The unsolicited opinions and commentary of people with no stake in the matter showed no sign of ending.

No one noticed.

“……!”

Frederic’s burning gaze had not left the white nape of Margie, who had only just come of age.

A summer peach ripened to perfection. An apple blushed red as dewdrops. A strawberry flushing crimson alone in a field of white snow. And……

“……A rose.”

A beautiful person who looked like the petals of a young, tender rose.

The word slipped out of him before he knew it.

Had he ever looked at an unfamiliar subject this long, this deeply? A person. A woman he had never seen before. Her skin, her lips, lingering on them like this……

Startled by a darkness and coarseness in himself he hadn’t known was there, Frederic turned his head sharply in the other direction. It was one of the small mercies allowed to him that no one caught the way both his ears burned red with something like shyness.

He bit down on his lower lip and lifted his eyes again, more careful and deliberate than before. His gaze chased after her. Obsessive, tenacious, like a man burning with fever who would die if he lost sight of her.

“……The shop Miss Flynn recommended has such a long wait……”

“……Three months and ten days just for the first fitting, they said……”

“……You’re lucky if you’ve even booked a fitting. I haven’t received this quarter’s catalogue yet……”

Extravagant and bold, yet without a trace of vulgarity, her presence drew eyes regardless of age or s*x. The way she smiled with crinkled eyes, then blinked those long lashes slowly, was almost bewitching.

What Frederic found most unbearable was that she had no idea how to wield her own charm.

“Miss Panton, you still haven’t seen the catalogue? Then take mine. If you’d like, I could give you next season’s as well……”

“Oh! That’s so kind of you, Miss Flynn!”

“Isn’t next season’s not out yet? How do you have it?”

“Oh, is it unreleased? I just assumed, since the dress designers and jewelry curators came to me directly and left their copies……”

“Of course. The tailors and jewelers all know their best clients.”

“Would you like to come up to my room right now?”

“Yes!”

Margie began climbing the staircase at the center of the hall. She gathered her long skirts with the poise of a proper young lady, but her skipping steps were entirely impish.

“Me too, Margie!”

“I want to see as well!”

“Of course. I’ll ask the staff to have my drawing room ready for guests. Just a moment.”

With each step she climbed, her slender ankles flashed briefly into view, and Frederic could not look away from her retreating figure.

She was someone who had known only the world’s generosity and warmth. Nineteen years old without a single misfortune behind her, a guileless young woman who had never once imagined the unhappiness that might come for her.

Her smile, nothing like her calculating father’s, was completely unguarded. The purity of a woman raised with nothing but tenderness showed through without pretense. Frederic found it the most unbearable thing about her, and felt a fierce impulse toward it all the same. The impulse was, startlingly, the desire to possess.

“Nobody’s going home tonight!”

Margie turned around and fixed the women following her with a look of mock severity.

“Because you’re all staying up with me!”

Her expression broke into a bright, childlike grin, and as she chattered on, her blue irises shone deep and clear as a lake.

Frederic was captivated, helplessly, by a woman whose full name he had only just learned, a woman he had met for the first time today.

Thud, thud, thud, thud.

He pressed his left hand over his own chest without thinking. Afraid, somehow, that she might hear the embarrassing sound from where she stood.

His vision swam. His ears rang. His head spun. A cold sweat traced down his spine while a thirst he had never felt before rose up and made him want to sink to the floor on the spot. Like a man struck by lightning in the middle of the road.

He had to admit it now. He had fallen completely for someone named Margie Flynn.

Frederic Graham had always considered himself the kind of person who looked for plausibility, for something convincing, in the supposedly overwhelming and unrealistic moment of falling in love. Now he found himself on the other side of that, and wanted to put the question back to his arrogant former self.

You who demanded a perfect narrative for love, are you even worthy of falling in love?

Love comes like a bolt of lightning. It arrives like a disaster.

Love is a tragedy without a story.

A natural catastrophe that slips through the cracks in your defenses with cunning precision, a tragedy.

The emotion is mine, clearly, and yet I, its owner, have no control over any of it. Everything moves as it pleases. The possessiveness, the jealousy, the sense of inadequacy…… What is this if not a tragedy.

To Frederic Graham, Margie Flynn was both disaster and blessing.

Lost in the confusion of an emotion he had never felt before, Frederic made up his mind. He would be her first dance partner. He would ask her to court him properly. And……

Once he was discharged and settled, he would send a marriage proposal to her family. She just had to wait one year.

Even he knew it was a shameless resolution, but there was no taking it back now. How could a man in his twenties, burning with his first love, pull back from a longing this stubborn?

Frederic leaned against the far end of the banister at the central staircase Margie had just climbed and waited for her.

The moment he admitted he had fallen in love with Margie, the party he had found unbearable transformed into a space full of anticipation. Feeling like this, he thought he could even receive Ian Flynn’s presumptuous posturing with the easy grace of someone treating it as a harmless joke.

Right. I went too far. There was no need to react that sharply. It’s true that my father has left debts too large to manage and is still troubling people by borrowing money.

Frederic was turning his head toward where Ian Flynn stood, intending to apologize for his excessive words.

“Lieutenant Graham.”

A man came rushing into the banquet hall and looked for Frederic in a hurry. He was the driver who had brought Frederic to the Flynn estate.

“I’m afraid you need to return to the ship immediately.”

Sweat poured from the driver’s forehead.

“Not now. Wait.”

Frederic had no intention of leaving before he danced with Margie. His head was already full of nothing but Margie, Margie, Margie.

“A message just came through. Your……”

The driver’s lips moved. He hesitated for a long moment.

“Your father, Duke Graham, has passed away……”

Love is a tragedy. Love is a disaster……

The hypothesis had become a certainty.

˗ˋˏ ♡ ˎˊ˗

There was no time to grieve. The loan sharks showed up at the funeral to demand repayment.

“How could he have thought to borrow from creatures like this instead of a proper financial institution.”

Frederic muttered, standing before the coffin, incredulous. The man who had been nothing but a burden while alive, who had seemed determined to torment him right up until the end, the man he had called father until a few days ago, now lay cold and still.

About a year after Harry Graham’s funeral.

The late duke’s second wife filed a claim against the Graham ducal household for her share of the inheritance. Most of the assets held under the Graham name were seized as a result.

Under the laws of the Kingdom of Oslande, the inheritance was to be divided equally between spouse and children, but the stepmother’s lawyers argued strenuously that this was deeply unfair. She claimed the deceased had carried on affairs throughout their marriage. On top of that, she produced a written pledge made during his lifetime, stating that he would give his wife the entirety of his assets as a settlement, and that document became the deciding factor in the case.

Before Frederic could find any recourse, the court ruled in the stepmother’s favor. What little the deceased had left behind was stripped away entirely and handed to her. He learned only later that the deceased had already taken out a substantial loan to fulfill the pledge and transferred the funds to her before his death. The stepmother’s legal team had kept that fact carefully hidden to secure a favorable verdict. They were, by all accounts, the finest lawyers in the kingdom.

Frederic inherited the family name and with it a debt of hundreds of millions. Titles like penniless duke and bankrupt Grace clung to his medals like filth.

Frederic Graham, around that time, was in no state to be called sane. Looking back now, the raw-nerved hypersensitivity and the obsessive fastidiousness that had overtaken him were probably what he would now call helplessness, or depression.

His military salary alone was not enough to cover the debt. He was approaching discharge, weighing extended service as a way to pay it down, when one day……

“Hello, Duke Graham, Your Grace?”

The person who came to find him was none other than Margie Flynn.

How did Margie know to come here!

Frederic barely managed to swallow the cry that tried to escape him.

He had lost his father, inherited a family and its debts, and in the middle of all of it the naval training was rigorous and relentless. The only freedom permitted to a man with nothing but obligations was Margie Flynn.