Though she lived in a country with the lowest percentage of married women in the known world, in a twist she hadn’t seen coming, it came to seem that it must have been her fault. She had some lack, she thought, not to be able to get him to propose and take her into the house with his mother. She was not beautiful enough, she decided. It was a corrosive conclusion, the acid kept inside her by the cork of the unpopped question. It ate her youth and flattened her curls, leaving her with a let-down, stranded air and the tight mouth of the unchosen.
