Rachel stared out the window at the darkening sky, her mind racing through implications and complications. Invoking the Petitioner's Right would be a spectacle. It would be controversial. It would probably make her the most hated woman in the empire.
But it would work.
The question was timing. She couldn't just petition the Crown out of nowhere with a theoretical argument about divorce. She needed a case. A client. Someone whose situation was so clearly unjust that even the most romantic fool would have to acknowledge the system had failed them.
Rachel thought about Celestia, who was probably dining with Duke Thorne right now, starry-eyed and convinced she'd found her soulmate. In three months, maybe less, that starry-eyed girl would start to realize that her soulmate had a jealous streak. That he didn't like her talking to other men. That he thought love meant ownership.
And because everyone told her it was romantic, because the narrative insisted it was destiny, Celestia would smile through it and convince herself she was happy.
That was the insidious thing about the system. It didn't just trap women in bad marriages. It convinced them they wanted to be trapped.
Rachel needed to find someone who was already trapped. Someone who knew they were miserable, who wanted out, but who had no legal recourse because the system insisted their suffering was romantic.
She thought about the novel she'd read. There had been other women in it, side characters and background figures. A viscountess whose husband openly kept a mistress. A marquess's daughter who'd been married off at sixteen to a man three times her age. A merchant's wife whose husband had gambled away her inheritance.
They'd all been presented as minor tragic figures, objects of pity but not protagonists worthy of happy endings. The narrative had moved past them quickly, focused on Celestia and Thorne's supposedly epic love story.
But those women were real people in this world. They had real problems. And if Rachel could find them, help them, build a body of case law around their situations, she could change everything.
She pulled out a fresh sheet of paper and began to write, not a petition yet but a plan. A strategy.
Step One: Research. Identify women in untenable marriages. Understand their situations, their contracts, their options.
Step Two: Establish credibility. She couldn't help anyone if they didn't trust her. She needed to build a reputation as someone knowledgeable about marriage law, someone who could be discreet.
Step Three: Find the right case. Not just any unhappy marriage, but one that would be undeniable. Clear abuse or abandonment or fraud.
Step Four: Invoke the Petitioner's Right. Bring the case directly to the Crown with unassailable legal arguments.
Step Five: Win. Set precedent. Change the law.
It was ambitious. It was probably impossible. But Rachel had built a career on winning impossible cases.
She just had to do it in a world where the deck was stacked even higher against her.
Rachel looked down at the treatise still open on her lap, at the tiny footnote that mentioned the Petitioner's Right. Someone had put that law in the books centuries ago. Someone had recognized that systems could fail, that people needed recourse when power became tyranny.
That someone had given her a weapon.
Now she just had to figure out how to use it.
She spent the next hour making more detailed notes, sketching out arguments, anticipating counterarguments. The Temple would say that questioning blessed unions was heresy. The nobility would say it threatened the social order. Even well-meaning people would say that marriage was sacred and some suffering was inevitable.
She needed to reframe the conversation. This wasn't about destroying marriage. It was about protecting people within marriage. About recognizing that vows made under coercion weren't truly vows. That love obtained through control wasn't truly love.
It was about giving people the same rights in their marriages that they had in every other legal contract—the right to renegotiate, the right to exit, the right to be treated as a person rather than property.
A soft knock interrupted her thoughts. Rachel looked up to find yet another maid at the door, this one looking apologetic.
"I'm sorry to disturb you, my lady, but Lady Celestia is here. She's quite insistent about seeing you. She says she won't leave until she knows you're all right."
Rachel suppressed a sigh. She'd been avoiding this confrontation, but maybe it was time to face it. She needed to see Celestia as she was now, before Thorne's influence twisted her into something smaller and sadder.
And maybe, just maybe, she could plant a seed. A small thought that would grow over the next three months until Celestia was ready to hear the truth.
"Send her up," Rachel said, gathering her documents and tucking them safely into a drawer. "And bring fresh tea."
As the maid left, Rachel smoothed down Seraphina's silver-blonde hair and prepared herself. She'd spent twelve years dealing with difficult clients, hostile opposing counsel, and judges who thought women didn't belong in courtrooms.
She could handle one romance novel heroine.
Even if that heroine was walking into the worst relationship of her life and didn't know it yet.