“But…”

Adeline placed her hand on her belly without thinking.

“Being in this house suffocates me. I mean it.”

Her voice trembled. The feelings she had been holding back finally rose to the surface.

“I want to be away, at least until I give birth. A few months is all it would take. Once the baby is born, we can come back.”

Kailen did not answer.

A brief silence settled over the room. Only the ticking of the wall clock came through clearly.

But the answer that came back was still not one that offered any certain promise.

“For now, let’s wait until after the baby is born and safely here, and then we’ll see.”

Those vague words pressed down on Adeline’s shoulders all the more heavily.

She could not say anything further.

She nodded, but her gaze dropped to the floor. Something inside her chest caved in.

It was not so much the fact of being refused that saddened her, but the fact that her anxiety had been pushed aside as something he could think about later.

Adeline slowly let out a breath.

The higher her hopes had been, the deeper her heart sank.

She felt like she was the only one who had grown tired.

* * *

Adeline had not slept properly for the past several days.

Not because sleep would not come, but because she could not close her eyes. The moment she lay down, something inside kept shaking her awake. Causeless anxiety, endless worry, concerns she could not get a hold of. Her thoughts kept veering off course, and the more they did, the more alert her mind became, and sleep grew further away.

Her stomach kept turning.

Waves of nausea rolled in and subsided, over and over, and acid rose all the way to the back of her throat, bringing on dry heaves that came out like coughs. Even though she had eaten nothing, her stomach showed no mercy.

She glanced at the glass of water on the nightstand. It had run dry at some point. She could ask for it to be refilled, but Adeline reached out and then stopped. It would only come back up the moment she swallowed it, she knew. Even water felt like too much.

When morning came, she lay there for a long while without moving. Staying in the same position had made her lower back ache with a dull stiffness. Only when she felt she could no longer hold that position did she turn onto her side.

Even swinging a single leg out of bed felt like too much. Her body, which had not rested properly through the night, hung heavy, and her head was foggy.

Then the door opened carefully.

It was Tanya.

The morning tray looked the same as the day before. A glass of sparkling water with a slice of lemon floating in it, and a few bland biscuits that tasted like almost nothing. Any other food made her stomach turn at the mere smell. So her morning menu had been more or less fixed lately.

Adeline took a sip of the sparkling water. The sourness and the carbonation touching the tip of her tongue seemed to push the nausea back for a moment, but it did not last.

She picked up a biscuit and forced herself to chew and swallow. She had no desire to eat at all, but she could not starve herself with the baby to think of.

Every single chewing motion was a struggle. Tanya watched her quietly, with a look of quiet sorrow.

“How do you manage on just this?”

At Tanya’s murmur, Adeline paused her hand for a moment. She did not have the energy to answer, but she opened her mouth anyway, afraid the silence might come across as irritation.

“I’ll make sure to eat more at lunch. Mornings are just particularly rough.”

Tanya said nothing and moved the tray to one side. The sound of the plate clinking against something rang out louder than it should have.

“I feel cooped up. Let’s take a walk in the garden.”

At Adeline’s words, Tanya nodded and picked up the shawl. The weight of it settling over her shoulders was nothing, really, yet strangely she felt both her body and her heart being pulled downward at the same time. Even that small warmth felt like too much.

“Yes. Getting some sunlight outside should help.”

“Mm.”

A short answer.

When she stepped out into the corridor, the air felt subtly different, perhaps because someone was airing the place out. The faint smell of cleaning solution drifted through, likely from the morning cleaning just finished. 

Any other day she would not have noticed it. But today was different. The sensation of it pricking at the tip of her nose made Adeline wrinkle her face without thinking.

“Are you alright?”

At Tanya’s question, Adeline raised her hand and gave it a light wave. A sign that she was fine. Even putting it into words felt like too much effort.

One step, then another, she made her way slowly to the top of the staircase.

Footsteps echoed up from below. There was an urgency to them. Then a low, composed male voice followed.

It was Kailen. He seemed to be going down the stairs while speaking with someone. From the responses woven into the exchange, the other person sounded like his chief secretary, Collen.

Adeline’s steps stopped on their own.

Last night, he had sent word that he would not be able to come home. Nothing more than a brief message saying he would be late, with no reason attached. 

She had not sensed his presence at all after that, and the thought crossed her mind that he might have slipped in briefly in the morning just to change his clothes and was heading back out. That was what she thought.

His back, visible below the staircase, was dressed without a single wrinkle, neat and composed. Always immaculate, the way he always was. And yet that back, for some reason she could not explain, filled her with a warmth she had not expected.

Well, it had been two days since she last saw him.

Adeline parted her lips without thinking.

“Kai…”

Her feet moved before his name could reach his ears. The moment she took a step forward, the hem of her skirt caught on her toe.

“Ah…!”

“Madam!”

Tanya’s cry burst out from behind her. At the same moment, something he had said not long ago flashed through her mind like lightning. He had told her to be careful, that the ankle she had twisted had not fully healed yet.

Her balance gave out completely.

Her body pitched forward. Her vision tilted, and her heart felt like it dropped.

“Ah, Kai…!”

The words did not make it to the end. Fear pressed hard against her chest. Without a moment to think, she instinctively wrapped her arms around her lower belly. And just as she squeezed her eyes shut.

A firm arm snatched her by the waist.

“Adeline!”

It was a short, sharp cry.

She gasped for breath in his arms and looked up. Kailen was staring down at her, his face stricken. Shock crossed it first, and then an emotion she could not read took over.

“…What on earth…?”

His hand gripped her arm harder. Hard enough to make it difficult to breathe. Adeline winced without meaning to.

In that instant, his eyes changed.

His gaze sank cold and deep, like a winter sea. The bewilderment that had been there just a moment before vanished without a trace, and a sharp mix of fear and fury rose up and churned like a violent storm.

“Are you out of your mind? Are you trying to get yourself killed?”

The words reached her ears, but for a moment Adeline could not grasp their meaning.

Killed. She could not make her mind catch up to why he would say something like that.

Kailen’s face had gone pale. A pallor that looked like all the blood had drained out of it. His jaw and lips were locked tight. Fear he could not hold back surged over the anger and fanned the flames of something raw and violent.

In the meantime, Collen came closer, and the other servants and the head housekeeper, drawn by the commotion, gathered one by one. All of them asked with alarmed faces whether she was alright, whether she was hurt anywhere.

But none of it reached Adeline’s ears properly.

All she could hear was Kailen’s breathing. Rough and uneven. His chest rising and falling like a man who had forgotten how to breathe.

He, too, had his gaze fixed only on her, and seemed to see nothing around him.

“Are you staging a protest against me right now?”

His voice trembled low.

“Or do you actually want to die?”

Only then did Adeline understand.

She was seeing Kailen raise his voice like this for the first time. He was the kind of person who went quiet when angry. The kind who turned cold, composed to the point of being unsettling.

And yet right now, he was holding on to her with ragged, labored breaths.

Like someone who believed that the moment he let go, something irreversible would come apart.

“What are you, what are you talking about?”

Whether from shock, Adeline’s voice cracked and came out rough. Her breath had not yet settled, and her words trembled at the ends.

“I just… I just missed a step…”

She steadied her breath for a moment, then opened her mouth again.

“Who wants to die… who said anything about wanting to die…”

Her heart pounded hard even as she spoke. The shock of a moment ago still lingered in her body. The instant her feet had found nothing beneath them, her body pitching forward, and then…

“Why are you shouting so loudly? If the baby hears… what are you going to do?”

At those words, Kailen’s gaze slowly moved downward. Toward her belly, not yet visibly swollen. Once, very briefly. Then it returned to her face. Why that look gave her such a chill, Adeline could not say.