Chapter 4: Fitting In and Fighting Back

3.

When I heard the news, I sat by the window all night.

The glass was cold against my forehead, the moonlight silvering the frost on the pane. I wanted to find something to remember her by, but found nothing.

I wasn’t lucky enough to land in a more open and prosperous era, or to become a senator’s daughter or a debutante.

No grand parties, no whispered proposals in rose gardens—just the silent ache of loss. Intrigue in drawing rooms, power struggles, clever scholars and beauties—none of it had anything to do with me.

Or rather, with the vast majority of women in this era.

Tradition, and all the old rules about how women should behave, pressed down on us like a mountain.

Every girl in town felt it: the way your voice had to drop when grown men walked by, the way mothers looked at you when you laughed too loud or dreamed too big. I feared pain, and I feared death.

I didn’t dare think of standing out—I only wanted to survive.

Survival meant shrinking, becoming invisible in a world that would rather not see you at all.

4.

Gradually, my precociousness and knowledge of etiquette won my teacher’s approval.

After all, my soul was over thirty years old, so I learned faster than the others.

I remembered all the things I’d read in thick, dusty history books back in my old life—how to stand, when to curtsy, what to say. I diligently memorized rules for women, even as I rolled my eyes a hundred times in my heart.

I embroidered dutifully.

I accepted my fate dutifully.

But every stitch felt like a little rebellion—a silent promise to myself that I would not forget who I really was.