Justine never married. She never spoke of those nights. But every winter, she left a loaf of bread on her windowsill for any hungry soul passing by.
Justine read until dawn. Then she looked up at her tormentor. "Is Juliette alive?"
The village took her in. She became a seamstress, mending clothes for pennies. Juliette fled to Italy, where she became a courtesan and died rich at forty. The Marquis de Gernande was found in his château five years later, dead of a fever, surrounded by untouched instruments and a single phrase scratched into the marble floor: "She was right."
And when the village priest asked why she still believed in God after all she had endured, she smiled—a smile that held no bitterness, only the quiet certainty of a candle that refuses to go out.
She picked up the knife.
In a rain-slicked corner of 18th-century France, Justine stood at the convent gate, her few coins clutched so tightly they left crescents in her palm. The nuns had turned her away—too old for charity, too poor for a dowry. Her sister, Juliette, had vanished into the arms of a Parisian nobleman months ago, leaving Justine with nothing but a tattered copy of a moral guide and a belief that virtue, like a candle in a dark chapel, must eventually be rewarded.