The rain tapped lightly against the window, but inside, Isabelle's world was anything but calm.
She sat alone in the quiet of her apartment, the worn blue shawl wrapped tightly around her shoulders. Her voice still ached. Her bones ached deeper. But tonight, it wasn't just her body that was tired.
It was her soul.
The kind of tired that crept up from the past like smoke under a locked door.
She closed her eyes, and the memories came—not as dreams, but like bruises you remember where no one could see them.
She was ten when her mother died.
Twelve when her uncle took over.
He smelled of sweat and stale beer. Called her girl more than he used her name. Said she was "pretty enough to be useful someday"—whatever that meant.
She learned early to keep quiet, to keep her eyes down, and to hide behind locked doors when night fell.
She was fourteen the first time he tried to sell her.
An old man with silver in his beard and yellow in his teeth came to their narrow alley flat. He offered coin. Not much.
"She's strong," her uncle had said. "And quiet. You'll like that."
The man tried to touch her wrist.
Isabelle ran.
Out the back window. Over the fence. Through cold streets barefoot and bleeding.
She never went back.
Not even when the hunger clawed at her ribs like rats in a cupboard.
Not even when the shopkeepers swore at her and the women pulled their children away.
She learned to steal bread with a smile. To charm for coin with wide, dark eyes. To take scraps of fabric and stitch her own dress. To sing on corners for the same men who once looked through her like fog.
And then one day, a club owner with a lazy smile and a good ear for pitch heard her voice. He offered her a spot.
"You'll be safe here," he had said.
He lied.
But she stayed anyway.
Because on stage, she became someone else.
Not the girl from the alley. Not the girl nearly sold.
She became fire. Elegance. A woman with no past.
But she had a past.
And tonight, it sat with her like an old friend turned enemy.
Her fingers curled tightly in her shawl as she whispered:
"I didn't claw out of that hell just to lose myself now."
She thought of Mary's soft letters.
Of her smile.
Of the way she said I don't care if it's sin.
That girl… that girl had never seen what it meant to be nothing.
Isabelle had.
And maybe that's why she clung to Mary so tightly. Because Mary made her feel… clean. Untouched. Like she hadn't been ruined by the world.
A tear slipped from her eye before she could stop it.
She wiped it away fiercely.
"Let him have his money," she said to herself. "Let him have his family name and suits and polite words."
Her voice cracked.
"But he'll never know how hard I fought to be here.
How close I was to losing everything."
She reached for the pen. The ink bottle. The paper.
Tomorrow, she would write again.
But not as Lily.
As Isabelle.
Because Mary deserved to know the whole story.
And maybe—just maybe—it was time to stop hiding.