“Listen, we may have lost our money, but we’re not penniless, you know?”

“Sure, so pay up if you want to leave.”

The guard who had thrown us in the cell replied with a smirk. To think jail is the price for dining and dashing! Isn’t that too harsh?

“How much?”

“Well, 10 gold, no, make that 20 gold.”

“What! The meal we had was barely worth 1 or 2 gold!”

When I shouted angrily at the jailer’s words, he covered his ears and shook his head.

“Miss, with that attitude, you’ll have to pay 30 gold.”

“That’s ridiculous!”

“That’s not my problem. If you want to leave, just pay up. From the looks of it, neither you nor your companion seem to be ordinary commoners.”

The guard said, looking back and forth between me and Ilion. This bastard. Trying to make a business out of bail money.

Judging by how he kept raising the amount after looking at our faces, it seemed he had brought us in thinking we’d be worth some money.

“Oh, by the way, we’ll be sending a letter, so just give us your home address. Your family needs to know where to bring the money, right?”

He asked, continuing to sneer.

There was no way I could give our address. Why would I advertise that the Duke of Celestine was imprisoned for dining and dashing, of all things?

When I kept my mouth shut, unable to speak, the guard shrugged.

“If you don’t want to talk, suit yourself. Just so you know, the longer you stay here, the more interest will be added to your fine. Well, if you really don’t have money, you can always work it off.”

With those words, the man disappeared, cackling.

That damned bastard!

He was insufferable from start to finish.

Fuming, I pressed my face against the iron bars and glared at the retreating guard, but there wasn’t much I could do.

I was well aware that I was an unlucky person, so it wasn’t particularly unfair that the punishment for dining and dashing was severe, or that I had conveniently lost my perfectly good wallet. But lately, I felt like my bad luck was reaching new levels. And those levels seemed to have no bottom.

Not getting to eat crab, ending up in jail. At this point, that inn room from earlier looked like a hotel suite.

I let out a deep sigh and turned to look at Ilion.

“I’m sorry. I definitely had money until we bought the candy… I’ll try talking to the jailer again when he comes back tomorrow.”

As I muttered in a small voice, the person who should have already scolded me was oddly quiet.

“Um, Your Grace?”

His posture, leaning against the wall, seemed a bit off.

Hurrying over, I saw he was covered in cold sweat.

Don’t tell me he’s having another attack? We just met the Saintess not long ago, why? Didn’t she cast a blessing then?

Desperately, I shouted for the guard, but only my voice echoed through the empty prison corridor.

Ilion was collapsed, unable to even open his mouth, seemingly in great pain, and I had neither painkillers nor enough money to get us out of here.

Suddenly struck by anxiety, I found myself short of breath.

“No, it’s okay. There’s the force of the novel in this world, so he won’t die here. That’s right.”

I muttered like a mantra, forcing out my held breath. But soon, doubt raised its head again, stirring my heart.

‘But what if there’s no such thing? The force of the novel isn’t even proven, is it? What if Ilion doesn’t wake up like this…’

Without realizing it, my hands started to tremble.

And a memory I had buried deep in my heart surfaced, causing intense ripples.

***

When I was too young to remember, both my parents passed away.

When I say this, most people look at me with pitying and sympathetic faces, but there’s no need for them to feel sorry or sympathetic towards me.

My childhood wasn’t as pitiful or sympathetic as they might think.

It’s difficult to define what’s normal, but if having both parents is considered normal, then I didn’t have a normal family.

But I never once thought of myself as different from other children.

Because I had a grandmother who took care of me like a parent.

Although we weren’t well-off, my grandmother allowed me to do everything I wanted.

On birthdays or Christmas, I could receive the toys I had been wanting as gifts.

Just because my parents weren’t there didn’t mean I grew up any differently from my peers. I had no major lacks.

At that time, my life’s biggest worry was deciding how many albums of my favorite singer I could buy with that month’s allowance.

Such an ordinary life crumbled with one sudden phone call.

“Jiha, what should we do. Your grandmother has collapsed.”

“…What?”

Even before that, grandmother had often mentioned that she wasn’t feeling well.

‘Instead of saying that, let’s go to the hospital.’

‘What hospital? It’s just because I’m getting old. I’ll be fine again in a few days.’

‘What if you really get sick?’

‘Why would grandma get sick? I’m going to live to see our Jiha get married and live well.’

Saying things like that, grandmother refused, saying she was fine, that there was no need to go, that going to the hospital would just be a waste of money.

“It’s pancreatic cancer. It was discovered too late. For it to have worsened to this degree, there must have been symptoms…”

After several days of tests, the doctor told me this. He probably said more after that, but my mind had gone blank and I couldn’t hear anything else.

‘Cancer? Grandmother? Could the test results be wrong? Yes, they must be wrong. Grandmother was fine until just recently. She just had a bit of an upset stomach, how could it be cancer?’

Unable to accept the reality, I silently stared at the piece of paper in front of the doctor.

My mind had gone white and I couldn’t hear the doctor’s words at all. I could barely remember him saying to prepare myself as there wasn’t much time left.

After that, I cried for a long time in a corner of the hospital. I cried and cried until no more tears would come.

Only after crying so much that I thought all the water in my body might have been squeezed out did I remember my grandmother who would be worrying about me not returning.

I barely managed to stop crying and went into the bathroom to wash my swollen eyes with cold water, but it only made me look more ridiculous.

After staying in the bathroom for a long time, I moved my reluctant feet to enter the hospital room.

However, despite my efforts, grandmother immediately noticed that I had been crying.

“What did the doctor say? Oh my. It’s probably nothing, but that guy must have scared our puppy again.”

“Grandmother…”

“Don’t cry. Grandma is fine. Don’t cry.”

I thought I had no more tears left to shed, but making my earlier efforts to stop crying meaningless, I broke down and cried again.

That day, grandmother patted my back for a long time, telling me it was okay.

Grandmother, who was in a state where even chemotherapy was impossible, had to rely on painkillers every day after that, suffering from constant pain.

Sometimes she would moan on the bed, not even realizing I had come, and I would run out crying to call a nurse. That was all I could do.

Just crying and calling for someone to help…

As the doctor said, grandmother passed away before that winter was over.

The funeral was quiet.

Grandmother had no children except for my late father, and only my school teacher, friends, and a few of grandmother’s colleagues came.

“The granddaughter is the chief mourner.”

“I heard her only son and daughter-in-law died in an accident. They say only the granddaughter barely survived.”

Grandmother’s colleagues, probably not thinking I could hear, talked while eating at the funeral hall.

Sitting in the chief mourner’s seat, I blankly listened to the conversation drifting over.

“So that’s why she worked so hard, raising her granddaughter alone. To suffer so much in her twilight years, it’s a pity.”

“I know. They say these days cancer can be survived if caught early… It seems it was discovered too late.”

“Come to think of it, we all planned to go for a health checkup early this year, but she couldn’t come that day because her granddaughter suddenly got sick.”

“That’s right. Oh my, if only she had gotten the checkup then, it could have been discovered earlier.”

The conversation passed like background noise, and I blankly stared at grandmother’s memorial photo.

‘Ah. It was because of me.’

Grandmother’s hardships, her suffering until her death, not being able to discover the cancer early — it was all because of me.

And I didn’t even know…

Suddenly, I remembered what grandmother often said to me while watching dramas.

‘That kind of guy ruins a woman’s life.’

It seems grandmother couldn’t see the bad person in front of her who had ruined her own life.

The memory I didn’t want to recall overlapped with Ilion in front of me. I still couldn’t do anything.

If he hadn’t received the Saintess’s blessing, it was surely because of me. Because I didn’t act according to the original story…

Yet I couldn’t do anything for him.

I didn’t have the ability to break Ilion’s curse, nor the knowledge to treat him so he wouldn’t suffer.

If so, I had to at least try to return the story to its original course.

“Please, don’t die. I’ll somehow put everything back the way it was supposed to be, so please…”