So I looked down. “No,” I whispered. The next morning, I woke up to absolute silence.
Adrian’s side of the bed was empty. At first, I thought he had stepped out, but minutes turned into hours.
Then the bedroom door opened. Margaret was standing there, dressed in dark clothes, with a cold expression and cruel satisfaction in her eyes.
“Where is Adrian?” I asked. “He left.” I felt my heart stop. “Why?” She walked closer and lowered her voice.
“He knows you were not pure.” By that afternoon, the entire town knew what Adrian had said.
He told everyone that I had deceived him, that I had entered his family while hiding a secret, and that he could not remain married to a woman who had lied about her past.
People whispered my name as if it were a curse. Women stopped talking when I walked past.
Men looked at me with contempt. Mothers pulled their daughters away from me, as if the shame could spread by contact.
They said I had humiliated Adrian’s family. They said no respectable man would ever love me again.
Even my parents looked at me as if I had destroyed them. When they came to take me home, my mother did not hug me.
My father did not defend me. “You ruined our family name,” he said. I wanted to scream the truth.
I wanted to tell them that I was just a child when an older man, someone our family trusted, hurt me.
