Happiness did not arrive loudly.
It slipped in on quiet mornings and shared routines, on the way Charles learned where Victoria liked her tea cup placed, on the way she stopped flinching when he entered a room behind her.
For a while, it was enough to simply exist inside the promise they had made.
The ring on Victoria’s finger caught light when she moved, a soft reminder that the world had shifted—permanently, deliberately. She still touched it sometimes, as if checking it was real.
Charles noticed every time.
He never commented.
They were engaged for three weeks before he suggested the move.
Not as a command. Not as a declaration.
As an offering.
“The apartment is safe,” he said one evening as they sat on the floor of the living room, their son sprawled between them building some
