Chapter 338 Ashes Beneath The Calm

• Everything that happened had its reason. Some were obvious, laid bare from the start. Others lay buried so deep that only time—years, even decades—could uncover them. Natalia had peeled back layer after layer of pain, sometimes by choice, sometimes by force, until she was no longer sure she could face the ugliness beneath with steady eyes.
• Some of those wounds were hers. Others belonged to someone else.
• Her mother—the elegant, composed woman who had never once lost her poise in public—had carried a family disgrace too heavy to speak aloud. Who would have imagined it? The world-renowned dancer Pauline, admired and envied by countless people, had endured such a bitter marriage: a cheating husband, a mistress, an illegitimate child, and more than a decade of carefully hidden lies.