Where others bend

I'm creating a book, and I'll be uploading a chapter every week, which you can find through this link:

https://www.wattpad.com/story/406840706?utm_source=ios&utm_medium=link&utm_content=story_info&wp_page=story_details&wp_uname=LucienKade

Here's the first chapter:

Chapter I - The Art of Looking

There's something addictive about knowing you're being lied to and not saying anything.

I never considered myself a dominant person.

Not strong.

Not dangerous.

If someone had asked me who I am, I would have responded with something simple: I'm someone who observes. Not out of shyness, nor lack of character, but because I understood very early on that whoever looks with attention always arrives before whoever acts without thinking.

Observing is a form of power that almost no one respects.

While others talk to fill silences, I listen. While others move to occupy space, I remain still. I've learned that people betray themselves when they think no one is looking: a minimal change in breathing, a pause out of place, a gesture that lasts a fraction of a second longer than necessary.

For years, I confused this way of being in the world with sensitivity. With empathy. With being "good".

Now I know it was something else.

My name is Gael.

And for a long time, that was enough.

The last name was used by others. In documents. In signatures that didn't say anything about me. It sounded ancient, distant, even elegant. Ashcroft. It always seemed like a word too big for someone like me. Too loaded. As if it belonged to another version of me that didn't exist yet.

I didn't know then that names aren't chosen. They're awakened.

I'm blonde, tall, with green eyes. Not the gentle green of postcards, but the kind that seems to measure distances even when smiling. I've been told more than once, almost always with an uncomfortable laugh: "You have an intense gaze". I never responded. Because it wasn't intensity they saw. It was attention.

My body never screamed authority. My voice didn't either. And that played in my favor more times than I understood back then. People let their guard down when they think they're in control. And I always knew how to wait.

I learned to love too soon.

I was sixteen when the relationship that would mark my understanding of love began. At that age, one doesn't choose relationships: one chooses refuges. I didn't know who I was yet, but I already knew how to adapt. I already knew how to read moods. I already knew how to become what the other needed.

I grew within that relationship. While others experimented, made mistakes, and left, I stayed. I learned to associate stability with sacrifice, permanence with value, enduring with loving.

It lasted eleven years. Eleven.

Four of them I was married.

I believed in building something solid, in shared...