Episode 4
“Hey, why are you crying?”
At Aidan’s voice, I pulled myself together. Right, this was no time to be crying.
When I raised my arm and rubbed at my eyes, Aidan didn’t hide his appalled expression as he pulled a handkerchief from his pocket.
“How on earth can a girl be like this? Did you learn nothing watching the other young ladies at the academy? Even after I told you so many times to maintain your noble dignity.”
Normally, Aidan’s nagging about ‘noble dignity’ would have annoyed me first, but now it didn’t bother my mood at all. No, rather, I felt good.
“Look at this, I was right, wasn’t I?”
I thrust the opened diary right before his eyes.
“My dad definitely exists!”
At my excited voice, his green eyes narrowed. With an expression that practically asked what on earth this nonsense was, his pupils moved slowly from left to right.
“So you’re saying your father wrote this?”
“Yes!”
Where could there be proof clearer than this? I spoke while hugging the diary tightly to my chest.
“He must have gotten caught up in something. My dad has always been so full of affection; even if he wasn’t good at expressing it, he was always dying to help others.”
Though he never showed it, he was that kind of person.
Someone who gave affection even to a single flower blooming by the roadside. Someone who, if he saw a stray cat, would go out of his way to return and feed it something.
Isn’t that why a person like him saved this country and raised an abandoned child like me with love? A child abandoned right in front of a gate that was about to burst, where her parents had died.
“You’ve finally lost it, you’ve definitely gone mad.”
Aidan shook his head and continued.
“Just what kind of incident must a person get caught up in for their very existence to vanish? If what you say is true, there’s no way the people of this village wouldn’t know your father. Your neighbors, the members of the mercenary group your father worked for—they ought to remember him.”
“That’s why I’m saying he got caught up in an incident! Just how can a person’s very existence be erased? In this entire world, I am the only one who remembers him. Ah, and this diary, too…”
Why didn’t this diary vanish? When I went home, not a single thing belonging to Dad was left.
“There must be something in this diary.”
“I don’t know what on earth you’re talking about. The bakery owner or you could have just written it.”
Aidan seemed unable to believe it until the very end.
“Since it could just be a simple runaway, someone might abandon all their clothes and photos before leaving. But one’s memories cannot be manipulated. No matter how advanced medicine gets or how far science develops, completely erasing someone’s memory is impossible unless everyone suffered from collective amnesia.”
He was right. It truly was an absurd thing.
“Unless it were magic…”
At the words I muttered without realizing it, a scoff was drawn across his handsome face.
“Ha, are you a five-year-old child? Believing in something like magic.”
“Ugh, I don’t believe in that kind of thing either! It’s just a figure of speech!”
There are no wizards in this world like in fairy tales who wave a wand and go ta-da to transform things.
However, Dad disappearing in the first place wasn’t realistic either.
“So I’m going to investigate. Just as Young Lord Winslow said, a person vanishing in an instant is an absurd thing. My dad must definitely be out there somewhere.”
This diary is the only clue left to me.
“I should go home and read through this diary carefully again from the beginning.”
The part I read was just the very last page of the diary. This diary is quite thick, after all. If Dad wrote in it continuously, there might be something that allows me to infer what happened.
“Wait, I’m going with you.”
“…Pardon?”
“I said let’s go together.”
A black umbrella that looked just like him leaned toward me.
“Knowing very well that you’re not in your right mind, how could I let you go alone? As a nobleman, that’s no way to treat a lady.”
He seemed to genuinely think I had gone mad. At this point, my stubbornness was stoked. I wanted to see this arrogant young lord apologize to me later.
“Fine, let’s go together.”
Was my answer satisfying? The corners of his mouth, which rarely smiled, twitched upward.
“By the way, you can hold your umbrella straight.”
I unfurled the umbrella the bakery owner had found for me in the lost-and-found box earlier.
“Th-That, I knew that too.”
With an expression that showed he had no idea, Aidan walked past me.
“Wait, it’s not in that direction!”
“…Lead the way.”
Though the tips of his ears looked red, unlike him, I couldn’t verify it properly because Aidan blocked the view with his large umbrella.
**
I took the key out of my pocket and opened the door.
Come to think of it, was the house clean? Still, asking him to wait outside the house would be like advertising that the place was messy.
Besides, I don’t need to look good to Aidan anyway, so it should be fine, right?
“Is this… the house?”
“Yes, it’s our house.”
I never dreamed in my wildest imaginations that the first guest to come to the house I prepared to live in with Dad would be Aidan, though.
“So, you’re saying this is a house?”
“Yes, please come in.”
“Really, this is a house?”
Does it look like a stable to you, then? How many times are you going to ask?
“Yes, yes. It’s a house. Even if it looks like this, it’s a house I took a huge plunge and pulled a loan to buy.”
It might look like a shabby house in Aidan’s eyes, but realistically, it was the best among the houses I could afford to buy.
At my sarcastic reply, he straightened his head from looking around and closed the door.
“Ahem, I didn’t mean it like that. I just thought it seemed a bit big for you to live in alone.”
“That’s because it wasn’t a house meant to be lived in alone.”
It was a house to live in with Dad, just the two of us.
It was a chance to repay the grace of raising me all this time. Even though that chance vanished before it could even arrive.
I quietly bit my lip. I couldn’t show tears in front of Aidan.
“Ah, I see.”
He replied nonchalantly and sat down on the sofa in the living room as he pleased.
“Ah, no need for tea. I doubt there’s any of the high-grade tea I drink in this house.”
I wanted to snap back, ‘Who said they were offering any?’, but just as he said, there was no high-grade tea in our house. Since it was filled only with coffee to wake me up every morning.
‘Still, he’s a guest who came to the house, so I should treat him with courtesy.’
However, since there was something Dad always said, I brought him a glass of plain water and pulled out the diary.
“Wait. Before looking at the diary, tell me about your father first. I need to know something too so I know what clues to focus on when searching.”
“Ah, that’s true. Well, you see, my dad…”
I began to explain about the person named Ashford Violeta.
“Do you remember the gate that turned the continent upside down when we were very young?”
One day, an unknown black fissure appeared in a peaceful rural village.
Investigators were dispatched immediately, but they were unable to find out anything other than the fact that tremendous energy was measured there.
The tragedy began exactly one week later.
Terrifying monsters poured out from the fissure, and the village was erased from the map in just two hours.
People began calling that suddenly formed fissure a ‘gate’.
There was no set rule as to when or where it would form, but it was certain that once it appeared, monsters incomprehensible by human common sense would pour out one week later.
The gates were a catastrophe for humanity.
“After many sacrifices, the Gate Research Institute was established, and they discovered that there is a one-week interval for every gate.”
“You also know that those gates vanished exactly eighteen years ago, right?”
“Yes, because they discovered that gate creation can be obstructed using magnetic fields.”
Powerful magnets, neodymium, are installed in each region to prevent gate generation. It is a kind of barrier, so to speak.
The Empire had reported the event as a grand victory of science.
Even if the memories of Dad were erased, what Dad had accomplished hadn’t vanished.
“The one who discovered that gates close due to magnetic fields was my dad.”
