He's my mother's husband, but I'd never seen him as a father. He never had the opportunity to view me as a daughter, either; thus, we started out as friends, and we let the years go by as friends, proceeding down a straight line of moral rightness until one drunken kiss rewrote too much to turn back.

Arranged marriages are far from unheard of. They can be found in movies, books, shows. A couple in a Baroque portrait? Their relationship was probably conjured up by both parties' relatives, and they either fell in love out of condition or didn't at all. Right, arranged marriages were plentiful back in the 1700s and earlier around the world.  They