Chapter 7

But I never imagined that the future I thought was secure would be so fragile. With just one word from the Princess Royal, everything we had collapsed. And in the end, he fell into another woman's arms.

Power and beauty poisoned his heart until there was nothing left to warm.

I lifted my hand and touched the back of it, where the skin was still red and swollen.

The wound no longer caused me much pain. But my heart had frozen solid, encased in a thick layer of ice so bitterly cold that it could never be thawed again.

For several days, Edward was hardly ever home.

And when he did come back, his visits were always brief. He would arrive either drunk or carrying the cloying scent of another woman's perfume, and the way he looked at me had grown distant.

At worst, he seemed to go out of his way to avoid meeting my eyes.

I knew in my heart that what I had been dreading had finally come to pass.

I did not go looking for him, nor did I demand any explanation. Instead, I stayed quietly in my own courtyard, putting my things in order.

I had come to accept that this marriage was already over in everything but name.

It all changed the day Princess Aurora burst into our home.

Edward openly lavished his affection on her right before my eyes and didn't hesitate for a moment to sell every last asset we had to search for the Celestial Tear Gem just to please her. It was then that I realized there could be no turning back for us.

I am a daughter of the Hughes family, and since childhood, no one has ever dared treat me this way.

I married him of my own free will because I believed every sweet word that fell from his lips and dreamed of growing old beside him.

But now I see him for what he truly is, and I am done deceiving myself.

On the afternoon of the fifth day, Edward came home.

He did not rush off again as he usually would. Instead, he walked straight into my courtyard, a piece of paper in his hand.

His face was a tangle of complicated emotions, and his eyes kept darting away, as if he could not bring himself to look me in the eye.

I was sitting by the stone table with a book in my hands when I looked up and said, flatly, "You're back."

Edward grunted in reply, took the seat across from me, and placed a sheet of paper on the table, pushing it toward me with his fingertips.

I lowered my gaze and saw that it was a divorce settlement, already written out in full.

The handwriting was as familiar as my own, but at that moment it seemed to glare back at me like an insult.

The air around us went still, leaving nothing but the sound of wind stirring the leaves overhead.

Edward was the first to break the silence, though he took his time doing it.

When he finally spoke, his voice had a forced hoarseness to it, a rehearsed kind of misery, as if he were the one who had suffered some terrible injustice, or at the very least, as if he genuinely believed he was doing this for my sake.

"Charlotte," he said slowly, each word deliberate, "I think we should end this marriage."

The sentence landed like a sledgehammer square against my chest.

I had prepared myself for it as best I could. But hearing him say it still sent a dull, sickening ache through my heart, and a chill rose from somewhere deep inside me, spreading through my limbs and settling in my throat until I could barely breathe.