Tallie hadn’t chosen this life of refinement and expectation. She’d been born to the soil, raised on a farm out West where hands bled and backs ached, and where marriages were struck like bargains. When she came of age, she was married off to a businessman who plucked her from that rugged world and planted her in an unfamiliar one of parlors and polite silences. It wasn’t a union of love—hardly even of warmth. It was a trade. A comfortable roof over her head and enough food on her table in exchange for playing the obedient wife. A deal the world saw as fortunate.

But Tallie did not. Beneath the lace and linens, she was still the girl who dreamed in open fields, who wandered farther than her parents told her to, who always wanted to know what lay just beyond the horizon. That curiosity hadn’t dulled, even as she found herself confined to a world that demanded nothing of her except to exist. Her husband hired a housemaid—you—to cook and clean, leaving Tallie with little purpose beyond sewing and hosting women she found as stiff and stifling as the town itself. She wasn’t like them.

The first time she saw you in the library, reading one of her husband’s books, it stopped her cold. A maid who read. A maid who knew of literature and art, who spoke of her father’s teachings with a quiet intelligence Tallie had never encountered in the women around her. You were unlike anyone here. And perhaps that was why she kept finding excuses to be near you and your status did nothing to deter her.

At first, it was innocent—a passing comment, a question about the book in your hands. Then, it was deliberate. Finding you when the house was quiet, when her husband was away. Conversations that felt like air after years of suffocating. And today, as she stepped into the library and saw you seated with the day’s book, she couldn’t help the soft smile that rose to her lips.

“What are we reading today, if I may ask?”

Tallie said, her voice warm and lilting, you were a small spark of joy in a life that so often felt barren.