บททั้งหมดของ His Father’s Wife: บทที่ 1 - บทที่ 6

They did not call it an auction. They used softer words. Transfer. Placement. Selection. Words that made it sound orderly, almost respectable. As if selling people could be improved simply by changing the language around it.Waiting was the worst part.Not because of fear — fear was constant, like breath — but because waiting gave it space to grow roots.They kept us in a long room with no windows. The lights were too bright, buzzing faintly overhead, casting everything in an unforgiving white that made it impossible to hide. The walls were tiled, cold, as if the room had once been meant for something clean and clinical, before it was repurposed to prepare girls for sale.There were twelve of us that day.Some sat on the benches lining the wall. Others stood, pacing in small circles, as though movement alone might keep their bodies from being claimed. No one spoke at first. Silence pressed down heavily, broken only by the hum of the lights and the occasional sniffle someone tried an

Time did not heal anything. It organized it. A year into the marriage, I learned that survival was not about endurance alone. It was about precision. Knowing when to speak. When to disappear. When to let silence do the work for you. I learned the rhythm of the house the way one learns tides, slowly, by watching what returned and what never did. My husband was predictable. He rose early, ate alone, spoke little. He expected access without discussion and compliance without gratitude. He did not beat me. He did not insult me. He used me the way one uses an object that belongs to them—without malice, without thought. That, I discovered, was its own kind of violence. The other wives existed like carefully placed ornaments. We crossed paths occasionally, always polite, never familiar. None of us spoke about why we were here. That kind of honesty would have been dangerous. We were women attached to the same man, but there was no sisterhood in it. Only awareness. I stayed quiet. Qui

I learned his habits before I learned his moods. He rose early, earlier than his father ever did. He walked the grounds like a man inspecting a prison he intended to fortify. He didn't speak to the guards with the booming ego of my husband; he spoke to them with a quiet, terrifying precision. He was mapping the house. I recognized the behavior because I had done the same, but where I looked for exits, he looked for weaknesses. Our paths crossed more frequently after that—not by chance, but because he seemed to be everywhere I sought to be. I refused to hide. In this house, shadows were where things were broken. I preferred the light, where I could see the blow coming. But his gaze had changed. It was no longer just the dismissive look of a son looking at a stepmother. It was the look of a man who suspected a leak in his pipes. One afternoon, I was summoned to the library. Not by my husband, but by a guard who didn't look me in the eye. The heir was sitting behind the massive m