Ha. What is he trying to do right now?

“Dertosse…”

“No. I don’t know what I’m saying… It must be because Rechel coming and going earlier has me all stirred up.”

“Wasn’t that woman nothing more than someone you mentioned in passing once?”

“……”

His eyes held mine endlessly.

Like someone with something to hide.

“Dertosse.”

“…Yeah.”

“You don’t have to tell me. I trust you always.”

Like the foolish Evian who trusted and followed him without question, I would keep acting this way today, tomorrow, and every day after.

Because that was how Dertosse would trust me. Just like now.

He had been going to see his mother every day, just as he had in the past. The difference from before, if there was one, was that he trusted me enough to ask his mother to treat me better. 

Because of that, his mother had finally reached her limit and let her true nature show in front of Dertosse, the way she always had with me.

Raging and screaming like a madwoman.

So Dertosse had started to see his mother a little differently. The illusion of her as simply a good mother had begun to crack, little by little.

“Thank you… I’ll treat Evie better from now on.”

“Okay!”

I could more or less guess what he had been about to say. It was probably about Rechel. Dertosse’s marriage itself had actually been a move to provoke Rechel’s jealousy.

Princess Rechel had been Dertosse’s childhood friend. From a very young age.

And for all that time, Dertosse had loved her deeply. Then, as Dertosse began thinking about marriage to carry on the family line, he confessed his feelings to Rechel.

‘But Princess Rechel turned him down flat.’

To Princess Rechel, who valued keeping her options open and lived as a flower that bloomed under everyone’s attention, Dertosse was not a man who measured up. She believed the most brilliant flower deserved to marry someone worthy of her.

So Dertosse gave up on marriage.

‘Because women, just as his mother had told him, had all made him suffer in the same way.’

In the midst of all that, Dertosse came across me wandering through the forest with no memory. Me, with no way of knowing where I had come from.

A woman he found in the abandoned forest behind the marquis’s estate.

A woman who couldn’t even speak the imperial language properly, who wore a harmless expression and trailed after him like a duckling that imprints on the first person it sees after hatching. Evian, who remembered nothing except her own name.

‘And then he told Rechel about my existence. That was the first time Rechel felt jealous.’

Dertosse noticed, and pushed forward with marrying me.

It was after he made one last confession to Rechel.

Rechel had let her guard down, never imagining Dertosse would actually go through with marrying a woman like me over her, and in the end Dertosse married me, as though to make a point.

‘That’s probably what he was trying to tell me just now.’

“I’m so glad a woman like Evie is my wife. I used to think Rechel was the wisest and most beautiful woman there was, but…”

“She even sent a new handmaid… she seemed like a kind person, wasn’t she?”

“Don’t even get me started. After Evie left, she was in tears, making a whole scene. You have no idea how exhausting it was to calm her down.”

“Goodness. After I left? Why?”

“……”

His gaze drifted toward my stomach for a moment.

“…It’s something like that.”

“Something like what?”

“No. Don’t worry about it, Evie. I’ll handle it.”

He was going to talk badly about her and then run straight to her the moment Rechel called him. Handle it, sure. A laugh nearly escaped me, but I buried it and answered him softly.

“Okay… I understand. Make sure to pass along my thanks to her. She did send me a handmaid.”

“Don’t worry. In return for this, the two of us agreed to go on a date…”

“Hm?”

“Oh, no. What did I just say… haha. Don’t worry about it, Evie.”

Dertosse waved his hand in a hurry and jumped up from where he was sitting.

“The drink is wearing off. I must have lost my mind for a moment there.”

“This date…”

“No. It’s nothing. Nothing for Evie to worry about. More importantly, rather than this… Evie. Shouldn’t we start thinking about an heir soon? If we have a child, Mother will surely come to like you.”

Unfortunately, the one who kicked me the hardest while doubting even the paternity of my child was your mother.

My child, who had been born into such a sorrowful fate and never even made it into the world, came to mind. Nausea rose from somewhere inside me, and no matter how hard I tried to hold it back, bile kept flooding my mouth.

“I’m not feeling well…”

I had to get him out of the room somehow and then get to the washroom, but my body couldn’t hold on even that long.

Because I kept thinking of the child who had to die at the hands of people like these. Because I kept thinking of those who ignored my pleas to spare my child and instead kicked me mercilessly.

“Evie!”

I couldn’t get him out and ran into the washroom instead. It must have been the first time he had ever seen me like this, because Dertosse’s voice rose sharply.

“Are you all right?”

I waved him away, begging him not to come in, to please leave, but it was no use. He followed me right into the washroom anyway, then took one look at me retching and rushed back out.

“Oh… Evie… your stomach must really not be well. I really can’t watch this…”

“……”

“G, get yourself checked tomorrow. Ugh… I think my stomach is turning too. I, I’ll head out then.”

If he loved me, if he had given me his heart with any real sincerity, would he have walked out like that. Would he have said something as absurd as his own stomach turning.

‘I really can’t stand him.’

I had barely eaten anything, so there was little left to come up, but I stayed hunched over for a long while before finally wiping my mouth.

I had turned back time, and yet my body was every bit as frail as Evian had been back then. I raised my arm. I didn’t think I had been this thin in my past life, but my forearm was unusually slight.

“After turning back time once, am I on borrowed time now. That’s fine, but… this part is just too unfair.”

I sank to the floor and pulled my knees to my chest.

It wasn’t unfair for any one particular reason. It was that in a life where everything had already ended for me, they were still out there living well. Even now, only I was suffering with these memories while they went on without a care.

That was what felt so unbearable.

That even for a single day, those people got to live in comfort.

In the end I couldn’t take it anymore and pushed myself up off the floor, then washed my face with cold water.

One life of being the weak Evian was enough.

“One month. One month should be enough to at least shatter this happy little life of yours.”

I steadied myself and took out the notebook I had kept tucked away in a very deep place.

One ability I hadn’t possessed before had settled naturally into my body after I turned back time. The ability to write in a language I couldn’t place as belonging to any country.

It was neither Korean nor the imperial language. It was a language even I had never seen before, yet my hand wrote it out naturally, the way one writes in their mother tongue. Thanks to that, I could use that script to record every future event I remembered.

“Isen took my hand, so… the next thing would be that.”

Evian may be known as nothing more than a simpleton from a mere marquis’s household, but for that very reason, the things she could do were limitless. Especially with an ally like Isen. I sorted through the events from the future that would be most useful to him and wrote them down in a letter.

* * *

The next morning, it was an ordinary morning, no different from any other. Or rather, the one difference was that Mary was standing at my door.

“Why are you here?”

“Because I am someone who must watch your every move, young mistress.”

“…Mary must be the only person in the world who says ‘watch your every move’ so casually.”

Just then, the voices of maids chattering reached me from not far away. I thought for a moment, then pulled her inside.

“Mary.”

“Yes.”

“Once they pass, support me and help me outside.”

“All of a sudden?”

“I collapsed from the ab*se disguised as education that went on until late last night. And since we’re going out anyway, let’s get a certificate confirming the pregnancy.”

“Is the pregnancy real, my lady?”

She looked me over without any particular reaction.

“Of course not. This is simply a way to make things more entertaining for them.”

I smiled brightly as I looked at her.

I was looking forward to seeing how they would react. Dertosse, at least, had been somewhat ‘human’ for a month after hearing I was pregnant.

‘It’ll be the same this time. I wonder how entertaining it will be. Like a shield protecting me, he worked harder to help me than ever before after learning I carried a child.’

That didn’t mean he kept protecting me. Because he had started to suspect the child in my womb might not be his. Dertosse believed every word his mother Rose said. Even if that meant ending up unable to trust the wife who carried his child.

‘Still, he’ll protect me. For one month.’

One month is enough. Enough to drag Dertosse down into the mud while he’s still soaking in happiness.

“Entertaining?”

I looked at Mary, who seemed puzzled, then pressed my ear quietly against the door.

It was already shaping up to be entertaining. How would my mother-in-law, for whom her son was everything in the world and everything had to go her way, change?

And what about Rechel, who was slowly falling in love with Dertosse. Even now, Rechel was probably rushing here in a frenzy to make Dertosse hers. Just imagining the sight of it was enough to make me laugh.

‘And then there was what Dertosse said yesterday…’