Please Forget Me - Chapter 329

‧₊˚ ☁️⋅♡𓂃 ࣪ ִֶָ☾.

He wasn’t home.

I have no memory of my father staying by my mother’s side as she lay like a corpse in bed after losing the baby. But I do remember waiting for him to come, waiting for him to arrive and lift her up.

“Around that time, I’d just been appointed royal physician. You and your mother were living in the city we’d originally lived in, while I was staying alone in Dunley. It takes a good four hours by train, and it wasn’t easy for me to leave my post…”

Just listening to him pile up excuses confirmed my suspicion: my father hadn’t been there when my mother needed him most.

‘So he had time to make a child together, but not time to be there when she gave birth? A doctor who says countless lives depend on his hands, yet my mother’s life didn’t even count as one of them?’

I thought of it, but didn’t say it. Still, I didn’t bother to hide my disbelief from my face.

“When I heard your mother had left, I searched everywhere. But they told me she’d already gone to the New Continent.”

“……”

“I tried sending letters, but none ever came back.”

“……”

“And as for why I didn’t go find her, even though I had the address…”

Perhaps because of my expression, he kept offering excuses no one had asked for. Then, as he was about to justify why he hadn’t gone all the way to the New Continent, he abruptly stopped.

He stared blankly at the table, like someone who’d just been slapped.

“Anyway, Dana… I loved your mother very much, but…”

When he opened his mouth again, the most absurd excuse I’d heard all day spilled out. One look at my face, and he shut his mouth at once.

After a long sigh, he spoke again, this time without making excuses.

“This is the first time I’ve talked about this with you… Have you been holding all of this inside?”

“I wouldn’t know. I don’t know what the old me felt.”

“Ah… right.”

Dr. Loveridge seemed to have forgotten my condition for a moment.

“As my memories came back, I also recovered the feelings I had when Mother left me. So for me, it still hurts like it happened yesterday. But for you, Doctor, it’s something that happened nearly twenty years ago.”

Maybe it was because I called him Doctor. His eyebrows, which had been drooping as he looked at me with pity, shot upward.

“So there’s no point in digging it up now. I don’t even know why I brought it up. I just couldn’t hold it in. Maybe, like the doctor said, my brain injury makes it hard to control my impulses. Please just let it go.”

“No.”

He flustered, waving his hands.

“If you want to talk, you should. Even if it’s late, it’s right to talk about it. And wouldn’t that help you?”

I wasn’t so sure. How would talking about the pain of losing my mother, or the resentment toward the father who was always absent, really help me?

‘I might grow closer to my father.’

…But did I really need to?

I don’t know what my relationship with him used to be, but to the present me, he didn’t feel important enough to dredge up decades of buried emotions just to repair our bond.

As I idly toyed with my necklace, thinking there was something else I wanted to know more, the doctor happened to ask,

“That necklace, that was your mother’s, wasn’t it? Do you remember?”

“Yes. I recovered the memory of her putting it around my neck before she left.”

“I see… But where did you find it?”

Killian, that man, returned it to me. He said I’d given it to him along with a confession of love. According to him, at least.

Since returning home, I hadn’t mentioned that man to anyone. There’d been neither the opportunity nor the need with my family, and at the hospital I could explain my condition without bringing him up.

“Well….”

As I hesitated, unsure whether it was all right to mention him now, the doctor continued on his own.

“At some point, you stopped wearing it. I’d been wondering what happened to it.”

“Did I ever tell you why I wasn’t wearing it?”

Because I’d given it to a man? Was what Killian said really true?

All I wanted to uncover was that man’s truth. Even if I did, it wouldn’t change the fact that he wasn’t my husband but a fraud, so why did I keep doing this? Was this, too, because my brain injury had made me an impulsive fool?

“Come to think of it…”

The doctor murmured, staring blankly into the air with a startled look.