The butler hesitated for a moment before answering.

“Has not sent anyone since he went to the capital.”

“Are you saying he didn’t even try to seek my consent on such an important matter?”

That was quite natural.

Devon was confident that the Marquis would die soon.

“Father, please don’t be too shocked by what I’m about to say.”

“What else has happened?”

“Devon had your coffin made in advance.”

The Marquis, as well as the butler, was shocked by Lydia’s words.

Even if the Marquis was said to be on his deathbed, what kind of son would have his living father’s coffin made in advance?

How is this different from praying for your father to die quickly?

The Marquis clutched his head and eventually fell backward.

“Father!”

“Master!”

After a commotion, the Marquis regained consciousness.

Lydia sat beside the Marquis’s bed, holding his hand, and said,

“Devon doesn’t know yet that you’ve recovered, Father.”

Though Devon didn’t send anyone to him, he was receiving reports on the Marquis’s health condition from the physician at the lord’s castle.

The first thing Lydia did upon arriving at the lord’s castle in the marquisate was to confiscate the reports the physician had been sending to Devon.

“You should send someone to the capital to investigate. Your coffin is prepared in your bedroom.”

These matters needed to be handled with certainty.

The Marquis might have collapsed from shock now, but Devon was still the Marquis’s blood.

Perhaps the heir to the family whom he cherished even more than Lydia.

In that case, a desire to trust his son might bloom in Father’s heart.

Meanwhile, if Devon quickly removed the coffin, the Marquis might simply rationalize that Lydia had lied out of her sense of loss and move on.

The Marquis wanted the Evansi family to be continued by a “son” with “Evansi blood.”

That desire was stronger than expected, and Lydia had been brainwashed from childhood not to covet Devon’s position.

Lydia only realized after death that her desire to possess the family had been castrated early on.

That realization didn’t make her want to possess the family.

She would leave for somewhere warm in the south.

But just in case, she planned to place “her own person” in the family instead of Devon.

“I don’t want to be accused of causing discord later. So Father, you should definitely send someone to secretly confirm it.”

The first step of that plan was to create distance between Father and Devon.

* * *

While staying at the Evansi castle, the Black Wolf Knight Order and the rest of the party recovered from fatigue and took care of their health.

Byron, Nella, Maria, and Robert received medical treatment and took health supplements.

Color returned to their faces, and Arsen’s heart was at ease seeing the bright appearances of his former teacher and nanny whom he had missed so much.

“But is it okay for a priestess to spend money like this?”

“I’m here as the marquis’s daughter, not as a priestess.”

Maria and Lydia, who had become as comfortable as friends, went shopping with the allowance they received from the Marquis.

Most of their purchases were items for the baby-to-be.

Arsen had informed them that there weren’t many places to buy a variety of baby items in the border region.

People there generally made everything themselves, but Lydia didn’t want to do that.

She wanted to give only the best, absolutely the best, to Violet, who wasn’t born yet but whom Lydia would raise like her own daughter.

“Don’t say such things in front of Priest Byron. He thinks you’re devout, Priestess Lydia.”

“……Where do I look devout?”

And that was Lydia’s recent concern.

Byron was moved by Lydia’s choice to shed her noble facade and become a priestess of the lowest rank.

Lydia, who didn’t even pray morning and evening, was utterly perplexed.

She asked Arsen for help, but that disloyal knight dismissed it as “someone else’s problem.”

He even seemed to find Lydia’s predicament amusing.

“Where have you two ladies been?”

“Uh…? Sir Arsen.”

Speak of the devil.

She had just been mentally cursing Arsen, and now she ran right into him.

“You seemed awkward before, but you’ve become friends quickly.”

Kedrick, who was behind Arsen, commented on seeing Maria and Lydia arm in arm.

“Ah, we’ve formed a group.”

“A group?”

“Yes, a group of women with absolutely no luck with men.”

Maria burst into laughter at Lydia’s answer.

One was betrayed by the Emperor, and one was betrayed by some noble young master.

With similar wounds, they quickly became friends even though Maria didn’t remember Lydia.

“An interesting group.”

Where exactly? Arsen questioned his adjutant’s mental faculties.

“I’d like to join.”

“My goodness, Sir Kedrick, do you also have love wounds?”

When Maria asked, Kedrick looked at the distant sky and muttered, ‘she was a very bad woman.’

“But our group has an important rule, Sir.”

What is it? Can only women join? Since he had heard it called a women’s group earlier, Arsen made that assumption.

“You must vow never to love again.”

What kind of significant group requires such a vow?

Arsen couldn’t understand.

So does that mean Lydia will never love again?

Wouldn’t it be better to develop a better eye for men instead?

“By the way, Sir, did you have something to tell me?”

“Ah.”

Arsen, momentarily distracted by rising questions, remembered why he had approached Lydia.

“The person the Marquis sent to the capital has returned.”

“That was quick.”

Lydia immediately turned and headed toward the Marquis’s room.

“Not the bedroom, but the study.”

Arsen gently caught Lydia’s shoulder as she was about to run off, correcting her direction.

“The study?”

“I saw him walking earlier.”

Though he needed a cane, it was significant progress for the Marquis who had been bedridden all this time.

“I’m surprised he’s recovering so quickly.”

“Who’s talking……”

Arsen was the one who was surprised.

He had never heard even a rumor about someone recovering from the White Ghost disease.

“I only heard about it too, so I didn’t know the improvement would appear so quickly.”

Lydia, heading toward the Marquis’s study, suddenly looked up at Arsen.

Her clear, calm lake-like sky-blue eyes, resembling Devon’s but different, sparkled with curiosity.

“Do you believe me now?”

“If I hadn’t believed what you said, I wouldn’t have saved you, Lydia.”

“Tch, you just wanted to see how things would turn out because you were curious.”

Lydia pouted her lips and turned her head sharply, but a smile lingered on her face like an afterimage.

“Still, thank you, Sir Arsen. Without you, I wouldn’t have made it here and would have starved to death at the Marquis’s residence.”

She meant it sincerely. Whether he believed her or not, Arsen had been a great help.

“Last time, you asked why I agreed to Giselle’s adoption, right?”

One step back to move two steps forward. And now it was time to take one step forward again.

“This was my card. Even if Devon and I agreed, it wouldn’t matter if Father opposed Giselle’s adoption.”

The Marquis would certainly oppose it.

Devon wished for Father’s death, and Giselle, certain the Marquis would die, made a deal with Devon.

Who would want to grant the wishes of people who had a coffin made and were waiting for him to die?

Before Lydia could finish speaking, an angry shout erupted from the Marquis’s study.

“Go and cancel the adoption immediately! What adoption without the family head’s permission!”

* * *

The person secretly sent to the Marquis’s residence in the capital brought back two unexpected pieces of news.

First, there was a coffin in the bedroom.

Second, Devon had commissioned a tombstone from a sculptor.

He had asked the capital’s best sculptor to make it as luxurious as possible, and the Marquis didn’t know whether to be pleased or not.

“Giselle, that ungrateful thing. She shouldn’t have done this to me.”

Still, blood is thicker than water, and the Marquis cursed Giselle more than Devon.

He had willingly taken in an orphan who would have otherwise become a maid somewhere, fed her, and now she had backstabbed Lydia and even him.

“That’s right. Who does Giselle think made her a noble?”

Lydia agreed and added fuel to the fire.

She would have preferred if the relationship between Devon and the Marquis deteriorated further, but for now, she was satisfied with this much.

Relationships naturally become unmanageable once even a small crack appears.

“How could she do this without acknowledging Father’s grace? Even if Devon told her to get his permission because Father would die soon, Giselle should have at least pretended to send someone here.”

“It may be presumptuous, but Master, I also think Miss is right.”

When the butler took her side, Lydia smiled inwardly.

The butler and Giselle didn’t get along. Giselle had an ambiguous position in the lord’s castle.

The secretly greedy Giselle tried to seize power by exploiting the fact that she was, albeit distantly, of the Marquis’s bloodline.

She tried to act as the lady of the lord’s castle in the Marquis’s absence, and the butler, who had managed the lord’s castle for generations, resented it.

“I apologize to Miss Lydia, but isn’t it all thanks to Master that Miss Giselle is now meeting His Majesty the Emperor?”

“That’s right. If Father hadn’t taken in Giselle, she would never have even seen Richard’s face.”

“If she’s becoming Empress that way, shouldn’t she first think about repaying her debt to you, Master? If it were me, I would have searched the entire Empire to find a way to cure Master’s illness.”

Oh, Lydia inwardly admired this. She hadn’t thought that far.

But hearing it, the butler was right.