Sweet Romance17 min read
I Pretended to Be Blind, He Pretended to Be a Masked Stranger
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I woke up in the dark and did not want anyone to know that my eyes saw again.
"I can't see a thing," I told them for the hundredth time, and my voice was steady as a spoon.
"You always say that," Forrest Tran, my little brother, laughed cruelly from across the table. "Maybe your eyes are lazy."
"I am not lazy," I said. "I am unlucky."
For years I lived on the edge of being noticed and then being pushed away. I was a low-born daughter in a house that had plans for other hands to line with silver and silk. My stepmother's favor lived like a lamp with a cracked glass—light for some moods, strong enough to burn for others. I had been pushed too many times. Once, when I was five, Forrest had shoved me so hard my head met wood. They said I would never see again. They put a blind girl's cane in my hand, a blind girl's apron on my chest, and a blind girl's future into a sealed envelope.
"I will keep the good parts," I told myself. "I will keep the parts that let me laugh and eat and tell stories."
That is how I survived until the night a silver-masked man climbed down from my rafters and changed my life.
"I won't kill you," he said the first night. His voice was even, like a polished blade. "You are useless to me blind."
"Thank you," I said. "That is merciful."
He did not kill me. He did not leave. He stayed on the rafters by day, and by night he moved like a shadow. He carried himself with a calm that made the household dogs quiet. He clipped his words and tossed them like stones I could catch, though I could not see his hand.
We shared the same roof and kept separate lives. He never asked my name. I never offered it. I learned how to hear his footsteps like weather and to recognize the staccato of his breath when he slept on the beam. Sometimes he hummed under his breath, low notes that made the rafters shiver. Sometimes he left me pieces of food.
"Too sweet." He once said about an almond biscuit I brought him. "Too salty." He said about a piece of jerky. "Too rich." He said about roasted pork. He judged like a man who had eaten the world and still found it wanting.
The evening I stopped being blind on purpose was an accident and a small miracle. Forrest shoved me again; I hit a table corner; pain rang in my head; I thought I would never open my eyes. Instead, when the light leaked under the shutters, my world flowed back into color like water into a dry bowl.
I did not tell anyone. My life had been shaped by silence and small lies; one more would not be much worse. I learned to keep my face without expression when others spoke and to put my hands where a blind woman’s would be. I hid my new sight behind old habits, behind the cane I still used, behind the white cloth I tied over my eyes. The silver-masked man did not suspect. He still came down at night to keep watch, always careful, always distant.
"Are you looking at me?" he asked once, standing behind me as I pretended to braid hair.
"No," I said, tone hollow. "I can smell your hair."
"Stop being ridiculous," he said, and his voice had a small smile.
"I like your smell."
He did not laugh long. "You are too sure of yourself."
Maybe I was. I let my hands wander one night while I pretended not to see. I told myself it was to clean, to be useful, to repay the food he had given me. My fingers brushed his chest. The skin was warm and perfect; his ribs moved under my touch like the rhythm of oars. He jerked back as if stung by a blade. Cold water splashed my cheek. He made a small, clipped sound, then ordered: "Don't."
"I was cleaning," I lied.
"You should not touch what is dangerous," he said.
"Are you dangerous?"
He inhaled like someone smelling a fight. "That depends."
I wanted to say, I can see you. I wanted to laugh at my own fear and tell him he had been leaving me little gifts so I would not starve. But I did not. I pretended to be blind and learned new things about the man who guarded the rafters.
He wore a silver mask. Even in my secret seeing I could not always take him in fully—the mask made a blank theater, a face without a story. He was careful and quick, his hair dark as spilled ink. Once, when the moon cut through smoke, I saw a pale patch across one shoulder, like a scar or a brand. A square, someone said later; a royal sign if a certain rumor was true.
"Do you have a name?" I asked him foolishly one night as he knelt beside my bed and read aloud from a cheap storybook he had found for me.
"No," he said. "Names make you belong."
"Can I give you one?"
"You can try."
"Then you will be my dry-father," I said with a grin. "Pretend to be my father and tell me I am brave."
He broke a quiet laugh. "You are absurd."
"Absurd is charming."
He sighed and reached out, not with violence but with a careful hand, to smooth a hair that stuck to my forehead from fever or sadness. "What did the child do?"
"I fell," I said. "I was muddy and cut."
"The brave child should not fall."
"Then be brave for me," I said.
He looked at me for a long time and, without the mask's blankness, his voice softened. "You are lucky," he said. "Lucky people are always dangerous."
His soft words lived in my ears like a warmth you hide from a storm. I started to call him dry-father in jokes and in whispers. He never accepted the name fully, but he answered to it with a shorter guard.
The small joys of my regained sight were practical: I watched a busy street and took in the colors of the market; I tasted pastry and learned what "sweet" should feel like; I watched myself in a pond and learned that my hair was darker than I had sung in my hopes. I filled my evenings with small pleasures. I fed my senses to make up for months of night.
Then my stepmother decided to place me.
"You will marry the teacher," she told me, and she said it as if she were giving me a bowl. "It will cut our costs and secure you a home. He has lost two wives. He needs a wife who obeys."
"Do I have a choice?" I said.
"Choice is a luxury," she said. "You have a duty."
"For whom?" I asked.
"For the family." She smiled as though she had solved a puzzle.
When a man from the market came courting—one honest man whose smile never matched his fine clothes—I considered him the safer bet. He came with sugar sticks and promises. "We will be family," he said. "I'll help with your father."
"Does your father need help?" I asked.
"He will be my father," he said, and his voice was earnest.
It felt safe until the house declared the marriage to the teacher. He was small and timid and pale. They called him a necessary match. I felt my small stolen world collapse into living with a man who smelled like dust and old books. I could not hold that thought long; the silver-masked man had his own business dealing out chance and mercy.
"You like him?" he asked one morning when a neighbor had come to escort me to the match.
"Who?" I said, though I saw the neighbor by the window and the man across the yard. "No."
"Good," he said simply.
The night they brought me to the house of the teacher, all small and full of lamps, everything plain with the terror of destiny, I had an idea. I would not be another daughter's quiet life. I would be stubborn in the small ways.
"Hide your things," he whispered up from the rafters as he always did now and then. "Leave a breadcrumb. Hear me and listen."
"I will try," I said.
At the wedding, there was a foolish man from next street—Gerry Bryan—who was sent as my "husband" by a spiteful cousin. He smiled in a way that showed no threat, only dullness. After the ceremony he drank and smiled too much, and then the housewomen gave him a dark pill.
"Drink," they said. "It is celebratory."
I saw it flash like a black cherry in a palm. The fool swallowed.
When he turned toward me with the stomach of a drunkard and the eyes of a child, something broke inside me. Rage came like floodwater. I did what pain has taught me: I hit back.
"No," I howled. "No, I will not be taken."
I found a hairpin and thrust it into his face. He screamed. Women came in with brooms and old rage. They saw blood and shrieked. I did not stop. He toppled and howled like an animal.
"I killed him," I told myself in the quiet after.
They dragged me from the house and threw me in a cell. The slap of the door was a final drum. I banged and screamed for hours, but the world did not change. I had broken a person, and I had been broken in return.
When Bailiffs walked me to the prison, a small paper slipped into my palm through the slot in the door. I kept it and breathed my name into it as if it were a talisman. The paper had a small seal and a single line: "Wait."
Days became a long jail of dark thoughts. Food came like a rumor. My nails were chewed to white. I banged and called and banged again until one day men came with faces like white knives.
"You have a visitor," one said.
He pushed the iron door open and there he was—Preston Chase, in the fashion of men who wear crowns in their speech. His silver mask was gone. The shape beneath was better than rumors could hold: not all princes glint in the sun and smile. He looked like a man who had never learned to be ordinary. Flame burned at the edges of his eyes. He knelt down in front of me with the gentleness of someone who had worn armor and then decided to kneel for a different reason.
"Julissa," he said.
"Why?" I asked.
He swallowed and looked at me like a man counting promises and finding the number too small. "Because I owe you."
"Payable in blood?" I said.
He looked in my face for a long time and then he did something astonishing: he asked for Anastasia Arroyo to be brought.
I spat at the name like a hot seed. Anastasia was the titled daughter of the Chancellor Grant Lefebvre. She had taken delight in pushing me forward as an offering and then in mocking me like a winter crow. Her voice was a silk dagger and her eyes had a way of making people cower.
"Bring her," I said. "Bring the woman who stood with a smile as I bled."
Preston stood. "I will," he said, and left with a favor like a man carrying a torch.
When Anastasia arrived, she walked in with a courtly smile full of poison and the Chancellor at her side, looking like a man who could cover sins in parchment. The hall was full of servants and curious faces. The jailer's steps were iron.
Preston did not speak at first. He took her gloved hand and placed it on a low table. He had arranged for the public to be there—jail staff, a few neighbors, a messenger from the palace. Word traveled quickly in this city.
"Anastasia Arroyo," Preston said, voice like steel pulled thin, "you have accused the innocent to raise your standing. You have asked men to do harm and laughed when they stumbled. You and your allies conspired with the chancellor's power to force houses to give daughters to convenient men. You traded hearts for influence."
Anastasia laughed. "You overstate what I did. I used opportunity."
"You used cruelty," he said. "You used hunger to create debts. You used your father's office to hide the shame. How many lives did you think to break?"
"No proof," she declared quickly. "Where is proof?"
Preston motioned. Two servants stepped forward with a basket. Inside were letters—transcriptions of her commands, signed with the chancellor's seal. There were lists of names and payments, and under them, a slow bloom: "Arrange 'match' at the next feast." There were witnesses: men who had been paid in coin and cowed, now stepping forward to speak.
"She told us," one jailer said. "She said, 'Make sure the girl is taught a lesson.' She smiled while she pointed."
"Why?" Anastasia said, eyes hard. "Because I had to protect my betrothal. Because I was right that the prince would not court a low-born girl."
"You weaponized your place," Preston said. "You sold a girl's life to social cause. You called it honor; it was not."
Anastasia's face went something like ash. Around us, people began to murmur. Preston held up the jade ring I had lost, the small pawn he had given me months ago. He set it on the table. Everyone saw the mark on the inside—the chancellor's cipher.
"This ring was pawned to secure the change of place," he said. "This ring is the thread of what you thought were secret plans. It links Grant Lefebvre to this scheme."
Grant Lefebvre's expression did not move. He drank as though a quiet poison would not touch his skin. "You have no proof," he said in a courtly tone. "My office is above such claims."
"Are you above remorse?" Preston asked softly.
At first Anastasia tried to deny, then she tried to laugh, then she tried to bargain. Her changes of face were quick knives: surprise, mockery, panic, denial. The crowd watched the mask come off someone who had believed herself untouchable.
Preston directed his voice like a bell. "We will make proof visible. You will listen to every woman who came forth. You will stand where you pointed girls toward ruin. You will hear them name the debts you created."
A dozen voices rose. They named times, places, knocks on doors. One woman produced a small wooden comb Anastasia had demanded as "gift" and used to mark girls who were to be traded. The comb had the chancellor's cipher hidden under varnish. The proof came like a stubborn spring.
Anastasia's smile cracked. "This is nonsense," she breathed, but I saw, in that crack, more fear than hate. She grasped for her father's sleeve.
Grant Lefebvre's mask of calm began to slip. When the first whispers became clear accusations, the crowd's mood shifted. "You used state letters," someone said. "You wrote 'expedite' on an order and it came with men who carried chains. You breathed 'silence' into an official's mouth."
"Enough," Grant said sharply. "This is gossip. The court will judge."
"Do you trust the court?" Preston shot back. "Or will you twist it as you have twisted other things?"
For the first time, the Chancellor's voice wavered. He had built his life on paper that looked clean. "This is treason," he said. "You will not accuse me without proof."
Preston produced more: ledgers hidden in women's chests, a servant's testimony that he was paid with coin stamped from the chancellor's reserves. It was not a single proof; it was a web. The more threads people pulled, the more the web collapsed on those who had thought themselves above getting trapped.
Anastasia went white. Her vanity, that bright tool, fell away and left her thin as a carved stick. "You will not ruin my family," she begged. "You will not—"
"Beg," I said, voice low and rough from a month in the dark. "Beg, Anastasia Arroyo. Beg a woman you tried to break."
She looked finally at me, and for the first time she could not disguise the smell of fear. The crowd pressed close, eyes wide. I had waited for this.
"Please—" she started, and then something in her broke. Perhaps it was the way the marketplace men spat at her, perhaps the way the jailers lowered their heads as if to say, finally. The cry of "beg" became a chorus. She knelt, not because Preston ordered but because her world of influence withdrew like water from sand and left her on her knees.
"Anastasia Arroyo," Preston said, and his voice moved like winter wind, "you will stand at the gate of the market tomorrow. You will wear the sign of the woman who took a girl's life for sport. You will listen to those you wounded tell their stories. You will return here with a public confession, and you will beg forgiveness."
It was not a law. It was humiliation. It was not enough for a full justice of the court, but it was what the people needed: truth exposed and pride stripped. The crowd soothed itself with the sound of someone who had been untouchable now touched.
Anastasia attempted to speak, to bargain with eyes like wet glass. "You cannot do this," she gasped. "My father—"
"Your father will keep his post," Preston said. "Not because he deserves it, but because his removal would ruin more lives. But you will not keep your power."
The chancellor's face flushed like a beggar's as the crowd murmured. "This will not stand," he said. "I will appeal. I will—"
"You will do what a father should," Preston interrupted. "You will take your daughter's hand and have her do what she refused to do: apologize and make amends."
The crowd did not move. They had been waiting for the sight of the proud put in their place. They had been saving scorn like dry kindling. Now the match struck and the flame rose. There was shouting, relief, the rustle of cloth as hands clutched at each other.
I watched Anastasia kneel, lips trembling. Preston's words cracked her like wind cracks a frozen river. "Forgive me," she said, voice flaking. "Forgive me for—"
"Say their names," I said. "Say the girls' names you condemned."
She repeated names with a machine's voice, and each name was like a bell toll. People pressed closer. Someone began a chant: "Names! Names! Names!"
Anastasia's cheeks burned as the public spelled out her crimes. She tried at first to defend, then to weep; later she curled in shame. When she stumbled to her feet, she found the market gate a place of mirrors: people had long memories now.
The punishment lasted longer than the first scene. For three days she stood at the market, a placard tied about her neck that read "She who made other women's fates." Passersby spat or sneered. Old women who had been bullied by her slapped her with rags and told their stories. Children pointed. Men who had once served her father threw rotten fruit. The humiliation was public, practical, and it left marks—on reputation, on pride, on the gleam that had once shone on her face.
During the third day, I watched from a distance. Preston had arranged it all like a chess player. His expression had an odd light: not triumph, but a slow satisfaction that justice had been shaped into a thing people could see, feel, and name. The crowd received their due. Anastasia had been a bad woman in the ways that matter—she used power to break people—and she felt what she did now: smallness, a voice thin and rough from pleading.
In the weeks after, the Chancellor's hold weakened. Papers once locked away were opened. Servants who had been paid secret sums came forward. The world began to stitch itself in a different pattern. Grant Lefebvre's position was tarnished. He retreated to his books, his face like parchment, while his daughter's name was mud.
But the punishment had not been only theirs. There were those who had traded me like a pawn who felt loss in ways I could savor: Forrest's insolence had been quieted by disgrace to his family; the teacher who had been prepared to take me in was shown in public to be a man who'd taken the money and walked away; the petty men who had hurt others were named and slapped with their deeds.
I will not pretend all cruelty had vanished. Power had roots, and roots live under soil. But the market had seen the truth, and the truth had teeth.
"Why did you do this?" I asked Preston one night later, when we sat by a small brazier and food sizzled like small confessions.
He was not the masked man then, not fully. He had removed the mask and folded it like a letter on the table. His face had the tired lines of someone who had been both soldier and secret. "You burned me," he said simply.
"I burned you?" I repeated.
"You lit a candle under the roof where I slept," he said. "You made me care. I do not like having my sleep disturbed by not caring."
"I never meant—"
"You meant to survive," he said, and then he said something so strange it made me laugh and then stop short: "I like the way you are fierce."
His hands were big and sure. He reached and touched the small scar near my temple—an old mark from the first fall—and then he surprised me again. "You are not to be used by other people's comfort," he said. "You will not be a pawn."
We were not gentle then and not gentle now. Sometimes he would be a father to me, and sometimes he would be a man who touched me like a promise. He taught me how to ride a small horse he kept for that reason, and once he laughed like an idiot when I fell into mud. Once he wrapped my hand in his and said, "You are mine," that strange phrase that made my teeth ache.
There were moments when I could not tell if I had fallen in love with a savior or a man who saved me for himself. It did not matter much as time went on because he stayed. He came and went with the business of the court, but he kept a line closed between us like a private post.
When he had to leave on duty, he left me the silver mask. "Keep it," he said. "So you'll remember what it feels like to be dangerous."
I laughed and slipped the mask on. In a mirror, I looked like a villain in a story. I kept it hidden in my chest.
The months that followed were uneven. The chancellor's case waned and found a quiet conclusion: the man kept his skin but not his influence. The city corrected course as much as it could. Forrest and my stepmother were moved to a small post; their boasting voice became weaker. The teacher faded into middle life; his interest in me was a memory of gears that had not meshed.
Preston and I grew more reckless with each other. He would appear at midnight and feed me dry jokes, then disappear into my rafters like a dream. Sometimes he would tie a ribbon to the beam and drop me notes. He taught me to read the small flourishes of calligraphy that men used when they had something to hide. "You like stories," he said once. "So read them and make your own."
"Are you my prince?" I teased.
He touched my face gently. "I am Preston," he said. "I am a man with a mask. I am not a prince if you do not want me to be."
"I want you to be whatever you are to me," I said.
He smiled, which was a rare thing. It made him look like a bad boy in a noble's coat. "Fine," he said. "Be mine."
We wrote our small vows like children who believe words can be nails.
Then came the winter when his absence stretched. He was called to go farther than before. He left with a hush and a promise he did not speak: to return after the new year. I gave him coins and a ribbon and told him to be careful. He placed his hand on my head and whispered, "Wait."
I waited. I did not know the fine art of patient women whose lives are the sand in lamps. I went about my days, opening small markets, learning new cooking, and practicing the dangerous art of living.
But trouble came again, not from the Chancellor this time but from the world of old promises. A new face walked into my life—Anastasia's ally, a house with debts that tore like old paper. They arrived in fine clothes and with knives hidden in sleeves. They said, "We offer your hand to a man respectable enough to be a public bearer of your shame. He needs a wife, one of small temper."
They dragged me like a thing from a stall. I called for Preston and for the army of secrets he had. The men answered with silence.
"Where were your guards?" I cried.
"They were pulled away," he confessed later, voice low and guilty. "I made a choice for safety I cannot justify."
That guilt burned like acid. He had removed his protection; I had been handed again like a common commodity. When he returned late and found me battered and sold, he did the one thing I had forgotten he could do: he moved like a storm.
He stormed the house where I had been dragged. He stood in the courtyard, hands tight like traps. He did not speak much; he did what men with power do—he arranged facts like stones and threw them until the structure collapsed. He arranged for confessions. He pulled men back from their lies with simple orders. He brought people to bear upon those who had arranged for me to be traded and they crumbled.
I had thought of ripping out his heart with my teeth for leaving, but he was not a simple villain. He had left for reasons I could not know. He had returned to burn what needed burning. It did not change everything, but it changed enough.
Later, when all had been leveled and the easy way forward showed as shameful, there was a ceremony in the market. I stood with him as people watched. Anastasia knelt again, this time in front of a public tribunal that was less formal than a court but more public than any court could be. There were lanterns, and the mayor brought a small chair, and Preston stood in the center like a man who had learned to keep his mask only for a little while.
"Tell them," Preston said to me that day, voice soft as linen.
I stood and spoke the simple truth. "I pretended to be blind to survive. I found someone who wore a silver mask and kept me alive. He gave me the means to leave a life that would have been mine to weep over in old age. He saved me, and when I could fight for myself, he gave me furiously sharp help. He is cruel when he must be—but he is kind. He is my answer."
The market applauded. Some people cried. The crisp air tasted like rain.
"You are not supposed to be a trophy," I added. "You are a man who refused to let me be used, and for that I thank you."
He touched my hand and pressed the mask I had kept into my palm. "Keep it," he said. "So you remember your power."
I laughed—and I told him the truth I had been holding like a small knife. "When I was in the dark, the rafters were the only place I knew light. When you came down, you became my light. I am glad you came."
He bent and kissed me, careful and hungry and more honest than he had ever been. "Then be mine," he said. "Not as pawn. Not as project. As Julissa."
"I will," I promised.
In the end, the punishment people saw was not a formal law but a public shaming that broke the backs of those who thought themselves beyond the reach of scorn. Anastasia's downfall was complete: she was marked and shunned, and the Chancellor felt the wind shift. They had done evil by using power to dry out others, and people had watched them find their place among the rubble. Anastasia's reaction had passed from haughty amusement to denial to frantic pleading to shell-shocked collapse in public. The crowd watched her face change and took pleasure in the truth that power can be public shame.
The man on the rafters—Preston—kept his mask and his secrets, but he also took off his armor occasionally. He taught me how to read the marks in people's hands, how to see the ways they try to hide, how to protect the people who cannot speak.
Life grew into a slow rhythm. I moved from being an object of pity to the woman who carried the story of the woman who pretended to be blind but saw everything. I learned to pick battles, to speak, to name the names of those who abused, and to protect those who could not.
If you ever ask me why I pretended to be blind after I could see, I will tell you: because pretending kept me alive until I had a plan. Because pretending let me learn people's shapes like maps. Because sometimes the best way to punish a liar is to make his lies visible to everyone.
"And you?" I asked Preston one night as snow sifted down like flour, crisp and clean.
He put the silver mask back on without fuss. "I will keep my mask," he said. "So I do not forget who I was when I needed to be dangerous."
"Will you ever stop wearing it?"
He turned and kissed my cheek. "Only for you."
I laughed then and took his hand. The market noises were far below and the rafters creaked like old answers. For the first time in a long while, I loved the way my life looked when it was not only a survival story. I had friends and enemies; I had bread and bruises; I had a man who would break the world for me and a mask that bore witness.
We both kept what we needed: I kept the mask and the truth. He kept the secret that sometimes a silver-masked man will trade a throne for a life that smells of honesty and fragrant almond biscuits.
The End
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