Please Forget Me - Chapter 290

‧₊˚ ☁️⋅♡𓂃 ࣪ ִֶָ☾.

For a while, I kept writing letters to you, only to tear them up and throw them away. It felt pointless.

Your engagement to Rupert was a misfortune for me, but for you, it must have seemed like good fortune.

I was only the second son of a minor noble house. All I could offer you was a life not much different from what I’d promised back then, and the freedom to attend medical school. Rupert, on the other hand, could make you a Marchioness.

And I failed to stand up to my parents. Rupert didn’t.

They say the former Marquis and his wife, who had struggled to secure a single heir, indulged their son’s every wish. Even though they considered taking a commoner as the future Marchioness a humiliation, they couldn’t bring themselves to stop him.

Judging by that alone, Rupert was the better man for you.

In no time at all, the rumor that the future Marquis had become engaged to a commoner spread across the country.

Even if you were to learn the truth, I doubted you would overturn an engagement already known to the entire society. And even if you wanted to break it off, the elders in your family—who longed for social advancement—would never allow it.

…Saying I gave you up for your sake is a lie. I was afraid.

Between becoming the wife of an ordinary noble and becoming a Marchioness, who would ever choose me? I was a coward who didn’t want to confirm that you would abandon me.

I even wondered if, perhaps, you knew Rupert wasn’t the man from the letters and chose to go along with the deception anyway. Not because I thought you shallow, but because it seemed impossible not to notice.

The man in the letters said he hated hunting, yet Rupert took pride in displaying his kills. You fell together from the third floor, yet he was completely unharmed. And most telling of all, he didn’t have the necklace you gave me.

I couldn’t believe you wouldn’t notice the inconsistencies. I was wrong.

Later, I realized you never once suspected it might be someone else. Rupert is the truly cunning one. Every time you sensed a contradiction, he must have covered it with another carefully crafted lie.

I never confronted Rupert. The guilty one was him, yet I was the one who avoided him.

What good would talking to him have done? All I’d hear would be shameless excuses and what would come out of me wouldn’t be words, but fists.

If our eyes met at school, I wanted to hit him. No, if I’m honest… I wanted to kill him.

That feeling hasn’t gone away. When I finally made up my mind, you were the one who stopped me. You stopped me not for his sake, but for mine, didn’t you? I should be grateful, but…

Blaming you would be shameless. And now, I am a shameless man.

Still… I hated my parents more than Rupert. The ones who didn’t just allow you to be taken from me, but helped it happen.

Rupert was always that kind of man. I never trusted him from the beginning.

But my parents did, it seems. Or perhaps they simply believed that because they were my parents, they would naturally be on my side. That they would help me when I needed them.

That belief was betrayed in the cruelest possible way.

The funny thing was…no, ’surprised’is the right word, because it wasn’t funny at all. was that my father, who always sided with my mother, actually told her, “This time, you went too far.”
Of course, in the end, he still chose his wife and returned to being the same man he always was.

“How long are you going to sulk over this? If you’re a man, shake it off and move on. You lost her because you’re weak and spineless, that’s not manly at all.”

If my brother hadn’t rushed over the moment he heard, furious on my behalf, I don’t know what I might have done. Ted wanted to go reveal the truth immediately, but by then, I had already given you up.

Still, I was grateful that someone stood on my side.

If my brother had arrived even a little later, I might have put a gun in my mouth and pulled the trigger right in front of my parents, calling it revenge.

Revenge… haha.

Would my death really have been revenge for them? They claimed to love me, but I believed that was a lie. If I had died, my father would have blamed my weakness, and my mother would have resented me and not regretted anything.

In the end, I chose a different kind of revenge.