Not about scandal.
About autonomy.
About the cost of public virtue.
About what happens when a woman refuses to compartmentalize her humanity for the comfort of donors.
I’d started writing again—not grant proposals or carefully vetted statements, but essays. Long, unfiltered pieces about the illusion of moral neatness. About how easily women are boxed into palatable narratives. About how loving someone imperfect doesn’t erase your values—it forces you to interrogate them.
The response had been overwhelming.
Not because everyone agreed.
But because it was honest.
Cassian never edited my work.
He read it.
Quietly.
Sometimes he’d underline a sentence and slide the page back to me.
“Keep that,” he’d say.
And I would.
Harper had remained skeptical for exactly three weeks.
Then she’d come to New York with Luca.
And she’d seen it.
Not the land.
Not the wealth.
The way he watched me when I wasn’t looking.
The way he deferred when it mattered.
The way he never once asked me to shrink my words.
“He’s not soft,” she’d said to me privately.
“No.”
“But he bends,” she’d added.
That had surprised me.
She’d been right.
He didn’t change who he was.
But he moved when it counted.
We were in Charleston the night he proposed.
