There's a word for the fine web of cracks that spreads across the surface of an old painting as it ages — craquelure. Every aged canvas has it, this lacework of tiny fractures running through the paint, and the thing they never tell you outside the trade is that it isn't damage, exactly. It's just time, showing. It's what happens to anything that has survived long enough, pulling very slowly against itself until the whole surface is veined with the evidence of having lasted. You learn, as a...

Paper Vows is a serialized fake-marriage billionaire romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.