Chapter 346
‧₊˚ ☁️⋅♡𓂃 ࣪ ִֶָ☾.
“Then I assumed he would choose to starve in silence. I thought that eventually he’d grow unbearably hungry, give in, and finally open his mouth. Children usually do, don’t they?”
“Did Killian not?”
“He never starved to begin with.”
She explained that he had simply gone to the kitchen himself and taken care of his meals.
“So we barred him from entering the kitchen. Days passed, and still he never once said he was hungry. He didn’t even look like he was starving. It was suspicious, so one day I followed him in secret. Do you know what I saw?”
“What did you see?”
She said he first went to the small garden at the edge of the estate, pulled a few vegetables from the soil, then stopped by the chicken coop to collect eggs. After that, he went straight to the stables, chatted idly with the old coachman, and cooked with him.
“That sounds like Killian.”
He had never let me go hungry. Even in places where food seemed impossible to find, he always managed to procure something edible.
“He was like that from a very young age.”
She had misunderstood my words and took them as criticism.
“To think he would rather cook with a coachman than tell his parents he was hungry.”
“That’s heartbreaking.”
“Heartbreaking? Hardly.”
“A ten-year-old who feels more comfortable with a servant than with his own parents—that is heartbreaking.”
“….”
“So what did you do then?”
She said she’d been furious and had tried to dismiss the coachman on the spot for disobeying orders. That was when Killian finally spoke. To defend the coachman.
Though she had acted in anger, she couldn’t bring herself to dismiss a man who had loyally served the family his entire life.
In any case, she never tried that method again.
“Even as a child, Killian was lovable.”
“Imagine that child as your own. Would you still find him lovable?”
I said nothing, but I didn’t bother hiding my expression. She shot me a displeased look, then picked up the stack of Killian’s notebooks piled beside my bed and carried them away.
I was hiding out in the Ackroyd family’s townhouse in Dunley. She had offered me a guest room, but I spent most of my days in the room Killian had used as a child.
Even now, bedridden, I lay on his old bed, endlessly rereading his writings—not diaries, but mathematics notebooks and such.
“Killian was intelligent.”
I murmured, fiddling with the notebook she’d missed. As she returned the notebook to the shelf, her hand stopped.
I couldn’t see her face, only her back as she stared down at the book. After a moment, she let out a long sigh.
“Yes… back then, it all felt so frustrating. He annoyed me so much.”
“Killian does have that side to him.”
Even from her back, she looked so helpless so I said gently, trying to take her side.
“Looking back now, he wasn’t lacking at all. He was extraordinary.”
“That’s right.”
“He was a child who would survive no matter where you dropped him. And he did. He was thrown into enemy territory and came back alive.”
“And he even brought someone as burdensome as me back with him.”
“Haah….”
She collapsed into a nearby chair.
“I should have trusted him more… I should have let him do things his own way.”
I wished she’d realized that sooner. She seemed to love her son, but the direction had been so wrong that the distance between them had grown irreparably wide.
She lifted her face, wiping away the tears pooled in the deep lines of her skin.
“But back then, I couldn’t trust him. I was always anxious about him.”
She waved her hand vaguely as she spoke, then covered her face again.
“Ha… I don’t even know anymore. This probably sounds like nothing but excuses to you.”
In truth, I had no right to blame her in this matter. I, too, had failed to trust him.
“Killian has such a gentle, mild appearance. When danger comes, he looks almost too kind, so you worry whether he’ll endure harsh trials, whether he can really resolve them.”
“Exactly.”
“But he always did. Every single time.”
I should have trusted him. Regret washed over me.
“He looks gentle, but he’s incredibly stubborn. When he loves someone, he loves them to the very end. And when he hates someone, he hates them just as completely.”
When he loves someone to the end. Was that about me?
Everyone who knew the old me says I became an entirely different person. They don’t hide that they preferred who I was before.
Only Killian loved me even after I changed.
So why wouldn’t he see me now? Is it because I said I didn’t love him? Surely he knows what I want to say, so why won’t he meet me?
“…Do you think he hates me now?”
“No, I don’t think so. If he did, he would have exposed everything already.”
What did she mean by that?
I asked—but she didn’t answer.
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