A man like Declan doesn’t study you because he treasures you.
He studies you the way a buyer studies a house he intends to get under market value, learning where the foundation is soft.
And I had a soft place he found within the first month: I wanted, more than I wanted air, to be loved for myself and not my father’s fortune.
Once he knew that, he owned the lever.
Every time he made me feel that his love was conditional, I worked harder to earn it — and the harder I worked, the more certain he became that he could ask for anything.
That is the whole grammar of that kind of marriage.
It isn’t written in bruises.
It’s written in a slow, patient lowering of what you believe you’re allowed to expect.
Chapter 3 — The Bracelet
I did not scream.