On the third night, they stopped at a roadside inn where the air smelled of stew and woodsmoke, and Isabella finally broke the quiet with a question delivered like a blade laid gently on a table.
“Why did you buy me?” she asked. Her English was clean, educated, the kind spoken in parlors, not fields.
Hartwell’s hand tightened around his glass of whiskey. “You’re… beautiful,” he said, because lying would have been easier but felt cowardly. “And I need someone to manage the house.”
“Lie,” she replied without raising her voice. She looked at him then, fully, eyes steady.
“Men like you don’t spend fortunes on a woman to have her scrub floors. You bought a fantasy. A living doll to fill the empty rooms where you buried your family.”
The words landed in him with a sick accuracy.
Hartwell’s face warmed, anger and embarrassment wrestling. “Careful,” he warned, because that was what his world demanded he say.
“I am careful,” she answered, and there was a tiredness beneath her composure, a weariness that sounded older than twenty-six.
“That is why I’m telling you now: I am not a doll, Colonel. And you will regret this. Soon.”
Hartwell should have punished her. That was the rule. But punishment felt suddenly childish, like throwing stones at a storm.
