Chapter 4
Asheel was leaning against a large wooden barrel, talking to a man that Nadia had never seen before.
They seemed to be friends, or at least, on friendly terms.
It was getting closer to Nadia and Asheel’s meeting time, though he never told her anything about introducing her to someone, so she thought she should come to greet him later. She didn’t want to increase the number of people who knew about their relationship.
Nadia leaned against the wall and waited for the stranger to leave.
“Do you want it?”
“No, she doesn’t like stuff like that.”
As she waited quietly, her ears began to adjust to their hushed conversation. Even though there was quite some distance between her and the other two, Nadia could make out Asheel’s voice immediately.
Were they talking about her? What did he think she hated…?
As she wondered, she quickly found out what it was—the faint scent of cigarettes soon entered her senses.
A smile tugged on the corners of her lips. Asheel remembered that she hated the smell of cigarettes when they passed by it once. She thought he didn’t smoke, but she supposed that’s not the case.
She then prickled her ears with bated breath, trying to hear more.
“Are you still seeing each other? Isn’t she a noble?”
“We’re just having a little fun.”
Nadia’s smile froze in an instant. She wanted to hear more of the conversation, but she couldn’t hear anything. The sound of her heartbeat was so loud that she couldn’t hear Asheel’s voice.
Slowly, she placed a hand over her chest and pressed down. She held her breath and tried to calm herself down, but all she could hear was the stranger laughing and jokingly slapping Asheel on the shoulder.
At that, she felt that he was laughing at her directly, so she turned away, clutching the skirt of her dress so tightly that her knuckles were white.
What she heard was only part of their conversation. The distance was so far that the words couldn’t even be understood properly in the first place. Maybe she had just misunderstood. It would be careless on her part to judge the whole thing by just a part of it.
It really couldn’t be true…
She should smile as usual and ask him about his friend. After asking that… she’ll ask if they had truly been talking about her back then. If she told him that she overheard their conversation…
As if there was something stuck in her throat, Nadia hesitated a long time, then gulped.
At that moment, it sounded like the man was about to leave, then she realized that if she took just one step from where she was, Asheel would notice she was right there.
Nadia was scared.
She was trying to suppress the thought, but what if Asheel said that she heard it right? What if he laughed at her just like his friend did?
There were many possibilities that Nadia was thinking of.
As if the temperature suddenly dropped, she could feel chills and goosebumps all over her skin. Nadia shook her head and wrapped both arms around herself.
A constant cycle of speculation and denial plagued Nadia’s mind. There was no way he would do that. She knew how much he cared about her… although what if it was all a lie? She kept denying that this wasn’t the case, but there was still a possibility that what she was assuming was right.
Nonetheless, she knew that she should hear his side of the story. There was no denying the time they spent together, and it wouldn’t crumble just from a few words. She knew this.
Even so… she wasn’t confident that she could go out and face him with a smile. She couldn’t pull herself together. Nadia wouldn’t be able to greet him with a calm expression and ask him about what she heard. The faith she had in herself and in their relationship was collapsing.
It felt as though her heart had become cold.
Maybe she misunderstood everything. Maybe she was too excited and mistook Asheel’s kindness and gentleness as love… because she had never experienced love before.
She shouldn’t have eavesdropped. She should have walked slower. If she did, then she wouldn’t have started suspecting him or second-guessing herself.
Nadia was breathing hard, heaving as her thoughts became more tangled up. It felt like her feet were nailed to the ground, but eventually, the strength in her legs came back and she rushed away.
After she took that first step, it became easier for her. With her mind still a mess, she hailed a commoner’s carriage that was passing by.
It was fortunate that she had left the estate wearing a veil. She couldn’t hide her emotions well, so she would have shown such a shameful face if she hadn’t been wearing a veil.
When she arrived home, she ran straight to her room as if someone were chasing her. The maids wondered why Nadia came back so soon, shortly after she went out.
“I’m not feeling well, so let me rest. No one is allowed to enter my room.”
Spewing out a half-hearted excuse, Nadia slammed the door shut without waiting for a response. She leaned her back on the wall as though she was blocking it, then took a deep breath. She couldn’t breathe properly, and her vision was blurred.
She tried very hard to suppress those thoughts, but they were bubbling up to the surface.
In the end, she couldn’t ask him about it.
If she had a little more confidence in herself, then she would have stood confidently in front of him to ask what exactly it was that he and his friend were talking about.
She knew how dangerous it was to keep fueling her imagination without hearing the whole story, and so she forced herself to think reasonably, still, her emotions were beyond her control and trampled over rationality.
“No… No. That can’t be—”
As though she were trying to convince herself, she whispered this to herself over and over again, but the words that she uttered in a shaky voice did nothing to affect the already established doubt that was festering within her.
Only negative thoughts followed one after another.
No matter what she did, every time she tried to push away those thoughts, it was futile. She was trying not to think about it, but it just didn’t stop.
Nadia fell into the endless pitfall of imagining what he meant by ‘fun’—if he had told his friend a story about what they have done together while laughing. In her mind, she had already become a poor girl betrayed and abandoned by her lover.
It was simple to conclude that she was a victim even as she ran away for fear of learning the truth.
Her hand trembled while it was pressed upon her chest, but she didn’t stop breathing evenly. Otherwise, it felt like she would collapse in tears.
It was because she couldn’t do anything in an unseemly manner. She couldn’t show herself to the maids if her eyes were swollen and her face messed up from crying.
With that thought, Nadia took off her hat and threw it away, then stood in front of a mirror.
After taking off all her hairpins and combing her messy hair, she whispered to the mirror as though she were casting a spell.
‘It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.’
She kept mumbling to herself so she could stop thinking and calm herself down. However, the blue eyes in the mirror that stared back at her were already pooling with tears that betrayed her will.
Soon, the river that she desperately tried to prevent from flowing soon trickled down her face.
“How stupid of you… Do you truly believe that? Why? On what grounds?”
With no one to say this to, she realized all these words were just hurting herself. Her voice quivered so badly because of her tearful voice, but she didn’t stop.
“You’ve never been loved before, though how did you become so sure that you were loved now? How are you so stupid…? That’s why you were fooled so easily. Isn’t that right? Who likes such a thing as you!”
Nadia raised her voice almost to the point of screaming, although she closed her lips immediately, surprised by her own voice.
She then immediately wiped her face of her tears, however, more poured down to no avail. Her trembling hands still covered her face.
“You said you were worried about me. You said I’m pretty… You said you liked me…”
She experienced everything for the first time.
There was no way for her to know if he meant it or not. She was so focused on clinging onto the warmth that she had never gotten in her life, so excited about the saccharine words that were just for her…
“I thought it was real… How could I… How do I know if it was all a lie…”
It was suffocating. She poured out all her resentment that she had tried so desperately to keep down, and the tears wouldn’t stop as if she had become broken.
Curling into herself on the bed, she gasped and wept.
“…I want to die.”
Amidst her heart-shattering pain, she spat out these words suddenly, but she did not truly want to die.
Nadia just wanted to be loved…
It was a good thing that Nadia made an excuse about not feeling well. She spent a few days in bed without any motivation at all. She couldn’t stop thinking about how she didn’t do anything, but as time passed, this, too, subsided.
—
On the third day of Nadia’s collapse, she thought that if she stayed like this, other people might notice that she was behaving strangely. Especially because her father, the Duke of Ingram, had arrived home.
When Nadia went down to greet him, the first thing that the Duke did when he saw her shabby composure, was to make a face and click his tongue in disapproval.
As she cowered from her father’s silent yet pointed look of dissatisfaction, she raised her head when her father finally spoke.
“You will get married next month, so take good care of yourself. You can’t show yourself in front of people if you look like this.”
“Marriage? …My marriage…?”
The Duke of Ingram raised an eyebrow as if he wasn’t expecting any resistance.
“That’s right.”
“A-All of a sudden? Who is my fiancé? What about the engagement…?”
“It is the Marquis of Elantz. I decided to skip the engagement ceremony. He needs to go back to his territory, so we set a date in a hurry. I didn’t even know you’d be in this state.”
With her mind still in a state of chaos, she couldn’t understand her father’s terrible words properly.
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