A Comfortable Misery – Kassandra Hart

Hoping she wouldn’t be too upset with me, I twisted the doorknob and pushed open the door to her room. As soon as the door was open, I could hear the crying much more clearly; its source was not a ghost, but rather Miss Lancaster. The intensity of her weeping caught me off guard, because I had never actually seen her cry. I had seen her disappointed, excited, furious, and panicked, but I had never seen her brought to tears for any reason.

In the dim moonlight that illuminated her room, I could see her sitting on the floor with her knees brought up to her chest, her elbows resting on her legs, and her face buried in her hands. Her shoulders rose and fell as she sobbed, her hands muffling her cries. The skirts of her nightgown pooled around her on the ground and her black hair tumbled down her back, still damp from her bath. I took a step forward and whispered her name. “Go away,” she croaked, her voice broken with sobs.

I felt conflicted. Knowing her, she wouldn’t want anyone to see her in such a vulnerable state, but I couldn’t just leave her like this. I knew the pain of crying alone, having no company other than the moon as it watched over you. All the times that I had cried as intensely as she was now, I had wanted nothing more than for someone, anyone, to comfort me and show me they cared.

I didn’t know what to do, as I so often felt when I was with Miss Lancaster, but I did to her what I would have liked done to me. I dropped down onto my bottom beside her and wrapped an arm around her shoulders, pulling her against me lightly. When she didn’t shove me off or express her displeasure at the contact, I gave her shoulders a firm squeeze to let her know I was there for her. I didn’t say anything—I was clueless when it came to comforting someone with my words—, I just let her cry the tears that she needed to cry.

After several minutes of hard sobbing, Miss Lancaster’s crying lightened, reducing her to a heap of sniffles and whimpers. She looked up at me, big tears hanging on her eyelashes like dewdrops on flower petals. “Sadie…” she whispered, her voice unsteady. I was surprised that she called me by my first name—or rather, what she thought was my first name—, and while normally such an intimate act would be touching, I was afforded no such pleasure.

The sweetness of the gesture was soured by my disappointment that I couldn’t have heard her say my real first name. It was a stupid feeling brought on by a weakness inside me that longed for connection with someone else, a feeling that I had to be wary of if I cared about my independence.

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Book Cover by Kassandra Hart 1st edition 2026 1kitap1.com/en For Daphne, my greatest love Thank you for everything 1kitap1.com/en TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Chapter Twenty-Three Epilogue 1kitap1.com/en I CHAPTER ONE never thought I would attend my own funeral.

Not in the way that most people do, at least, on account of me being very much alive when it was held. This, of course, was by my design. I had spent the past year carefully planning my escape from Cinder, the miserable town I had grown up in, so that I could begin a new life for myself. As most things in life do, the plan for my escape revolved around money and death.

The first phase of my plan was to save up enough money to survive on my own until I could find a new, reliable source of income to keep me afloat. To do this, I had spent the past several months skimming off a few tokens of scrip from my unremarkable coal miner’s wage and converting them into official government currency at a loss.

The coal mine I worked for discouraged employees from converting our scrip into government currency—lest they lose our business in their company store—, so the conversion rate was unfavourable and ended up losing me some of my hard-earned money. Though it was unfair and extremely frustrating, it had to be done. Our mine’s company scrip held no monetary value outside of Cinder, and if I wanted to escape, I needed official government currency.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 2b29ab10bc3eeb63
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 1,528,060 bytes (1.457 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• ISBN: 9781069941107
• Pages: 237
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 441.87 minutes
• Total Words: 88,373
• Total Characters: 466,768
• Average Words per Page: 372.88
• Average Characters per Page: 1969.49

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