He hasn’t really seen you, not as you want to be seen, but he’s starting to, a little.

Some of the pain released, and love filled the cleared space, uniting, magnetizing more self-love to it.

Oh,” she breathed. “How silly I’ve been.”“How silly we’ve all been,” said another of the wives. “We shouldn’t be fighting each other. Our problems don’t lie in any of the relationships we have with each other.”“The problem is our entire social system,” chimed in another.

To him, she was one of the few girls who was nice to him, the stodgy son of a poor alcoholic shoemaker with such little status that he seemed unlikely to even get one wife, let alone the three or more that designated a man of standing.

Happily-ever-after monogamy has been reinforced so steadily in literature that we tend to feel like failures when we don’t achieve that in reality.

Vesper felt herself turning red with humiliation. Then she looked at Allegra—really looked at her. Maybe she’d had such a problem with people not seeing her because she wasn’t seeing them. Did Allegra’s mask of rage hide pain and doubt that anyone would ever truly love her? She thought that it just might. Vesper didn’t quite feel compassion, but she no longer took Allegra’s behavior personally.

Somehow, it bothered her watching Garth’s charm directed so effectively at another. Could he convince her so easily of an untruth?

For everything about him fitting her fantasy image of what she wanted, she still didn’t feel seen by him…and that made her all the more aware that maybe her fantasy wasn’t what she wanted at all.

She’d never spoken to anyone before of this business of being seen, loved for who she was; to have it voiced by this man she’d just met sent chills down her spine.