An Orphan Girl Is Forced to Marry a Short, Obese Man — Unaware He Is a Billionaire
“You eat here,” Beatrice would say. “You live under this roof. You must contribute something.”
So Catherine stopped attending class.
Instead, she spent her days by the dusty roadside leading to Mbarara, selling bananas, cassava, and roasted maize beneath a faded umbrella. Cars passed in clouds of red dirt. Motorcycles buzzed by endlessly. Some days she made a little money. Some days she made almost nothing.
Yet bitterness never fully settled in her heart.
She greeted customers politely. She helped elderly women carry heavy baskets. When hungry children came with empty hands, she sometimes gave them fruit for free.
Other vendors shook their heads.
“You are too soft, Catherine,” one woman once told her. “The world does not reward kindness.”
But Catherine only smiled.
Perhaps kindness was the last thing she still owned.
Back at her aunt’s house, life remained harsh. Beatrice complained constantly—food was expensive, school fees for her own children were rising, electricity cost too much. No matter how hard Catherine worked, it never seemed enough.
If the water basin was not full enough, if the cassava burned slightly, if she returned from the market with too little money, the insults came quickly.
“Useless girl,” her aunt would mutter.
Her uncle Joseph rarely intervened. He preferred silence, newspapers, and the radio to conflict. And Catherine gradually understood something important: her presence in that house was not family. It was inconvenience.
As she grew older, the tension only deepened.
By twenty-two, Catherine had become a young woman with calm eyes, gentle manners, and a quiet beauty many people noticed in the market. She was not flashy or proud. It was simply the natural beauty of someone who had suffered without becoming cruel.
Ironically, that became another problem.
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