My mistress prides herself on being a virtuous wife, even as she forces her husband’s bedmaids to drink mercury-laced contraceptive draughts.
When one girl dies and another is sold, my mistress chooses me as the next woman for her husband’s bed.
She does not know that I was once a modern physician—or that I have stopped waiting for mercy.
If this household refuses to recognize its servants as people, I will teach its masters the price of treating women as things.