“……Is this magazine…… well-known, Miss Berni?”

Without answering Olivia’s question, Iris met her eyes, and her voice was unsteady.

“Good heavens, Iris! All of Lafreia is going to know now! That’s the kind of magazine Comus is!”

“That kind of…… magazine?”

“The kind that knows exactly what everyone, noble or common, actually wants to know! It probably outsells the newspaper!”

“……”

What the public wants to know. A famous man’s new lover.

‘The President who never gave any lover more than one meeting a week, now seeing a woman every day.’ ‘The foreign teacher who made the most eligible bachelor in Lafreia fall in love.’ ‘The charming Volterran girl who has captured the duke’s heir.’

The article was full of that kind of charged language. It was a portrait of Iris, assembled from fragments of what she and Carlyle had said at the party, freely reinterpreted.

Looking at the illustration again with that in mind, the necklace looked impossibly lovely. As though Carlyle had truly treasured her enough to give it.

“Iris. Are you really involved with Mr. Berthheimer like that?”

Olivia pressed for an answer as Iris stared blankly at the article.

Only now did Iris understand, with full force, what it meant to become Carlyle Berthheimer’s lover.

His name was on everyone’s lips, and so would hers be. From today onward, Iris Mora and Carlyle Berthheimer’s lover were the same word. The choice she had made to step away from her life as Henry Mora’s guardian had pinned a new label to her.

What exactly did the President want from her. To create the impression that even an ordinary woman could make him fall in love?

His words about needing someone like a blank canvas echoed in her ears. It wasn’t just about having no color. He had been looking for someone with truly ‘nothing.’ Because she had nothing, painting her with the color of being his lover had been as easy as cutting through soft cake.

“……”

Iris lifted her head and looked around.

Near the school gate, people who looked like journalists were stealing glances at her. The President must have known it would come to this. Hadn’t he spoken about it at the party last week as though it were nothing at all.

“……I’ll tell you more later.”

The look in Iris’s eyes as she handed Comus back to Olivia was sharp.

If she remembered correctly, his office was near the Royal Museum.

❖ ❖ ❖

“Welcome home, young master.”

The butler greeted Daniel with a sympathetic expression as he came home near the turning of the moon. He took the briefcase from Daniel’s hand, offering what small comfort he could.

“Ah, thank you. Is Eden asleep?”

The first person Daniel always asked for was Eden.

“He waited as long as he could and then drifted off. But the mistress……”

“Is that my youngest back?”

The butler’s message was cut short by the voice of Daniel’s mother, Jane.

She was sitting on the sofa in the drawing room beside the lobby, drinking wine. The firelight moved through her neatly pinned grey hair.

“Why are you still up. Goodness, aren’t you warm with the fireplace going in this weather?”

“You think you won’t get old?”

Daniel sat down beside Jane, who was giving him a playful look. He was already shrugging off his jacket.

Jane watched her grown youngest son for a moment, then refilled her empty wine glass.

“From the look on your face, you haven’t read Comus.”

“Comus…… oh, that sensational rag?”

“That’s the one. I know it’s the only reading material you have no interest in.”

“Why, is there something interesting in it? Did they find a new ruin?”

“That’s not usually what people mean by interesting, son.”

Jane clicked her tongue and opened that day’s issue of Comus, holding it out to him. Daniel took the magazine with one hand while reaching for his mother’s wine glass with the other. The glass stopped at his lips, though, because he had begun to read the article on the open page.

“Isn’t that the person they’re calling the President’s lover, Eden’s homeroom teacher?”

“……Yes.”

“Oh dear, my poor son. After following her around so faithfully.”

“I, I wasn’t following anyone……”

“You’d do well to keep Eden quiet if you want to fool me. I knew there was a woman a long time ago.”

“……Ha……”

Daniel dropped his head, ears burning red. It felt like being doused with cold water.

How could I have dared, with Miss Mora.

Daniel let out a hollow, rueful laugh. He had never regretted becoming Eden’s father. But there was no stopping the slight bitterness in his mouth. Iris was the first woman he had ever held feelings for.

“It never lasts long with him. You don’t pay attention to other people’s business, so you might not know, but they always end quickly.”

Jane seemed to have read her son’s thoughts and nudged his calf lightly with her foot.

“When that time comes, try again. What do you lack compared to the President? You’re tall, you’re handsome, and you’re so kind. A baronet is still a title, and the Dupree family has one. You don’t have as much money as the President, but…”

“I’m a single father, Mother. And that title and estate will go to my brother.”

“What does that girl have to offer? She lost her parents young, and she’s only twenty-one, isn’t she? She’s not going to marry the President, so she’ll be a spinster again soon enough.”

“……”

Daniel hesitated for a moment, then opened his mouth carefully.

“……Doesn’t that bother you?”

It was something he had kept buried, unable to bring out.

Even if things went well by some great stroke of luck, would his mother accept her.

“……Daniel. When your sister left us so suddenly, do you know what I regretted most?”

“……”

“Letting her study nursing, the thing she wanted so badly. If she had, perhaps she might have caught that kind of illness before it was too late……”

A deep, raw grief settled over Jane’s face.

The title had barely been kept through the dowry she had brought. Her husband’s family, having survived the crisis, had gone on to prosper, and Jane had become a baronetess.

A lady of noble birth must not work.

Having risen from common birth to nobility, she had never freed herself from that stale way of thinking. The pressure to live according to her station had cost her daughter everything.

Even a mere baronetcy is still nobility. Jane despised herself bitterly for it.

“In the end, it was I who invented a sin you never committed. So live as you please. I’ll handle your father.”

“There’s no sin, Mother. I have none.”

“If your sister and her husband had lived, you wouldn’t have had to take Eden in and live as a single father……”

“Mother!”

Daniel’s sharp voice rang through the dim drawing room, the firelight wavering.

“Eden is my son. Don’t let that slip in front of the boy, even by accident.”

Daniel was always an easygoing son, but he was sensitive about anything involving Eden. Since registering his sister’s child as his own son at eighteen, Daniel had accepted reality with a serenity that made it seem like his fate. At first it had been to ease his mother’s guilt over a grandchild who would grow up without parents. But as the child grew, something like paternal love had grown alongside him, in a way that surprised even Daniel. Whether by God’s joke or blessing, Eden took after his uncle Daniel far more than his father.

Daniel loved Eden enough that rumors about a top university student fathering a child before marriage didn’t trouble him in the least.

“……Don’t worry. Do you think Eden is only your son?”

“……I’m sorry for raising my voice.”

“Anyway, I don’t care who you see, so bring home a woman who likes you. Not one you like alone.”

“……That’s the hardest part.”

Daniel recovered his smile at last, rose, kissed Jane on the cheek, and left. As he walked, the contents of Comus came back to him.

The magazine spoke as though the two were caught in a fated romance. Yet nothing about the two of them he had seen on Saturday suggested any such relationship. Attaching the word ‘lovers’ to what looked like a strictly vertical arrangement seemed like quite a stretch. On top of that, when Daniel had asked whether they were acquainted, Iris had only looked uncertain. The President hadn’t answered either.

The social party mentioned in the article was last Friday. He had seen the two of them the following day, Saturday. If the President’s lovers never lasted long, had they already parted after a single day.

Unable to decide whether to feel glad about a parting from a woman he cared for or to offer sympathetic comfort, Daniel made his way to Eden’s room on the second floor.

He opened the door gently and stepped inside. Only the child’s steady breathing filled the room. Drawings covered the silk-papered blue walls, surrounding the sleeping boy. Among them was one of Iris’s. As he always did, Daniel swept his gaze across the wall, then perched on the edge of the bed and looked down at Eden.