‘Still, today was quite fun, wasn’t it?’

She had seen a camera for the first time in ages, and it had brought back memories of the days she used to trail after her mother.

Alisa lifted the corners of her mouth. Smiling with her lips brought the life back to her watery eyes almost immediately.

She had been lucky enough to get an opportunity, and she had enjoyed it. That was more than enough.

˗ˋˏ ♡ ˎˊ˗

The estate she returned to after a long while was in chaos.

It was the result of a scene her great-aunt had caused while the two maids were taking their afternoon nap.

Her great-aunt had woken up in an unfamiliar room, convinced she had been kidnapped, and began wandering all over the house — and in the process, accidentally knocked over a candlestick and set Hannah’s room on fire.

The fire was put out before it spread to other rooms, but Hannah’s room had already burned completely to the ground.

That night, Alisa found a small slip of paper on her attic desk.

[Don’t worry, I’ll keep the clothes safe.]

‘It’s the gentleman!’

She knew the moment she saw it. His handwriting was distinctive enough that once you’d seen it, you couldn’t forget it.

‘But when did he come by?’

One thing was certain — he hadn’t come through the front door. She would have known if he had.

‘Then when?’

Alisa blinked and looked down at the note again. It said nothing more than that he would keep the clothes safe.

A thought struck her — today’s events had been too perfectly timed to be a coincidence.

Her great-aunt waking up at precisely that hour. The fire breaking out in Hannah’s room, of all places. And the one piece of furniture the fire had completely destroyed being the wardrobe where the dress had been stored.

‘……The gentleman didn’t start the fire, did he?’

Alisa furrowed her brow, then shook her head.

Surely not. How would he have known exactly which room was Hannah’s to begin with?

She shrugged and brushed the thought aside. Heaven must have taken pity on her and lent a small hand.

˗ˋˏ ♡ ˎˊ˗

The next day, news of a fire at his precious estate brought Uncle Robenson flying over like the wind.

He was deeply distressed that the estate — soon to be his — had been damaged, and he slashed both maids’ wages in half on the spot. It was an act of tyranny born from his certainty that they couldn’t find new work without a letter of recommendation.

Whatever the case, it made little difference to Alisa’s daily life.

Except for a few additions to her routine.

Every morning, the moment she opened her eyes, she combed through every corner of the attic. She climbed the creaking ladder — which sang a different note with every step — and checked all the way to the small storage space near the ceiling.

“Eden?”

……

“Eden, are you here?”

No answer came back.

Fourteen days now. The heartless Prince disappointed her every single time, but Alisa was not the sort to be broken by something like that.

She propped herself up on her elbows and hauled herself to her feet. She fetched the rag she had washed and hung on the windowsill the morning before, soaked it in the bucket of water she had set aside, and began scrubbing the floor. Her knees went red from crawling across the worn wooden boards. She didn’t stop.

She scrubbed harder than she ever had in any other room, and cleaned all the way under the furniture hidden beneath the old curtains. It had been weighing on her ever since she had shoved Eden into that dusty hollow to hide him.

‘I’ll do better when he comes next time.’

She would bring wildflowers to make it smell nice, and make sure there wasn’t a speck of dust to be found. And with the clothes she had been given as a gift, there would be no chance of being mistaken for a maid again.

Once the cleaning was done, it was time to write a letter.

She had spent a long while wondering what to give Eden when he came, but there was nothing she could offer besides a letter she had written herself. So Alisa had decided to write a little each day, collect the letters, and hand them all over at once.

‘I’m so glad I know how to write.’

Using an old book as a writing board, Alisa wrote out her crooked letters one by one. Today’s letter was an introduction to the neighborhood.

She added a short grumble at the end, then folded it into a clover shape. Two weeks’ worth of letters had already filled an entire box.

Could you really miss someone this much after meeting them only once?

Alisa was learning these days that the number of times you had met someone and the depth of feeling you had for them were not very closely related at all.

The image of Eden falling into this attic kept drifting before her eyes. Even while doing housework, whenever she came across something that wouldn’t have existed in his time, she thought of him again. She had been collecting those things one by one and bringing them up to the attic, and the treasure box had been stuffed full of odds and ends for some time now.

And that wasn’t all.

Even while working downstairs, the moment she thought she heard a sound from the attic, she would bolt up to check. She had fallen off the ladder in the process and the bruise on her knee had still not fully faded.

Before she knew it, the sun had risen outside the window.

“Heave-ho. Time to head down.”

Alisa stretched and went downstairs.

Her attic routine was finished, which meant it was time to attend to her uninvited guest.

She grabbed a piece of fish from the kitchen and headed around to the back of the estate. She trotted over and peered behind the bushes to find the white cat with the little bell lying there.

The cat was sprawled out without a care, licking its paw, and let out a mrrrow as if to say, hurry up and hand it over.

Alisa set the fish down in front of the cat and sighed.

“I told you not to come here!”

Mrow.

“You can’t keep coming. We’ll be in serious trouble if you’re found.”

Mrroooow.

“This is the last time. No food next time. Don’t come back, understood?”

Alisa widened her eyes and tried to put some force into her voice. But the white cat flicked its tail without so much as acknowledging her. It seemed to know perfectly well that she would come out with food again tomorrow.

Dismissed to her face, Alisa stuck out her lower lip and dropped down onto the ground.

“Why do you keep coming here…… You have a bell, so you must have an owner.”

She had seen it wandering near Madame Marigold, which suggested it belonged to one of the shop assistants. So why not go to its owner — why bother making the trip all the way here just to beg for food?

The cat was nibbling away at the fish bit by bit, and Alisa found it so irritating for no particular reason that she turned her back on it. From behind her came the sound of enthusiastic gnawing. The cat ate with such obvious relish that Alisa, just listening, felt her own stomach growl.

Eden, whom she was waiting for, never came. Only this aggravating cat showed up every single day.

Look at it. Already finished with the fish and about to leave without a backward glance.

She heard the rustling and turned her head, reaching out toward the cat as though she hadn’t just been ignoring it a moment ago. The white cat leapt lightly aside, dodging her hand with ease. Then it began to stroll unhurriedly down the hill.

“You’re leaving just like that? After eating everything?”

Mrroow.

“Fine! Go on then, all of you, just go!”

Alisa watched the cat’s swishing tail for a moment, then turned her gaze back toward the estate. The attic was visible beneath the brightening sky. Her chest ached with a dull, hollow feeling, and she quickly looked down.

She was doing everything she could, and yet the problems kept piling up day by day.

The matter of the contract with Madame Marigold was one of them.

The day after the advertising shoot, she had gone back to Madame Marigold. Far from thinking Alisa had ruined the shoot, Mrs. Ashford was more than satisfied. She paid a generous modelling fee and even went so far as to propose an exclusive contract on the spot.

But Alisa couldn’t sign the contract. She had no guardian to give consent.

Her father was gone, and her mother had left the house. Her uncle was technically her guardian, but she could hardly contact him when she was trying to save money in secret. In the end, Alisa had to turn and walk away with the contract sitting right in front of her.

And that wasn’t all. No matter how often she lingered around Madame Marigold and the hanging tree, the gentleman was nowhere to be seen lately, and she had no idea how she was supposed to see the attic Prince again.

Alisa, shoulders slumped, forced her eyes open. She shook her head to clear her thoughts and clenched both fists.