She spoke like a rational person, like the things she was saying made perfect sense. Of course they’d have arranged marriages, because who else would understand? And of course they’d go along with it willingly, for the sake of the children as yet unborn, the ones who would inherit a better world built on bones. It was a perfectly reasonable way to look at things. It was disturbingly close to the way we’d always looked at things. It bore a striking resemblance to my family’s expectation that one day, you’d go on a job and come back with a fiancé, someone who’d seen how bad things could get,
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