She glanced sideways, wondering what the serious conversation was about, and bumped shoulders with someone nearby.

“Oh, I’m sorry……”

“Wait, Miss Clairmont?”

Liz looked up. Her eyes went wide.

“It is Liz, isn’t it? It’s been so long. I’m so glad to see you.”

“……Elena?”

It was Elena, a schoolmate from Bellum Girls’ Academy, the one who had helped Liz make her escape a year ago.

“Elena, what are you doing here? You said you were going to Liverpool in the west.”

“I’m traveling.”

“I see. Did you come with your husband?”

Liz had been thinking of Tom, the stable hand from Elena’s household, the one she had been secretly seeing back then. She turned, and Elena came forward with a man’s arm in hers.

“Come say hello. This is my husband, Viscount Herrington.”

“……!”

Liz flinched at the sight of the man on Elena’s arm. It wasn’t Tom, but she knew the face.

He was the very viscount Elena had jilted at the altar a year ago.

“What a small world. We have met before, haven’t we. At the ceremony. Miss Liz Clairmont.”

At the introduction, the man’s brow tightened for just a moment, then smoothed into a polished smile.

‘How dare you spirit away the woman who was to be my wife! Have you no shame.’

The man who had once hurled those words at Liz with such venom was now bowing with perfect courtesy. She took a step back, unable to make sense of it. While she stood there frozen, Elena sent her husband ahead and leaned in.

“Tom and I broke up a long time ago.”

“I see……”

There was nothing quite as deflating as helping someone escape and then hearing it had all come to nothing. What followed was no easier to hear.

“Running away together felt like a dream while it lasted. But we were fighting every day before long. We ended up separating, and I went back to the viscount and repaired things. And then we married.”

Elena spoke of the past as though it had been a brief and harmless detour, and laughed.

“I was so foolish back then. I let sweet words fool me into thinking someone who barely earned enough for a single dress could make me happy.”

She framed the whole episode as youthful naivety, a moment she had been innocent enough to be taken in by. Then she smiled and asked, “You’re a duchess now too, Liz. You understand, don’t you?”

No. She didn’t understand anything about putting money above love.

Something Liz had believed in all this time crumbled inside her. She opened her dry lips.

“So…… what happened to Tom?”

“Who knows. He kept coming around after I left, but I turned him away until he stopped. Last I heard he’d enlisted in the army. I don’t think about him anymore.”

Elena dismissed the fate of the man she had once loved so passionately without a second thought. Then she looked Liz over, taking in the fine dress and the jewelry, and spoke with open envy.

“Anyway, I was so shocked when I read that you’d become the Duchess of Ashworth. When we get back to Bergen, I’d love for the four of us to have tea together.”

“……Sure.”

Elena kept talking after that, but Liz barely heard any of it.

After Elena left, Liz walked out of the shop and pressed a hand to the wall of a side street, breathing unevenly. Complicated feelings shifted through her chest.

The family name was the foundation everything else was built on, even when it came to arranged marriages.

She had no way of knowing whether Tom had enlisted because of the heartbreak. But the belief that her efforts had helped someone toward happiness collapsed in an instant.

If the help she had given, out of nothing but the joy of it and with no thought for her own reputation, had failed to bring happiness to the people she helped. If it had pushed them toward something worse instead. The hollowness of that thought pressed in on her.

The idea that she might have interfered in someone’s life and made it worse refused to leave her head.

“……Liz.”

Johann had finished his conversation and returned. He studied her face with quiet attention.

“What’s wrong. Are you not feeling well?”

“No. I just feel a little weighed down.”

Liz gripped his hand and steadied herself enough to stand straight.

“I’m tired. Can we head back?”

“Of course.”

At Johann’s signal, a guard called for the carriage. Liz climbed in and rested her head against his shoulder, closing her eyes. A dull ache had settled somewhere inside her.

˗ˋˏ ♡ ˎˊ˗

The hotel lobby was busy with passengers heading back to the ship and staff moving luggage. Liz sat on a sofa near one wall and watched the lively commotion with unfocused eyes.

“My lady, the morning air is cool. Put this on.”

Maribel draped a soft silk pelisse over Liz’s shoulders. Liz pulled it closer and looked toward Johann, who stood some distance away speaking with his attendants.

“I heard there was a dinner last night.”

“Yes. The master thought you looked tired and went on his own to spare you.”

Johann, who usually insisted she go everywhere with him, had sent word the previous night that he would attend alone. It should have been the perfect opening to look for a way out, or at least gather some information. Instead, she had fallen asleep without meaning to. Or perhaps her heart had been too heavy to summon any will to act.

The shock of meeting Elena the day before lingered like an afterimage. The thought that others among all the people she had helped might have returned the same way, abandoning love when it met the real world, left a cold hollow in her chest.

She had never once imagined Elena might change.

Elena had never told her what happened after the breakup with Tom. There was no obligation to, but the bitterness remained.

Can feelings really shift that easily?

When love runs into the wall of the real world, it seems it can no longer hold two people together. Elena had given up her family and reputation to run away, and then she had traded love for the price of a dress and walked back. It felt like a mockery of everything Liz had believed in.

Come to think of it, who did Amelia say she was leaving with?

The question surfaced without warning.

When she helped other schoolmates escape, she always looked carefully into the man’s standing and livelihood. Amelia’s case had been different. It was less a request than a transaction, and knowing Amelia’s nature, Liz had trusted her to handle everything perfectly on her own and hadn’t asked further.

She did say there was someone she loved. That much had to be true.

But Amelia had been the type to rank everyone by family standing even within the academy walls. The idea that she would give up a life of luxury for someone from a lesser house or a commoner didn’t quite sit right.

In Bergen, only a handful of houses outranked the Bonecia family. The highest of all was the Ashworth Dukedom.

For Amelia, this marriage would have been the greatest opportunity of her life, the fulfillment of both her family’s glory and her own ambitions.

For the first time, a genuine question about the root of Amelia’s flight pressed up inside her.

The sofa beside her dipped, and a familiar scent reached her. She turned. It was Johann. His long fingers brushed her cheek, then gently tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear.

“Are you feeling any better?”

“Yes…… I’m fine.”

“……Good.”

She had been afraid her expression had given her away, but he didn’t press further.

“Let’s go back.”

Johann held out his hand. Liz looked at it in silence. A thought cut through her clearly: she was not the right person to take that hand.

A brief hesitation passed. Johann quietly reached over, took her hand first, and guided her up.

“Even if you’ve decided you don’t want to go back, you’ll have to come with me.”

“Johann, that’s……”

“Liz, you’re my wife now.”

He smiled with that easy certainty, as though stating something beyond question. Liz rose and followed.

She looked over the other ships at the dock. But in the end, she let Johann lead her back to the VIP suite.

“I have some work to see to. Rest here.”

Johann pressed a light kiss to her cheek and headed toward the temporary study. The warmth of it lingered after he was gone. Liz touched the spot with her fingers. She realized, with a small start, that she had grown so used to his touch that it no longer surprised her.

Judith’s words came back to her, and she shook her head.

It can’t be that.

Johann’s warmth and the brief happiness of these weeks had done something to her head.

“My lady, one moment.”

The maids were still sorting luggage when a crew member approached and held out a white envelope.

“A letter has arrived for the Duchess of Ashworth.”

“Who sent it?”

There was no seal on the envelope. No signature from the sender.

The crew member withdrew. Liz opened the envelope, puzzled.

Who would send this. More than that, she wondered whether anyone who knew her was even aware she was here. She pulled out the letter, and her eyes went wide.

[Miss Liz Clairmont, are you enjoying yourself in the place you took from me?]