Stanford honored her with both a graduate's degree and a Master's degree in Biochemistry, and eventually moved on to Massachusettes Institute of Technology to further her studies. The bonds (the non-covalent ones) she formed there went deep, and it was there, at a physics confrence as the man who would eventually turn her world around. She hated him at first; his hair was way too much and his attitude was off the charts not to mention the party boy attitude that was infamous around the campus, but Gia quickly realized he had the brains to back it all up. It took a lot of convincing for her to come around, but when she did, she fell in love with Ned Howard.

Before she knew it, she was legally Giuletta Howard and it wasn't until she was pregnant with their first child that she could tack on "Doctor" to the front of her name. It was the most exciting time in her life, with a child on the way and her years of endless research and effort had finally come to fruition. Soon after Nathan was born, the family moved to Tarrytown, NY to help with his family business. It felt rushed, but Gia agreed, and it ate at her slowly; she had gone through the country club circuit while she was growing up, and the last thing she truly wanted was to do that again with her children, so for eleven years she put on a brave face, but was quick to remind her husband of the growing opportunities in their related fields in Boston.

Back in Boston, she started working at Boston Biomedical Research Institute, where she finally felt like she was doing something worthwhile. Gia flourished there, and spent equal amounts of time reassuring her kids and husband how many opportunites awaited them in Boston.

That's when, it seemed, everything started going horribly wrong, save for the kids' success in their new school that allowed them to excel to the best of their potential without being bogged down by grade level requirements. Ned began working on his grandfather's car, but it started to become an obsession. Not only was he wasting his time on a car whose parts trickled in ever so slowly, but the time that was spent there made Gia feel nearly invisible. The kids were both so active and busy that they kept her occupied and happy, but she wanted her husband around. Age-old insecurities flew to the front gates, and as those things tend to, started to encourage her terrible thoughts. Ned was much more capable than what he was doing and quite honestly wasting away his degrees to tinker all day long. She gave it her best shot, for the kids, but crumbled into the arms of a co-worker. The affair wasn't something that she was proud of, and still isn't, but momentarily made her feel like she was in the spotlight.

The divorced was finalized in 2005, and while Ned insisted, Gia refused to accept any kind of spousal support, chalking it up to guilt from her affair. She wasn't in it for the money, and she never had been. The divorce caused her to throw herself into her work when she didn't have the kids, and nearly dropped everything to be with them when she did.

In late 2007 Gia received a phone call that her father needed to see her right away and that it was urgent. His years of gambling and borrowing had finally caught up with him, and the former doctor had a hefty collection of debts to an endless amout of loan sharks. Gia had spent years keeping him at an arm's distance so he couldn't give her children a bad impression. She explained that she would see what she could do, but ultimately he had gotten himself in the mess he was in, and after crossing the wrong hit man, was killed. The funeral was small and Gia couldn't bring herself to be that upset about it; the man she loved had been long gone, swallowed whole by his addictions and unable to accept help.