“If it goes out today, it can reach the count within the month. Please, consider his feelings.”

At words that could almost be called earnest, the lady huffed and sat at the desk, scrawling something that could’ve been writing or a drawing. The butler watched, then bowed with perfect formality even though she wasn’t looking at him, and left.

I didn’t feel sorry for him. I was too busy feeling sorry for my own future, left alone with a furious lady.

“Why are you staring at me like that? Did you go and do something with the butler while I wasn’t watching?”

She’d apparently been watching me for some time, because she dropped a shockingly crude word into the sentence without warning. I stared at her in blank disbelief, and she curved one corner of her mouth into a sneer.

“Look at that face over a little joke. You’re passable enough when you’re still, but when you scowl you look like a pig. You’d be better off with your face in the floor.”

I snapped my head down immediately. Even after a week of it, the verbal *buse still wouldn’t become normal, and heat crept up from my throat. If it reached my face and gathered behind my eyes, it would become tears. Not wanting that, I squeezed my eyes shut, and the lady, who’d come close without my noticing, grabbed my cheek and forced my expression flat.

“Oh, my dear friend! I didn’t mean actually put it in the floor. I meant relax your face. It breaks my heart to see you sad.”

Not exactly something to say from someone who’d spent days trying to make me cry, but the lady was always changeable. She’d swap outfits four or five times in a day, or react to the same mistake with complete indifference one day and a hard slap the next.

Fortunately, I hadn’t been hit hard since the first day, though I suspected that was only because I was small and young and she was going easy on me. The other maids and footmen, especially the men, took flying objects that were practically weapons without any protection.

Watching her display that violent temperament without a second thought while now furrowing her brow at my face with what looked like genuine concern was so brazenly shameless that it should’ve been infuriating, yet somehow she still looked beautiful, which made it all the more absurd. Why is it that beautiful people, by virtue of being born with good faces, can do something contemptible and still come across with some positive quality attached? It’s not fair.

In any case, I was obligated to play along with this performance, so I delivered my line without complaint.

“I’m fine, Miss.”

“Fine?”

The lady put on that blank expression again, the one that sent a chill down your spine, then went back to her chair and folded the remaining stationery into paper planes, sending them out the window one by one. The paper was clearly expensive beyond anything I’d ever touch, white and soft with gold-foil decorations pressed into it, but to the lady it was apparently just a toy.

I watched with undisguised longing, and she kept folding and launching planes with a look that said what are you staring at. Was I supposed to be folding them too? My confusion resolved itself in the worst possible direction.

“What are you waiting for? Go find them.”

For the love of…… I was clearly still too optimistic about the world. That had to be the problem.

I scrambled to lean out the window and track where the planes had gone, and in the middle of that, another one floated briefly through the air and crashed to the ground.

“Six.”

She was already folding the seventh.

I couldn’t hide the contempt, shock, and bewilderment crossing my face, and the moment she caught it, a flash of exhilaration passed through her eyes. The second I realized that, a cold wave rolled up from my lower back and I bolted out of the room.

Around this point I’d started to wonder whether the other companion children had quit on their own or been thrown out. What I did know for certain was that whichever it was, they’d been trembling with joy and weeping tears of happiness.

Because right now, if that blessing were handed to me, that’s exactly what I’d do.

Out of twelve paper planes, I found eleven. The last one had fallen into the garden pond. I hesitated, then rolled up my trouser legs. Even wading along the edge, the water came up to my knees, and I couldn’t bring myself to go any further.

The lady wouldn’t want me to come back a corpse with the last plane still missing.

The thought that she very well might came on strong, but I chose to believe the better option.

Not going into the pond didn’t mean I looked any less of a mess. Running all over the garden and manor had soaked my shirt and trousers through with sweat, and clawing through trees and along walls with bare hands had left my arms and hands covered in scratches.

Along the way, I ran into Joseph, the stable hand who’d brought me to the manor on the first day. He didn’t ask why I was doing something that would look like sheer madness to anyone who didn’t know the context. He just fetched a long rake and knocked down a plane that had landed somewhere high up.

“Don’t work too hard at it. The lady forgets what she’s asked for the moment she turns her head.”

Joseph handed me the plane and added, after looking me over.

“Thank you, sir. But doing what the lady asks is easier than staying in the same room as her.”

Joseph seemed to accept that, gave a single nod, and said nothing more.

I forced my shaking legs up the stairs. I could’ve sworn I’d started running around after the planes in the afternoon, but the sun outside was already sinking toward the horizon. My stomach felt even more tired from holding the flattened planes carefully by the tips so my sweat wouldn’t reach them.

I mumbled something about coming in at the lady’s door and turned the handle, and found her nestled deep in her soft bedding, napping. At first a sight like that had looked doll-pretty, but now I just wished she actually were a doll…… though then who would give me my silver coins and bread.

“Miss, are you asleep?”

The lady didn’t keep her companion in the room past nightfall. I wasn’t sure I was allowed to wake her, but I’d come back after completing what she’d asked, so she couldn’t say too much. She didn’t answer, so I gently shook her near the forearm. Miss, Miss. Then without warning a powerful grip seized my hand.

“Miss!”

The cry escaped on its own. I tried to pull free, but her grip was so fierce I couldn’t move at all and ended up just dangling there. The lady blinked awake, and she looked less drowsy than expected. More like someone who hadn’t slept at all.

She stared fixedly at their joined hands, or rather at one hand clamped around the other. She must have eaten well, because she was not only strong but long-limbed, with hands that seemed half a span larger than mine.

“Miss, that hurts.”

She startled slightly and loosened her grip halfway, but I still couldn’t pull my hand free.

“I found the paper planes like you asked. Oh, but I couldn’t get all of them. One fell in the pond, so……”

“Forget it, I was going to throw them away anyway.”

The most indifferent answer imaginable. I stared at her blankly.

“You were going to throw them away?”

The lady showed no interest whatsoever in the planes I’d stacked neatly on the table. I was dumbfounded. I’d clocked her terrible personality the moment we met, but I’d never realized until today that she also had a talent for making people feel hollow and useless, and the fresh wave of wretchedness that brought was something else.

This felt like the moment a suspicion I’d been carrying all week finally crystallized into certainty.

“Miss, do you dislike me? Are you hoping I’ll quit on my own, and I’ve just been too much of an oblivious country fool to take the hint?”

It ended as a question, but it carried the conviction that she was waiting for me to be the first to admit defeat. The lady’s eyes widened slightly, then she let out a small, contemptuous laugh and lied without flinching.

“I like you.”

Her hand was still warm around mine.

On my way out, I unfolded every one of the planes I’d worked so hard to collect and took them home. She’d said she was throwing them away, so I figured ownership had passed to me. The maids had mentioned they helped themselves to soap or silk the lady had used and discarded. Surely the same applied to her companion.

My parents glanced at the paper, then the next day went to town and sold it. The many fold lines probably meant they got less than half the going rate, but even the gold foil alone made it worth something, and that night we filled our stomachs entirely with pork, not a grain of cereal in sight. The happiness that came with it quickly pushed out the bad memories of the manor.