“That was not easy,” he said.
“No,” Catherine admitted. “But it was necessary.”
He asked her a question then, one that hung gently between them.
“Do you regret marrying me?”
Catherine thought of the forced wedding, the humiliation, the secrets, the strange kindness, the protection, the courage she had only just begun to discover in herself.
Then she shook her head.
“No.”
“Why not?”
She looked at the water in the fountain, where sunlight shimmered in soft ripples.
“Because this marriage gave me something I never had before.”
“And what is that?”
“The freedom to choose who I want to become.”
In the weeks that followed, Catherine slowly stepped into that freedom.
She walked through the garden every morning. She joined Moses in conversations about the charitable projects he funded. One day he showed her reports about orphan shelters and girls’ education centers.
As she turned the pages, photographs of children in classrooms and safe homes filled her chest with a sharp ache.
“I wish places like this had existed when I was younger,” she said.
“That is exactly why they exist now,” Moses replied.
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