Chapter 300
“Your Highness…! Are you unharmed?!”
“Your Grace!”
At some point, the voices of their allies—those who had come searching for them—began to echo dully in her ears.
But in Freesia’s eyes, there was only Izar, his face smeared with blood, eyes closed. Her mind, too, was in chaos, tangled like knotted thread by the words he had just spoken.
〈That you didn’t love me… that you thought, if the baby came out looking like you, your affair would be exposed. So you buried the child first… That’s what I had convinced myself.〉
Betrayal? He had misunderstood that she had intentionally buried the child before her ‘husband’ returned?
“Ah…”
But as if the tangled thread had finally begun to unravel, the shattered pieces of her memory began to come back to her, one by one.
Why she had once believed she had to ‘live as the Duke’s wife until the day I die’.
Why the people of the ducal estate had desperately tried to drive her out after she’d already conceived a child…
‘He thought the child belonged to another man.’
That’s why the ‘husband’ who had once looked after her so gently in the bedchamber had suddenly turned on her, as if she disgusted him.
The more she pieced together Izar’s final words and the circumstances back then, the more it felt like her heart was being torn apart from both sides.
‘But… if he had truly despised me from beginning to end.’
If the only reason he wanted a child was because he thought an heir might be born… wouldn’t he have given up on the child’s death more easily?
‘The day I miscarried, he could’ve just cleared me away and, as the elders suggested, brought in a “clean woman” to sit beside him.’
If there were no expectations, there’d be no room for rage or disappointment either.
So maybe, just maybe, her ‘husband’ back then had… cared for her in his heart after all.
“That’s…!”
As that thought crossed her mind, a single tear slid down her cheek before she realized it. Even as she covered her eyes to stop the flow, the tears kept falling, brushing her cheeks like translucent shooting stars, drawn out by the aching memories that welled up inside her.
‘Ah, what do I do.’
That man, who had stared at her as she looked around awkwardly her first night in the Duke’s bedchamber…
The next day, there had been new furniture arranged just for her. The gifts he had given, so cherished that she had never once dared to wear them.
The out-of-season fruits he had brought by the armful, silently watching the star-filled night sky with her.
And that night, thinking she was asleep, the way his fingertips had quietly traced her face…
〈I’ve held you in my heart for a long time… since we were children.〉
And Izar, who had told the amnesiac her a fabricated past, saying he had loved her since they were young and proposed first.
“Liar…”
Freesia choked out a trembling whisper, still looking at the unconscious Izar.
It had been a rose-colored lie, but how could she not understand why he had spoken it with such a heartbroken expression?
Freesia had loved that man since she was fifteen.
‘But I didn’t even know what it meant to be loved.’
So, back then, she couldn’t bring herself to believe that those small gestures from her ‘husband’ were truly expressions of love.
Because she couldn’t believe it, she never once expressed her own feelings either.
Now, the people who had found them shouted that Izar, unresponsive as he was, needed to be brought to a physician. Freesia pushed away those trying to support her and staggered to stay beside his moving body.
“Izar, you mustn’t die.”
Freesia gripped his hand tightly and whispered.
“I think… I finally understand now.”
Maybe someday, they would need to talk. About right and wrong, and the sorrowful, unresolved past.
But what she wanted to tell him when he woke up wasn’t that.
That she now understood what he had felt back then…
‘But will I be able to say it to him directly?’
Even if he opened his eyes, if he awoke after her remaining time had already run out…
But then, just as her head drooped under the weight of her sorrow, a silver button dropped onto the bloodstained earth.
“Ah.”
It must have come loose during the chaos of tumbling down the cliff. The chain of the button necklace had broken.
But when Freesia picked up the button and instinctively turned it over, she froze.
The number… had been erased.
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