Everyone fell silent at the sorry sight.

But even that seemed to fall short for the woman with the gentlest impression in the room.

A small lambskin shoe with a rounded toe crept forward slightly.

Then, in a show of pretended accident, it quietly ground down on the wreckage of the tart.

“……”

Apricot jam, vivid red-orange, smeared across the clean beige shoe. It was almost possible to hear the sound of a pastry chef weeping somewhere in the background.

The little foot, peeking out from beneath the hem of the skirt as though inviting everyone to come look at the stain on its shoe, drew Chad Hughes’s gaze, and he finally let out the laugh he had been holding back. Jeremy, one of the knights who had come with them and was standing beside Sir Siermaiem, let out a disbelieving scoff.

“Oh my, what do I do?”

There was no way she had not heard that duet, yet the beauty with amber eyes paid it no mind and delivered her line with the air of someone who had prepared it in advance.

“They were new shoes, too. How upsetting.”

It was a performance so poor it went beyond bad and into the realm of the absurd. Chad Hughes’s face lit up with even greater delight.

Among all the ladies who had approached in every imaginable manner, this particular method was a first. He had assumed she would drop a handkerchief, given how quietly she had been watching from her corner in the shop, but he had been entirely wrong.

The woman, far bolder than he had expected, seemed to have set her sights on making the other party produce his handkerchief rather than dropping her own.

Sir Siermaiem, who appeared to have caught on even before Chad did, looked steadily at the owner of that pitiful performance.

The gaze lingered a moment too long. Chad’s eyebrow crept up slightly as he caught it.

I thought he would sigh. Or ignore her entirely and hand her off to Jeremy without even making eye contact.

Because the Young Lord Siermaiem was the sort of dull man who had no patience for this kind of overture. Chad had been certain he would put on the mask of a proper gentleman and deliver a polite but firm refusal. And yet.

“…What a shame.”

Contrary to expectation, Curtis murmured in a low voice.

“It was an apricot tart.”

Something is different.

Just as Chad raised his other eyebrow at his superior’s manner, which seemed slightly off in a way that went beyond the words alone and extended to his gaze as well, Curtis spoke again.

“Jeremy.”

Whatever had been detectable in Curtis’s face a moment before vanished without a trace.

The words that followed were so unremarkable that they seemed to say Chad’s sense of something unusual had been nothing but his imagination.

“The lady has found herself in a difficult situation.”

On the surface, it sounded like the words of a gentleman concerned for a lady. But the true intent was nothing more than passing off a woman who had shown interest in him to the knight beside him.

The sharper ladies of the social circles could not have missed that cold undercurrent.

Most ladies who experienced the Young Lord Siermaiem’s indifference firsthand, having only heard of it before, would flush and withdraw. More than a few would shake their heads at Jeremy when he stepped forward to help, and leave behind even the handkerchief they had deliberately dropped.

Jeremy was well accustomed to that kind of situation. Even so, he could not ignore what was in front of him, could not ignore the lady’s predicament, and drew a handkerchief from his br*ast pocket.

“It isn’t much, but if this might be of any help…”

Neither Jeremy, who had offered the handkerchief, nor Chad, who was watching from the sidelines, nor even Curtis, who had passed the matter off to his retainer, expected it to be accepted.

“Thank you.”

But once again, something unexpected happened.

Jeremy’s handkerchief was not refused. His hand was not left hanging in embarrassment the way it always was.

The woman accepted Jeremy’s clean handkerchief with a polite manner and gave a small bow of her head. Jeremy, staring at her in a daze, found himself returning her thanks before he knew it.

“I’m Eleanor, of the Aster family.”

The lady introduced herself with her long lashes lowered, and her voice matched the impression her appearance gave. Jeremy, who had paused for a moment at the voice, gentle as a spring breeze, quickly offered a suitable reply.

“I’m Jeremy, of the Moretz family.”

“When I return your handkerchief, would it be all right to call you Sir Jeremy?”

“Ah… please think nothing of the handkerchief, but if a lady were to call me that, it would be an honor.”

Eleanor gave a soft smile at his visible flustered state and his earnest effort to respond with courtesy regardless. A faint flush rose in Jeremy’s cheeks.

Chad, who had been watching the whole thing from the position of a bystander up until that point, felt a small twinge of displeasure.

I should have been the one to offer it.

It was a moment that made him regret the past, when he had started delegating to Jeremy to spare himself the embarrassment of being refused every time.

“Well then…”

Unaware of Chad’s private regret over his past foolishness, Miss Eleanor turned away with grace. A faint sweetness of apricot drifted in the light air she stirred.

Jeremy stood staring in the direction she had disappeared, like a bee drawn in by the scent.

“Jeremy Moretz.”

It was then. Curtis, who had been looking at the crushed tart on the floor, called his retainer’s name in a low voice.

“How old are you this year?”

“This year?”

The knight, still caught in the lingering scent Eleanor Aster had left behind, asked back with a slightly vacant look before answering.

“My birthday passed last winter, so I’ve just turned twenty-seven.”

“Old.”

“Pardon?”

The bewilderment in Jeremy’s voice quickly gave way to indignation. Chad, who had been standing beside him staring in the same direction Eleanor had gone, replied on his behalf with an air of disbelief.

“Twenty-seven is the same age as you, sir.”

“I know.”

Unlike the two of them, Curtis had not spared so much as a glance toward the door she had slipped through. He murmured, still staring at the small footprint pressed into the tart.

“That’s exactly what I mean… too old.”

***

Thud. The moment Eleanor climbed into the waiting carriage and pulled the door shut, she collapsed into the seat.

The tension she had been holding, in case he might be watching through the wide window, released all at once, and a long breath escaped her. Without thinking, Eleanor brought her hand to her chest and felt her heartbeat.

Thump, thump. Her heart raced with a vigor that made it hard to believe it would stop in three years. Eleanor breathed slowly and deeply, working to calm the pulse she could feel through her trembling palm.

First, breathe in deeply, hold for three seconds, then breathe out slowly over five seconds.

She repeated the cycle several times, and the heart that had been pumping blood in ragged bursts gradually found its rhythm again. Her reason returning along with it, Eleanor let her head fall back against the carriage wall.

But unlike her chest, which had barely managed to settle back to a normal beat, her flushed cheeks refused to cool.

I did it. Eleanor murmured to herself, turning over what had just happened, which already felt strangely distant.

I made Sir Siermaiem learn my name and family.

That had been the central purpose of the first plan, so even with the small missteps along the way, it was as good as having achieved her goal.

Eleanor smiled, praising herself inwardly for the shamelessly brazen figure she had cut just now, and for having pulled it off in her own way all the same.

It was nothing more than safely climbing the first step. Behind the joy she felt at something so small was the realization, arriving a little late, of what else the goal had accomplished as a side effect.

He now knows my name. To him, I am no longer just one of countless women, but a single distinct individual.

Even if he forgot her right away, even if the odds of that were greater than the odds of him remembering, that fact itself mattered enormously to Eleanor.

Because even if every plan falls apart and ends in failure, when my funeral notice appears in the newspaper someday, he might notice my death.

The mere possibility of that was enough to make Eleanor feel something swelling large inside her chest.

That feeling made her feet twitch. Stop that. Eleanor caught herself about to stamp her feet without dignity, the way the children she used to teach would, and gave herself a quiet reprimand.

But her restless body followed the voice of her heart instead of the commands of her head. Her eyes drifted downward, and there in her line of sight were her beige shoes, toes lifted as though ready to dance.

I’m not a child. Eleanor laughed softly at herself for being unable to contain her excitement, and looked at the red-orange stain on her new shoes.

Can it be cleaned? She thought it over for a moment, then realized belatedly that she was still holding the handkerchief the knight who had been standing beside Curtis had given her. She bent down and carefully wiped the sticky apricot jam from the shoe with the clean white cloth.

But no matter how carefully she wiped, the light-colored leather, already stained through, would not return to its original ivory.

I did buy these shoes with this in mind, but… now that they’re actually ruined, it feels like a waste.

That thought lasted only a moment before Eleanor folded away the regret, deciding that even this mark could remain as a trace of today.

She folded the handkerchief neatly once it had done its work and set it on the seat beside her. The sweet scent of jam clinging to it tickled her nose.

The scent of apricot. Eleanor’s expression turned faintly strange as she realized, only now, that apricot was her favorite kind of jam.

“What a shame. It was an apricot tart.”

She had been so fixed on the goal of making her name known that she had not caught it at the time, but there had clearly been something odd about what the Young Lord had said just a moment ago.

Just as I thought.

Eleanor turned the words over in her mind, the way Sir Siermaiem had seemed to lament that what had fallen and been crushed on the floor was a tart of all things, and an apricot tart at that, and quietly arrived at a tentative conclusion.

He does have a sweet tooth.