“For anyone to look past it.”
He knelt in front of my chair, as I had once knelt before him, and looked up at me with those impossibly honest eyes.
“I needed to know if there was a person on this earth who could love me not for my money. Not for my face. But for whatever lives underneath.”
My eyes filled with tears.
“When your father came to me, begging for time, I was about to say no. Then I saw your photograph. A nurse, I read. A girl who’d worked two jobs since she was seventeen and never once asked her father for help. And I thought…” He swallowed. “I thought, perhaps this one.”
“So you bought me,” I said, the anger rising again, trembling in my chest. “You forced me to marry a man I thought was a monster. You humiliated me. You made me kneel at your feet.”
“Yes,” he said simply. “And it was the worst thing I have ever done.”
