Milady's First Husband

The novel discloses, in a single devastating chapter, that Athos was once a young Comte de la Fère who married a beautiful, unknown woman, discovered a brand on her shoulder revealing her as a convicted criminal, and hanged her from a tree in a fit of aristocratic fury, before learning, decades later, that she had survived. This three-chapter story imagines the courtship the novel skips entirely: who the young Comte was before that discovery, and how completely a marriage built on willful not-knowing was always going to end the way it did.