The round, egg-like forehead and the moonlight resting on his cheeks dissolved the day’s fatigue every time he saw them.

Would Miss Mora look like this at night too. No, she was less like an egg and more like the moon itself.

Daniel smiled to himself and reached to pull up Eden’s blanket. Something rustled beneath it. He lifted the covers to find the small-winged goose from Saturday’s drawing. The large wings Iris had sketched over it were still there.

Looking at the drawing, crumpled from the child’s tossing, Daniel thought of Iris again. However little experience he had with women, those two had clearly not looked like a normal couple. Putting the word ‘lovers’ to that kind of top-down dynamic seemed like a considerable stretch. And when Daniel had asked if they were acquainted, Iris had only looked uncertain. The President hadn’t answered.

Daniel worked out the date of the auction he had agreed to attend as a favor to a fellow associate professor. The President would certainly be there.

❖ ❖ ❖

Through the pale haze of cigarette smoke drifting and dissolving over the paper, he could see her hand.

A small hand and an even smaller one. Three people connected, hand to hand.

“……”

Carlyle looked up from the compact little cluster.

His hand brought the cigarette back to his lips and he drew another breath, and this time the backs of three people spread out before him.

By all accounts, Iris Mora should have had no family bond whatsoever with the brown-haired father and son. Yet sitting among them, she looked natural and at ease, as though she had always belonged there. If someone asked him to explain what ‘family’ meant, the three of them, each distinct yet bound together like a set designed from the start, would make a rather good answer.

It reminded him of the ducal family he had watched only through windows as a child. He had not been included among the ducal ‘family.’ Even on a university campus, he had observed family from beyond the invisible wall that divided him from them.

He had never wished to form that kind of bond with anyone. His assessment was that society placed excessive value on ‘family.’

There was no shortage of evidence for how fragile blood alliances were. The primary cause of their dissolution was profit expressed in numbers, and Carlyle, who held an uncountable quantity of those numbers, had always looked down on that spectacle from above.

Family love, counted among things that could not be priced, was clearly the kind that could be bought with money.

“……Sir. Are you tired?”

Only after arriving at his own conclusion did Carlyle hear the employee’s voice.

The ten staff members seated in a row on either side of the table, mid-report, came back into focus.

“Three hours in, so it’s understandable.”

Everyone was looking at him with a mixture of bewilderment and mild concern.

The President’s mind had wandered during a meeting.

“You’re already busy enough with your romantic ventures, and now you’re even busier.”

“Ha ha, my apologies. Let’s go back to the fragrance division.”

Carlyle answered the employee’s joke with a quiet laugh, pressed the nearly finished cigarette into the ashtray, and picked up the documents again.

The meeting ran for another two hours after that. Once the social season began, department store business meetings running late into the night were nothing unusual.

When everyone had filed out of the office, Ruben began opening the windows to clear the air thick with cigarette smoke.

Carlyle was reviewing the meeting notes and reaching for the bell to ask another secretary for coffee when,

“Um…… sir.”

Without the bell being rung, the female secretary knocked on the slightly open door and put her head in.

“Good timing, Esther. I’m sorry, but could you brew a cup of coffee before you head home?”

“Of course. But…… there’s a visitor waiting.”

It was eleven at night. The word ‘visitor’ at this hour made Ruben, who had been opening the windows, turn toward the door where Esther stood.

“……Who?”

Carlyle looked up from his documents and over at Esther.

“It’s Miss Mora.”

Esther’s expression as she announced the visitor looked slightly uncomfortable.

Carlyle’s brow shifted slightly. Only after Esther asked what she should do did he nod.

“Good evening, sir.”

Esther and Ruben left as Iris came in.

Wheat-colored hair pinned up in a style that aged her by ten years. White blouse, grey skirt. A worn leather bag and shoes.

Without the widower and child beside her, the wall that had stood between them was gone. Iris, visible and clear, was surrounded entirely by things that could be easily purchased.

Carlyle studied her for a moment, then curved his blue eyes.

“Good evening, Miss Mora.”

“……Yes.”

The greeting was warm, but the expression receiving it was dry.

“When did you arrive?”

Carlyle asked with a glance toward the window, but she didn’t answer.

“……Sit down.”

It wasn’t difficult to sense that she had come with a significant grievance. The article in today’s Comus, which had been pushed to the back of his mind by department store business, surfaced.

“I’d rather stand here.”

Sure enough, Iris didn’t move an inch closer to him.

“As you like.”

Carlyle smiled faintly and nodded.

“You knew, didn’t you.”

Iris’s voice was sharp, cutting straight to the point without hesitation.

“Knew what?”

“That my personal information would end up in an article.”

“I’m not sure. I don’t involve myself in other people’s businesses.”

“Articles about you appear in that publication regularly.”

“So? I appear in many places regularly.”

“……Don’t play with words. You know what I’m saying.”

Only then did Iris’s brow crease.

That look in her eyes, still not grasping who held the highest position in this arrangement.

Carlyle leaned back into his chair.

“This means I’m not just attending events as your partner. I have to actually live as your lover.”

“And you dislike that?”

“Yes!”

“Why?”

“Because I want to live as Iris Mora, not as the President’s lover or the President’s ex-lover!”

Her name?

The corner of Carlyle’s mouth tilted.

Growling like this to protect a name that wasn’t even a royal one, just plain Iris Mora.

Compared to his previous lovers, Iris would certainly be trapped in his shadow for quite a long time. Because she had no color of her own.

Thinking of it that way, he felt oddly satisfied. It was something like breaking in a horse that had never been saddled, training it to the rider’s rhythm. Even if another rider were to mount it later, the horse would remember the breathing of the first.

“This is a breach of contract. You clearly said I only needed to follow you to events in the capacity of your lover. So shouldn’t you have at least warned me this could happen, or prevented it from happening?”

“Ha ha ha, Iris.”

She was less easy to handle than expected. Carlyle laughed.

“You said yourself that articles about my private life are nothing new. You didn’t think of that? Do I have to anticipate and account for my employee’s ignorance in advance?”

“……”

“And I’m sorry, but I don’t have the gift of prophecy. How was I supposed to know what article Comus would write and stop it? Even if I’d asked them not to, that would only be a request, not something I could enforce.”

That’s how business works.

Carlyle gathered the documents on the table as he added that. Iris, at a loss for words, asked after a long pause.

“……What exactly do you want from me?”

The President had no apparent intention of apologizing.

Carlyle Berthheimer was a distinguished gentleman mentioned even in Volterran newspapers. But signing on the spot, trusting nothing but the weight of that name, had clearly been her mistake. Her financial situation hadn’t given her time to think it through carefully.

Still, the President was equally evasive. Someone who could pay that kind of money so easily could just as well hand over a cancellation fee and be done with it. He was keeping the contract going even as she stood here raising her voice at someone as important as him. Why.

“Is it because of the necklace? You, Mr. Brandon, Sir Bardo. What is the connection between the three of you?”

Iris’s palms were damp as she finally asked. It felt like touching something she shouldn’t.

Carlyle Berthheimer and Michel Bardo were among the most powerful figures in their respective countries. Davis Brandon’s political influence was unclear, but he was someone who controlled Lafreia’s rumors. She didn’t know exactly what was being set in motion, but the three of them felt connected, with the necklace at the center.

“Wrong question. It should have been why, not what the connection is.”

So the doctor’s mind isn’t only in the brother.

Carlyle’s expression remained unhurried as he opened the cigarette box on the table and drew one out.

“Michel Bardo is a politician with the Emperor’s confidence, and every business owner who wants to expand into Volterra needs to stay in his good graces.”