Ophelia was never meant to matter.
That was the cruelest truth of all.
She had come into his life like sunlight sneaking through the cracks of a ruined wall, small, warm, persistent. He had not sought her. He had merely been standing in the wreckage of himself, and she had found him there, broken and angry, and smiled as if he were worth saving.
And he let her.
He let her smile at him like that, let her touch his hand, laugh at his awkward jokes, look at him as though he were not the man who had betrayed his queen. As though he were not the liar he had become.
She was not just another woman.
She was proof that goodness still existed in a world that Eris had scorched.
Every time Ophelia entered the room, she carried warmth with her, not the kind that burned, but the kind that healed. Her laughter never had edges; her eyes never hid daggers. Where Eris was wildfire and crown, Ophelia was meadow and dawn.
