When Sofia walked down the aisle, she wasn’t walking toward love. At nineteen, she had already seen more hardship than most women twice her age. Poverty had shaped her days since childhood: a leaking roof over her bed, thin soup stretched to feed an entire family, and dreams that rarely survived past the morning. So when Harold, a seventy-year-old man with money, influence, and the promise of stability, proposed, Sofia convinced herself this was her escape.