“It wasn’t me who ended things between us. It was Peter.”

Every person in the parlor went rigid at those words.

Shiloh’s cold gaze moved to Peter.

“When I hit rock bottom, you were the one who left because you were ashamed. I never ran away.”

“Shiloh, I never said I was ashamed…… you’re misunderstanding……”

Every eye in the room turned to Peter, whose hand trembled around his fork.

“Misunderstanding? Fine. You never used the word ‘ashamed.’ What you said was that you couldn’t marry a poor woman, that I was a fraudster’s daughter and of no use to you. Are you going to deny that too?”

Peter avoided her gaze under the force of her stare, his lips moving without sound.

“I thought the world was ending. Three years of trust, and the person I built it with decided to become a stranger overnight…… because of another woman.”

“I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding here……”

Peter cut in, shifting anxiously.

Their academy classmates stared at him with undisguised shock, their eyes pressing him for the truth.

“Don’t interrupt me. There’s no misunderstanding.”

Shiloh drove the point home with finality and silenced him.

“……”

“I was so angry I couldn’t sleep. And I was deeply hurt. But now I’m grateful. Because of you, I learned that someone who abandons you when things get hard is garbage not even worth recycling.”

“……”

Peter froze, stunned by her bluntness.

“And a man who does something worth apologizing for and then plays the victim…… is someone with no loyalty, no conscience, and nothing worth having. I wouldn’t take him if he were free.”

“Shiloh.”

Rowella’s eyes went wide and she moved to stop her, but Shiloh turned her gaze on her instead.

“So, Rowella, you have absolutely nothing to be sorry to me about. Though if you’d had a conscience, you wouldn’t have done any of this in the first place.”

“……”

Rowella’s pupils wavered at that.

Shiloh articulated her painful past and her feelings about it clearly and precisely, without shrinking or losing her composure.

Rowella looked down and twisted her lips into a cold smile.

“Anyway, setting all that aside, what I actually came here to say today was……”

Shiloh lifted her blue eyes and looked around at the assembled guests.

“……”

The room went still. Every face was tense, bracing for whatever revelation was coming next. Rowella chewed her lip anxiously.

Shiloh reached into her bag and pulled out a slip of paper with the address of her bakery written on it. She placed one in front of each person, one by one, then smiled with an expression of pure relief.

“Come find me here whenever you’re in the mood for good bread!”

Her classmates stared at her in silence, and Shiloh gave them all a small, easy smile.

“I have a mountain of things to do at the shop, so I’ll head out first. Enjoy the rest of your afternoon.”

Her business concluded, Shiloh’s heels clicked against the floor as she turned the corner and disappeared.

Most of those left behind in the parlor sat with their mouths open, looking dazed. Rowella kept her eyes carefully lowered, but the muscles in her face trembled faintly.

Peter leapt to his feet and looked around with anxious eyes before speaking.

“I think there’s been a lot of misunderstanding between everyone. I’ll make sure to sort things out properly with Shiloh.”

“……”

His explanation did nothing. Only murmuring and a cold, stiff atmosphere lingered in the parlor.

“Then I’ll just……”

In the end, Peter glanced around one last time and slipped out of the parlor at a near-run, as if fleeing.

The room he left behind had gone frigid, and contemptuous whispers passed between the guests along with the occasional hollow breath.

*

Shiloh had no particular interest in taking revenge on Peter, her former fiancé. If the two of them hadn’t been so rude, she wouldn’t have said any of it. Besides, Peter was fated, as the novel had written, to be dumped by Rowella in the most wretched fashion later on. When the time came for his downfall, she could simply watch the spectacle unfold with graceful detachment.

Shiloh was surprised at herself for acting so differently from the original Shiloh. By nature she was someone who suppressed her anger to avoid making a scene.

When she had found out that the ex who had ended things with her out of nowhere was now dating her closest friend at the company, she had been so devastated she couldn’t even bring herself to shout at them. She had left the company as if running away.

She had been afraid of saying something too harsh or making a scene, worried he would feel even more justified in leaving her. Afraid the two of them would laugh at her irrational behavior and feel victorious. Afraid the rumors would spread to everyone around her.

She had replayed every moment of the relationship endlessly, asking herself whether she had done something to put him off, blaming herself over and over again. Had she been boring, trying too hard to please him, always adjusting herself to earn his approval?

The more her thoughts spiraled, the further her self-worth plummeted.

‘I should have humiliated those awful people in front of everyone back then, the way I did today.’

Still, she had seen the looks on Rowella’s and Peter’s faces when they were caught off guard. The grudge she had never managed to settle felt, just slightly, like it had been put to rest.

It helped that this world was inside a novel.

Because she hadn’t yet fully claimed this sudden life inside the story as entirely her own, she had been able to say what needed to be said with more ease. In the form of the confident self she had sometimes imagined.

To be honest, the fact that it was someone else’s love triangle had allowed her to stay cool-headed and say her piece without losing her composure.

Her one goal here now was to make the confectionery a success.

What three years of devoted love had taught her was that developing her own abilities was far more worthwhile than pinning herself to another person. She could realize herself and earn money at the same time.

Shiloh stopped walking and looked up at the clear sky for a moment. Then she turned toward the confectionery, and her steps were lighter than they had any right to be.

*

Four in the morning, the next day.

Shiloh stretched herself awake and came downstairs to the ground floor. She washed her hands thoroughly, then under the dim light worked her practiced hands quickly, shaping bread and cookies.

Setting aside the loaves that needed a day or two to proof, she wanted customers to taste bread that had been shaped and baked the very same day, still warm.

When the dough placed in the oven began to swell beautifully, plump as a baby’s bottom, the shop filled with an irresistible aroma of nuttiness and sweetness.

Shaping bread and welcoming customers kept her busy, and two in the afternoon came quickly. Only then would she eat, making do with a rough sandwich, and she worked on until darkness settled over the streets.

After closing the shop, she threw herself into experiments to find ‘her own recipes’ until just before midnight. The longer those packed days continued, the more customers arrived by word of mouth, and with them came more work.

She was quietly proud of herself for living so diligently, but she couldn’t yet afford to hire staff, and her whole body ached without reprieve. One such day, rolling her stiff shoulders, a detail from the original story surfaced in her mind.

Her maternal ancestor had been a mage from the magic tower and a saintess, a combination that had never existed before or since.

In the original novel, after Shiloh took a leave from the Magic Academy and entered the underworld, she sold ‘magical medicines’ to clients through unofficial channels. She used a powdered substance left behind by that ancestor to create special medicines. When combined with other nutritional components, the powder produced effects that were genuinely magical, amplifying the existing properties of any substance by more than a hundredfold.

Combined with something good for fatigue, it restored stamina almost instantly. Combined with something good for the skin, blemishes vanished in no time. Of course, the effects had an expiration date, and in the original story dark magic had been added to amplify harmful properties a hundredfold instead. But still.

“It would be wonderful to get my hands on that……”

Shiloh dropped onto the worn attic bed, kneading her swollen legs, and murmured absently.

But in the novel, the ancestor’s relic was said to be inside a pond within Montewarre Castle, the imperial palace of the Amondi Empire. Going there without preparation meant either being seized by the palace guard knights or drowning. One or the other.

In other words, it was an artifact that only the original Shiloh, with her unique abilities, could obtain.

Shiloh smiled bitterly and turned a small stone over in her fingers, the one she kept beside the medicine box in the attic cabinet.