Luca went very still.
Forty years.
No, more than forty years she had been doing this—sneaking through the village at dawn and dusk, leaving water at elders' doors, tending gardens, fixing bridges, cooking meals, leaving flowers.
While everyone whispered behind her back.
While they scorned her for siding with Julius, for letting the males take control, for betraying the sisterhood she had once led.
While her own daughters grew up thinking their mother was cold, distant, incapable of love.
And through all of it, she had borne the loneliness. Carried the burden alone. Never once stopping her secret acts of kindness, even when the people she helped looked at her with disdain in the daylight.
Realising this—Luca's heart cracked open.
What kind of spirit did it take to endure that? To be hated by everyone you loved, and still love them back so fiercely that you spent forty years sneaking around just to make their lives a little easier?
