She was beautiful. It wasn’t because she was young and pretty, either, like any jack off the street might have said, all while trying to weasel his way into a free drink or a handful of flesh. It was in the way she moved, with instinctive strength. The way she smiled was not the dull, witless smile common around the slums, but the pained, experienced, expressive smile of someone who was still alive. It broke his heart, and built it up again to see.

She was beautiful. Some days, he wondered if he was the only one to see it.