Some mocked him.
Some predicted the girls would grow up wild or broken without a mother. Others said he would remarry soon because no man could manage three daughters alone. A few women offered help, but poverty tends to make generosity fragile, and everyone had their own burdens to drag.
Still, the years passed.
And the girls did not break.
They became, in fact, the kind of daughters who make a whole town swallow its old opinions in silence.