Not a single day had passed in the last year without him thinking of her. In fact, if you added up every moment she had been absent from his thoughts, it would not amount to a second. She had even appeared in his dreams.

Even then, the promise he had made to himself, to send a marriage proposal to her family after discharge, had not left him. He had planned to sort out the wreckage of his circumstances, secure some footing, and then go to the Flynn household himself with the proposal in hand……

“I’m Margie from the Flynn family. I’m so honored to meet you, Your Grace!”

The only and precious freedom he had carried inside him appeared before his eyes in person.

The Margie he met again after a year had shed every trace of girlhood and become a beautiful woman. Frederic wanted, more than anything, to cry out with joy and hold her tightly. Margie standing in front of him would never know, for the rest of her life, how much effort it cost him to hold that back.

“You’re…… here…… how…… why……”

Frederic could not hear a word she was saying, and had no idea what was coming out of his own mouth.

I’m shaking, d*mn it…… I’m shaking so hard I think I’m going to lose my mind!

“I heard that Your Grace has been in considerable difficulty because of debt.”

“Go on.”

He couldn’t let her see him stammering in front of a woman he cared for. He clamped his mouth shut to hide the trembling. The result, against his intentions, was a cold voice.

“From this moment on, not a single penny of the Graham family’s debt will remain.”

Margie snapped her fingers, and a man who had been standing behind her produced several documents and a fountain pen with perfectly compliant hands, holding them out to Frederic.

“What.”

Frederic startled. He had not noticed anyone else in the room. He had been looking only at Margie, entirely absorbed in her.

[Full Loan Repayment Confirmation: Graham]

“……What is all this supposed to mean.”

Looking back and forth between the note at the bottom of the document and the lovely Margie, Frederic narrowed his eyes, still not understanding.

“All Your Grace has to do is sign, and that debt becomes the property of this Margie Flynn.”

“The property of Margie Flynn?”

“Not just the debt. The Flynn family will guarantee Your Grace’s entire livelihood. At a high standard of living, without a single shortfall!”

Why do tragedy and hope always arrive at the same time.

“Hehe. That’s right. I’m proposing to Your Grace right now!”

Frederic felt a strange emotion he couldn’t place. He couldn’t freely rejoice in the miraculous reunion with her after a year, yet he couldn’t grieve over the wretchedness that had swallowed him whole either.

“Flynn will look after Your Grace, Duke Graham!”

The emotion was anger.

The fury that had ground down the inferiority, the deprivation, the sense of loss, all of it entirely warranted in that moment.

“……”

Rather than answering, he pressed his right hand to his forehead and closed both eyes.

“Oh? Your Grace……?”

Left with a silent Frederic, Margie tilted her head with an expression that said she couldn’t make sense of any of this.

He kept his eyes shut for a long time, biting down on his lower lip. Shame weighed on his eyelids and he simply could not open them.

I let the woman I love be the first to say the word proposal. I’m worthless. The most useless wretch in the world……

A staggering revulsion crashed through him alongside the feeling that something had gone very, very wrong. It seized his entire body.

A button fastened wrong from the very start.

The words echoed through his mind, a single cry with nowhere to go.

˗ˋˏ ♡ ˎˊ˗

The moment Margie Flynn finished signing the documents transferring all of the Graham family’s debts, the seizures on most of the land and the old castle within the duchy were lifted simultaneously. Free at last from every last debt, I found myself marveling at the kingdom’s swift administration while feeling, freshly and enormously, a fear of the Flynn family’s reach.

That fear was deeply unsuited to what I felt toward the woman I loved. It was a catalyst that contaminated my pure love.

Margie.

The day the first button between us was fastened so firmly and so wrong, I understood. The powerful urge to undo everything and start over from the beginning, properly this time.

But Margie, as you know, I am hopelessly inadequate when it comes to you. I didn’t know where to begin undoing a button I didn’t even know how to fasten, and honestly I didn’t have the courage to try. So I showed you nothing but my worst self. Like a broken failure, like a warped boy in the middle of adolescence……

The only way I could preserve what remained of my pride, back then, was to leave the bedroom every night instead of holding you close. Holding the woman I love while filled with rage. The thought alone is disgusting and ugly. I didn’t want to hold you like that, Margie. I knew nothing about love, but the feeling of loving you was unmistakable. And I had some dim understanding that love should never be forced into that shape.

It led to a very wrong outcome, though.

You doubted my love. You hired someone to investigate me behind my back. I found out later it was a private detective who specialized in catching evidence of affairs between married couples or lovers. An affair! How could my head be in any state to look elsewhere when I had someone as pretty and adorable and lovely and precious as you, someone I would give my life ten times over without a second thought? You followed my every move. The more you did, the more I made the mistake of letting vanity get the better of me and leaving you lonelier still. Coming home late on purpose. Spending pointless hours with foolish friends instead of returning to you. On the rare days I finished work early, refusing to go anywhere near the bedroom. I told myself the only thing I had left was an empty title, and keeping that hollow thing intact meant I had to do something stupid like that.

I should never have done it.

Who did I think I was, treating you that way……

Looking back now, I was truly……no better than an idiot. Every time I recall each moment I hurt you, I’m hit by an urge to disappear that I can’t do anything about.

A penniless duke sold for money.

People pointed fingers at me for abandoning my honor.

By that point even I had lost the thread. Was my body and soul bound to the Flynn family’s money? Had I ever truly loved my own wife? Did your bright smile bring me relief, or did it make me envious? Is love nothing more than this thin, shallow game of feeling?

The resolution to my wide and sweeping confusion, my distrust of myself, came in the most unexpected moment.

“Whoa whoa whoa……!”

Skreeee!

“Someone’s collapsed over here!”

A traffic accident near the Somerset villa. No one was hurt, mercifully, but the shock made Margie faint. Why she was there in the first place didn’t matter.

Please just open your eyes. Please just regain consciousness.

If you do that much, I will endure any sacrifice. For Margie!

I prayed. To a God I had never believed in.

The wish was granted, but……

“Who are you?”

In that moment I felt regret. God is a simple and mischievous being, and my prayer should have been more specific, more favorable to my circumstances.

Even so, I had no right to doubt God’s mercy.

“I really can’t remember anything. Forgive me, but would you tell me your name?”

The moment I saw your guileless face, having forgotten me completely, I knew it by instinct. A first and final chance given to me by a God who pitied my situation.

“My husband? Good heavens, I was married? When?”

Right. This is a chance. A chance to love Margie Flynn as she is, without restraint!

Calling it a chance while you’re lying there hurt is a terrible thing to do, but I have no words for it other than chance. I can only blame my pathetic way with words.

“Fre, derick! Mm! Too, big! It hurts! Hnng! Huk!”

“Did I not warn you beforehand. That I couldn’t promise it wouldn’t hurt, and couldn’t promise I wouldn’t make you cry.”

If I told you I had wanted to do this from the first day I saw you, would you call me an animal?

To press my lips to your neck and stroke your skin, to say filthy things, to make you wet and open with my own effort, to spend the whole night making you cry and then soothing you again and again until you could take all of me, behaving as shamelessly as I liked.

I love you, Margie.

I love you forever.

How could a love like mine for you be emptied out by a few trite words of confession.

Even so, I……

“I love you.”

I can only say again that I love Margie.

Without that much spilling out of me, my chest would burst or my mind would break.

I love you.

I love you, I love you.

I love Margie Graham, my first love, who became my wife……