Please Forget Me - Chapter 323

‧₊˚ ☁️⋅♡𓂃 ࣪ ִֶָ☾.

Who am I?

“Right. Why would you run away with a man who has neither title nor wealth, when you have a Marquis for a husband? And an affair with a priest, no less. You’re such a proper, strict person, it’s absurd.”

The Marchioness. That man’s wife.

Then who is he?

“Looks like the article was right, you really did lose your memory.”

A man I barely remember. And yet, in my memory of the wedding, he stood in the place of the groom. Which means he is, without question, my husband.

Where am I?

On a train. A night train bound for Dunley.

What am I doing?

“Killian, where did that conman say he was going?”

“He said he was going home.”

I was answering a man’s question.

Everything was still a blur, so I kept checking and rechecking.

Who am I? Who is that man? Why am I here, answering his questions? And where did Killian go, leaving me behind?

The ‘truth’ that man had confessed was too much to swallow all at once. My head spun, as if I’d eaten too fast and fallen ill.

“Dana, what will you do with me now?”

When I opened my eyes, my world had turned into something completely different. How could I possibly know what the right thing to do was?

At the time, I hadn’t even decided whether to believe him or not. To be honest, I still hadn’t.

“Dana, go back to your husband.”

And while I stood there unable to do anything, not knowing what to do, he left.

The truth is, I hesitated about stopping him. But I didn’t.

If I grabbed him, it would feel like a guarantee that I would forgive and believe him no matter what lies he told me from then on. Even in all my uncertainty, there was one thing I was sure of: I didn’t want to be swayed by that man’s lies again.

To be honest, I thought he was only pretending to leave—to scare me. To make me panic, forgive him, and follow after him.

So I thought that if I didn’t chase him, he would come back soon enough, kneel before me, and beg.

But no matter how long I waited, he didn’t come back.

‘He really left….’

And because I couldn’t accept that he was truly gone, I stayed there in a daze—until, before I knew it, I had become a woman who simply waited for her husband to arrive and take her away.

“Dana, you made it back safely.”

I still didn’t know what I was supposed to do, yet both that man and this man seemed to know exactly what they should be doing.

“This might be a difficult question to answer, but…”

But why had I been waiting for a man who wasn’t even my husband?

“Still, I want you to answer honestly.”

Was it that I couldn’t trust him and couldn’t even trust his claim that he wasn’t my husband? But that was something I had learned after regaining my memory, something fixed in official military documents. So why?

“Did you sleep with Killian?”

My mind snapped back.

I lifted my gaze from where it had fallen and saw a man chewing on an unlit cigarette. At that moment, Killian whispered in my head.

“Say that you never crossed the line with me.”

Do you want me to become a liar like you? I’m sick of lies now.

“We did.”

The moment I answered honestly, the look on his face was one I recognized all too well, like someone who already knows the correct answer, who was prepared to be comfortably deceived if I lied, and now wonders why I would betray him.

I knew that expression because, once upon a time, I had had it myself when facing ‘Johann’.

‘Why should I offer that man a comforting lie?’

Because he’s my husband.

That’s what my head said. My heart replied that it was none of its concern.

I knew that with that single sentence—we did—my marriage would fall apart. And yet, I didn’t care. The ‘Dana’ of the past had always felt like a stranger to me, and therefore her husband was nothing more than someone else’s husband.

The shock of realizing that this man—not Killian—was my husband, that my entire world had been overturned, was a problem that belonged solely to Killian and me. Only now did I realize how irritating it was that this unfamiliar man had inserted himself between us.

“Damn it… that shameless bastard….”

‘Could you be quiet? I’m trying to decide right now whether I should trust and forgive that shameless man or not.’

It’s strange. When I first learned the truth, I was terrified that, as a Marchioness, bearing the priest’s illegitimate child would make me the target of the world’s scorn.

I was so afraid then, wasn’t I?