Chapter 81
“Bjorn.”
At her careful voice he turned his head. The damp eyes she had been seeing so often lately looked at her pitifully.
“I’m sorry. I was trying to unpack and move the heavier box first… a book I dropped opened, and I tried to close it…”
The excuse that he saw it by accident trailed off awkwardly. Yet even while barely holding back his tears, his voice soaked with moisture did not stop.
“Why… why didn’t you tell me sooner. That you, Leila… were my God.”
Bjorn’s eyes as he spoke were filled with reverence and awe.
This was exactly what she had been afraid of…
Cursing her own carelessness, Leila gathered excuses in an embarrassed voice.
“It would’ve been a bit embarrassing to say myself. And it was only a handkerchief after all…”
She tried to downplay the exposed past, but the response she got was only more intense.
“Only, you say. That was a moment of salvation for me.”
At each of the hardest times, at every steep turning point in his life, Bjorn had regarded the handkerchief that appeared before him as an answer sent by the Lord God and a small miracle.
“That you knew me from the beginning, that you’ve watched over me for so long… I can’t possibly believe it.”
Leila only truly began to show her presence before Bjorn when they were about eighteen. It was not a ten-year unrequited love, but a full twenty-year one that had been completely revealed.
Thinking to herself about how terribly persistent that sounded, she gave an awkward smile, and thicker tears fell from Bjorn’s eyes.
A joke about how he was a crybaby both then and now would be inappropriate in this mood, right? Leila swallowed the thought she could never say aloud.
“I thought there was no need to mention something already in the past. And I was worried you’d feel burdened…”
“If I had known sooner, perhaps I could have been with you earlier. No, that isn’t it. I’m glad I learned everything now. Now I know the one who has kept me alive until today was always you…”
Bjorn truly believed that. He had almost gone down the wrong path, yet now he had found the right one, so surely the Lord pitied him and granted her to him.
Because of his foolishness he realized the whole truth far too late.
“As I said before, I will live atoning to you from now on. Even if it takes my whole life, I will repay all the love I’ve received from you. For not giving up on me, for not letting me go until the end… Thank you, Leila.”
But despite Bjorn’s emotion, Leila only smiled awkwardly.
“I didn’t really want thanks. I just loved you the way I wanted to, simply because I felt like it. I even felt fulfillment in that. So you don’t need gratitude or atonement. I’m not asking you to love me the same amount either. I just… like that you exist as yourself.”
That was Leila’s sincere truth without a grain of exaggeration.
She did not know what had led her into such blindness. Some fates began from coincidence. Like two tree trunks intertwined without knowing why, her affection had clung to him and grown from the moment she first saw Bjorn.
“Back then and now, there’s only one thing I want.”
She poured unconditional love onto him, deciding to embrace his loneliness, his emptiness, and even every flaw.
“I want you to be happy, Bjorn.”
That single wish was the only reason.
And in that moment, Bjorn completely submitted before Leila’s dazzling love.
Not even the parents who bore him, nor the Lord God he served, could grant such complete love.
With that realization, Bjorn’s devotion changed its master. The irreverent faith that replaced the Lord God’s place was his love toward Leila.
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