“I didn’t know what you liked, so I chose for you.”

Carlyle came back to the table with two filled glasses and slid one toward Iris.

The scent of whiskey reached her the moment it came close. Her body recoiled so sharply she knocked against the back of the sofa. Her expression froze solid.

“……You don’t like whiskey?”

Carlyle looked mildly surprised as well. Surely not drinking was one thing, but to flinch like that.

“Y-yes…… I can’t drink……”

The effort Iris was making to smooth out her stiffened expression was plain to see. Carlyle simply pulled her glass back to his side of the table.

Ruben returned while Carlyle was still exchanging a few more idle words with Iris. He set the food he had brought on the table and left again.

“What is it you…… wanted to say?”

The moment she saw the food, Iris got to the point. Even with the President making some effort to be hospitable, she looked eager to be out of here.

Carlyle, who had taken a sip of whiskey, reached for the cigarette box on the table instead of picking up any cutlery.

“I’d like to hire you, Miss Mora.”

The clean metallic ring of a lighter sounded, and the cigarette caught.

“……Hire me?”

Iris narrowed her eyes in puzzlement, watching the long stream of smoke drift from between Carlyle’s lips.

What could a teacher possibly do for him.

“I need a model like you.”

“A model…… me?”

The President kept saying things she couldn’t follow. Iris’s head tilted slightly.

“The models I’ve hired up until now have usually been entertainers, but this time I think a blank canvas is what’s needed.”

“……”

Blank canvas.

From that one phrase alone, it wasn’t hard to guess what quality he had seen in her when he chose her. Iris fidgeted with her clasped white hands.

“Please don’t take it badly. Modeling is a profession that exists to make a product shine, isn’t it?”

“……That’s true……”

“So someone like you might be just the right fit. I’m not asking to take time away from your school hours.”

“Yes……”

It sounded like a compliment, yet it was the kind of phrasing that made you stop and think it over again.

Carlyle took another unhurried drag of his cigarette.

“Starting next week, you’d accompany me to various events. I’ll take care of everything you need.”

“I just have to go along?”

It didn’t sound bad. She was in need of a side income. Her main salary alone was nowhere near enough to cover her brother’s tuition, and the amount kept ballooning at an impossible rate. Keeping pace with something was something she was good at. She was beginning to think that meeting this man might actually be lucky.

At least, until Carlyle opened his mouth again.

“That’s right, though the one thing to keep in mind is that you’d be attending as my lover.”

“……Pardon?”

This was a different matter entirely.

His lover?

“What do you mean by that?”

“Exactly what it sounds like. Not that I’m proposing we actually fall in love. I’m asking you to play the part.”

Carlyle smiled the way someone does when telling a light joke and exhaled a breath of smoke. Iris’s eyes, however, had begun to waver.

“Ha ha ha, don’t look at me like I’m some kind of scoundrel. Nobody condemns an arranged marriage, do they? Isn’t this better than that?”

Seeing Iris’s expression, Carlyle stubbed out the finished cigarette in the crystal ashtray on the table and let out a short laugh. Iris’s gaze, which had been fixed on him, drifted toward the cooling food.

His words did seem to have a point. Choosing a lifelong partner, someone you swore love to before God, purely on the basis of self-interest might be the worse thing. Her thoughts grew tangled.

While her brow twisted with the weight of it, Carlyle opened the drawer of the side table and took out a checkbook and pen.

“Three months. The advance is around this much.”

He tore out the check with the figure written on it and slid it toward her. Iris’s eyes went wide when she saw the amount.

“When the job is done, I’ll pay ten times that.”

“……T-ten times?”

Iris’s brow crumpled hard.

The advance alone was staggering, and ten times that on top of it. It was not a sum anyone could earn through ordinary work. With that money, Henry’s tuition was the least of it. She could see him through to graduation and opening his own practice without a problem. After that, she could save her own salary steadily and build a foundation to stand on her own.

Nobody condemns an arranged marriage. As long as the school never found out she had been paid to play a role, she wouldn’t lose her job.

Iris’s heart began to pound.

‘Henry.’

She turned her brother’s name over in her mind.

‘It’s for children who got sick young, like me, sister.’

Henry had no idea that the reason he had been ill as a child was because of her. That was why she was someone who had to do whatever it took for him.

Iris’s gaze moved to the whiskey glass in front of Carlyle.

“I’ll come to pick you up in front of the school when you finish work tomorrow.”

Carlyle spoke, as though he had read the decision forming in Iris’s eyes. His low, resonant voice carried a note of satisfaction.

“……Tomorrow?”

“You have to build anticipation before a debut.”

This time, as he held out the contract, his blue eyes curved softly.

❖ ❖ ❖

True to his word, Carlyle came to pick Iris up every single day for a week as she left work. Deliberately wandering the upscale boutique district before taking her home, fitting her for new dresses and shoes, was all part of his plan.

It was only natural that her fellow teachers, and anyone else who witnessed the scene, grew curious about the two of them. There was little in the way of warm conversation passing between them, but raising everyone else’s expectations was a success.

“……”

Iris stared quietly at her own reflection in the mirror.

A week of preparation for the show had come to an end, and Friday, the night of the first party, had arrived. Before heading to the venue, they had stopped at a boutique for her to be dressed.

Carlyle sat in the wingchair behind her, holding a cigarette and reading something as he always did. With his hair styled and his tuxedo immaculate, he was devastatingly handsome, though she wasn’t paying much attention to that.

She was nervous in a way that felt almost like a debutante ball. The opposite of a shy young noblewoman stepping out to a party in hopes of a fated romance. Her debut trembled with nothing but worry and anxiety about whether she could be worth what that man had paid.

Iris needed money, and no side job in existence could match what Carlyle was offering. Thinking of Henry again, her lashes lowered gently.

“What a slender waist you have.”

“Everything suits you so well.”

The boutique staff, whom she had been seeing all week, kept exclaiming over Iris’s slight frame as they worked on the evening gown.

Over ivory silk that followed the lines of her body, thick rope-like embroidery in the same color curled in waves like her own hair. Between the curves, small transparent diamonds scattered like dust on a fairy’s wings.

White skin, wheat-colored hair, light brown eyes, a look defined by muted tones throughout, yet the dress Carlyle had chosen himself was sophisticated and vivid in a way she was not. Wearing it, she was entirely different too. The blurred teacher had become something else, a marble goddess drawn up from the sea.

‘This time I think a blank canvas is what’s needed.’

Iris recalled what Carlyle had said to her.

I was that blank canvas.

The picture he had painted over her was not yet finished, and already she carried a presence that was unmistakably changed. The way a great painter’s skill can be measured from the sketch alone.

To combine muted colors this perfectly, the world he lived in must be filled with nothing but beautiful, luxurious things. Only those who lived in such a world could have this kind of eye, Iris was thinking, when a staff member caught her gaze in the mirror and smiled warmly.

“The dress is nearly finished. Once you add the jewelry, you’ll look absolutely beautiful.”

“……This dress…… is all there is? Surely there’s something else to put on?”

“We don’t have anything else here…… Don’t you like it?”

Iris’s eyes went wide.

It wasn’t a question of liking it. Her chest was bare. Her arms were practically on full display too, though at least there was chiffon over them. To her, this was no different from being undressed.

Flustered, Iris’s lips moved soundlessly as she quickly pressed both hands to her chest.