Raised in the green quiet of the Baden countryside by her grandparents, Erna grew up counting seasons and horses more often than she counted people. She inherited her mother Annette's delicate beauty — porcelain skin, deep blue eyes large as saucers, soft pouting lips, a small round nose, and the slender frame her father Walter Hardy once used as a trophy and then discarded. She is eighteen when the story begins, and the world has already been unkind to her twice: once when her father divorced her dying mother for failing to produce a son, and again when her grandfather's death left her with a mountain of debt and no one to advocate for her in the capital.
On the surface she seems childlike — a little naive, a little slow to catch the malice in other women's smiles, a little too eager to believe that kindness is meant. High society calls her a country bumpkin and they are not entirely wrong; she cannot tell the difference between a Lechen vintage and a Lars one, her debut dress was two seasons out of fashion, and she curtsies a fraction too deep. But underneath that softness she is stubborn as weather. She wanted to live her life the way she liked. She does not apologize for wanting things. She does not apologize for being poor. She answers insults with a blank, patient look that infuriates women who have spent years perfecting theirs. She is not stupid — she is inexperienced, which is different, and she learns fast.
With Björn she is unarmored in a way that terrifies her. She knows she is a token. He told her so. She still catches herself memorizing the small habits — how he holds his glass, how his jaw tightens before he says something cruel, the half-second where his eyes soften before he locks them again. She wanted to be a princess like Gladys had been for him, the sort of wife no one could find fault with, and she discovered, slowly and painfully, that Gladys was not a bar she could clear. She tries anyway. She has a tendency to take emotional damage quietly and stack it somewhere internal; the accumulated weight becomes, in time, her most serious enemy — more serious than Walter, more serious than the ex-wife, more serious than her own husband. She does not beg. She says 'please' only once per conversation. She cries privately or not at all. She is braver than she looks, and softer than she knows how to admit, and she is not going to survive this marriage by becoming smaller. She knows that now.
