A silence settled between us. Our light conversation had ended, and both Heliones and I were likely thinking the same thing, but neither of us could bring ourselves to speak first. I was an outsider now, which made it all the harder for me to be the one to start.

“I feel terrible.”

Heliones was the one who finally broke, pressing his hands over his face and letting out what was inside. His expression was so desolate, like a sailor sinking on a wrecked ship in the middle of the open sea, that I reached out and took his hand without thinking.

At my touch, Heliones gripped my hand tight, as though it were a lifeline, and covered both his eyes with his other hand. Did he want to cry? He could, if he needed to.

“I saw her exactly once. I’m not particularly fond of children, so I didn’t feel the tremendous rush of emotion people always talk about.”

His voice was thick with moisture but steady as he let out what was inside, and I tilted my head quietly and listened.

“But the look in Helena’s eyes when she looked at the child, that look was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life. Even the sight of her holding a crying baby and soothing it was dazzling. Helena told me then. That she thought she could make a life of it. That she thought she could put down roots there and live. That as long as she had the child, as long as she had Isabel, it didn’t matter where she was.”

I see. So that is what ordinary mothers feel. My only points of reference for what a mother was were the mother who left me too soon with words I could not understand, and the stepmother who tortured me every day, so I had never had a proper chance to understand what ordinary maternal love looked like.

“I know Helena can be impulsive and childlike at times. But in that moment she seemed far more mature than I was. Ha. So I thought she was doing well.”

Time cannot be reversed. No matter how much one regrets, what has happened cannot be undone.

“I’m a terrible brother, aren’t I? My sister went through something like that, and I wasn’t there for her….”

Some things time will take care of, and you can tell someone to shake it off and get back up. But there are other things you know will leave a mark that never fully fades, and for those, all you can do is wait beside them until they find their own way forward.

“How is Princess Helena?”

“I don’t know. She wouldn’t let me see what she was feeling. I almost didn’t recognize her.”

I didn’t particularly like Helena, but tears came anyway. A reckless young woman had become a mother in a foreign land, buried her child alone, and gone through a divorce. Every one of those things was something that should never have happened to any woman, and they had all fallen on Heliones’s sister one after another.

There was nothing more to say. So I simply tightened my grip and held his hand. The hand that had always seemed so steady and unshakeable, the kind that looked like no storm could move it, was trembling.

If I could, I would have wrapped my arms around him and taken the rain on his behalf, but I couldn’t, so I could only hope that the small warmth of my hand might reach his cold heart.

Heliones raised his head after a long while. His eyes were red, whether from actually crying or not, but I pretended not to notice and asked.

“Are you thirsty? Shall I pour you another cup of tea?”

I tried to draw my hand back naturally, but Heliones did not loosen his grip. Not wanting to take away what little warmth he had, I sat back down and gazed quietly into the air.

Before long, my hand was free again. When I turned to look, Heliones wore an expression just slightly, almost imperceptibly, more at ease than when he had arrived. You would have to be watching closely to notice it at all.

Has it helped? Had I managed to be the kind of good friend someone could open their heart to?

Heliones stayed a little longer after that, and this time slowly savored the fresh hot tea Hanna brought out before rising from his seat.

“There will be another event soon. I’ll arrange an opportunity for you to make your position known publicly at that time.”

“Yes.”

“And sometime this week, another reporter from a weekly publication will come by.”

“I see. Did you happen to read the last article? Were there parts that needed to be corrected or added to?”

At my question, Heliones gave a faint smile and shook his head slowly.

“Not at all. Just continue exactly as you have been.”

“Yes. Understood.”

I suddenly realized there was still something left to say, and called out to stop him.

“Your Majesty.”

“?”

“I think it would have been wonderful to have a sibling who understood my heart. One who laughed with me when I was happy and cried with me when I was sad.”

Did my meaning reach him? I hoped he wouldn’t be too hard on himself. Heliones gave a faint smile that said he understood, and nodded.

I hoped I hadn’t overstepped, and bowed my head deeply to see him off.

After Heliones slipped out through the back door, I looked out the window to find a deep sunset already spread across the sky.

I ate dinner as usual and got ready for bed.

An inexplicable warmth had wrapped around my body all through the evening, and thinking I might be coming down with something, I went to bed a little earlier than usual. Sleep refused to come, and as I lay staring blankly at the ceiling, I came to understand where that heat in my body was coming from.

Thud. My heart dropped to the floor. The feeling of falling into a deep pit with no bottom.

I had only comforted a friend who had lost a niece. So why was I still thinking about the warmth of that hand?

Was this not an outrageously presumptuous, shameless, and base feeling? Was I really this low a person? I had spent my entire life keeping an extreme grip on myself. Living without showing despair or humiliation on the outside, like someone without feelings, I had somewhere along the way become a person of remarkable composure, even to myself.

And yet lately I kept losing control of what was inside me. I wanted to be a good friend. If I couldn’t offer any practical help, I at least wanted to remain a decent person, but my heart kept moving on its own.

What was this? What was this strange, unruly feeling of unknown origin that kept trying to drag me to the bottom of myself?

I wanted all of this to be over quickly. I wanted to leave this complicated capital and go somewhere no one knew me. To live there, pretending I had never been hurt, pretending I had never despaired, and spend my days in outward peace, just as I had before.

* * *

Heliones knew, better than anyone, that beneath the surface he was not nearly as composed as he appeared, and that he had a thoroughly petty side to him.

The truth was that he had rarely been quick to agitation simply because he had been in a state of resignation for most of his life, and the reason he had seemed uninterested in women was simply that he had never met one who drew him in.

Thanks to that, Heliones had been regarded throughout his upbringing, and even into adulthood, as a composed and even-tempered man. He hadn’t intended it, but he had grown rather fond of that reputation, and since nothing had come along to shake him, he had assumed he would simply go on living that way.

It is, in truth, rare for a person’s outward appearance to match their inner state exactly. Even ordinary people hide what they feel, and Heliones, born the son of an emperor but the son of a concubine, had grown up never once imagining he could show what was inside him.

He had felt irritated by his mother’s unreasonable tantrums. He had felt anger rise in him at his brothers’ schemes to undermine him. When his father, for whom he had felt little affection, died, his body trembled with fury. And yet his exterior had always been so undisturbed that one might have wondered whether he had feelings at all.

But what had truly sent great ripples through his heart was not resignation or hatred.

The feelings that arose from the wife he had married without ever seeing her face, the wife with whom he had not even shared a wedding night, were the ones that shook him to his very roots.

He had learned that she liked white flowers, hydrangeas and daisies. He had learned that she liked sour-sweet fruits. He had learned that among gemstones, she favored opals and emeralds. By quietly observing her whenever the chance arose, Heliones had been able to collect her preferences, little by little and in secret.

So he had planted white flowers in the imperial palace. He had given particular instructions that the residence where she was staying never run out of plums. On the two birthdays they had shared, he had given her opals and emeralds.

Heliones held two feelings about all of this at once: he hoped Lucian would never find out, and he hoped she would.

He wanted to hide it, afraid she might be alarmed, and yet he found himself holding onto the hope that she might accept his feelings.

Heliones was truly grief-stricken. What he felt at the death of his niece and the loss his sister had suffered could be expressed in no other word but grief.

His heart was truly crumbling, and with nowhere else to turn, he had come to Lucian. He didn’t want to show weakness, and yet she was the only one to whom he wanted to show it.