Galatea - Madeline Miller.epub -

I picked up Paphos from her cradle. She was light and warm in my arms. I didn't take the silk dresses or the gold jewelry he had bought to decorate me. I didn't need them.

Then the gods listened. They put warm, rushing blood into my stone veins. They gave me a pulse. Galatea - Madeline Miller.epub

The shift happened when my daughter, Paphos, was born. As I held her tiny, warm body against my chest, I looked at her soft skin. I realized that he would try to carve her, too. Not with a iron chisel, but with his voice, his rules, and his suffocating expectations. He would want her to be a silent statue, just like he wanted me to be. I picked up Paphos from her cradle

That night, looking at the moonlight reflecting off the cold marble floor of our bedroom, I made my decision. I was no longer a block of stone to be admired and controlled. I didn't need them

He froze. The hammer in his hand—the same hammer he used to chip away at new blocks of stone in his studio—dropped to the floor with a loud, heavy thud. He looked at me with genuine terror in his eyes. He loved the goddess-given flesh, but he was absolutely terrified of the mind that lived inside it. "What did you say?" he hissed.

In the beginning, I was exactly what he wanted. I stood where he placed me. I wore the heavy silk robes that scratched my brand-new skin. I smiled when he told me to smile, and I kept my eyes fixed on his face. He called me his greatest creation. He did not call me his wife; he called me his masterpiece.