A knock at the door, and Mary came back inside. I looked at her.
“Did you tell him?”
Instead of answering, Mary showed me a deeply uncomfortable expression. She hesitated.
“The thing is…”
What is it? A bad feeling settled over me.
“His Highness said… he would wait here until you came down. What do we do now, Miss?”
“…What? He said he would wait?”
I bit down on my lip, anxiety spreading through me. This wasn’t something I had planned for. What on earth was I supposed to do?
Mary, reading my distress, asked carefully:
“Shall I help you dress, Miss?”
I shook my head.
“No. Not yet.”
Axel’s patience was not especially long. He was also not the sort of person to spend significant time on something pointless.
So if I just held out a little longer, he would leave on his own.
Just wait a bit longer.
Until Axel left first.
Time passed. I asked Mary again, anxiety threading through my voice.
“…Don’t tell me he’s still here?”
“…Yes. The maid downstairs says he doesn’t appear to have any intention of leaving. What do we do, Miss?”
“Ah…”
Mary had been descending to the ground floor every thirty minutes to check whether Axel had left, and every time he was still there.
He didn’t appear to have any intention of leaving — !
Was he really going to waste all this time just to confront me about what I had done?
I shut my eyes tight and suffered through it — and finally exhaled in resignation.
There was nowhere left to retreat. Frightening as it was to imagine what he was going to say, I had to face him.
Only then did I turn to Mary with a request.
“I think I have to go down, Mary. Could you help me get ready?”
“Yes, Miss!”
Under the capable hands of Mary — a highly competent lady’s maid — the preparation was completed with remarkable speed.
My footsteps toward the first-floor parlor were glacially slow, each one reluctant, the pace of someone being led to an execution.
At last I reached the parlor door and stood before it, drawing in a deep breath.
The simple fact that Axel was on the other side of this door made my heart beat loudly.
I finished the breath. And then I opened the door and walked inside.
Axel sat across the room — perfectly upright, not a thing out of place. Dark eyes, darker than the night sky, turned toward me.
I bowed my head in a small, silent greeting. His face came into focus properly as I did — and I noticed, belatedly, that he appeared more tense than I was.
What? Did I misread that? Tense — why would he be?
The expression I had anticipated before entering the room was something formidable, something terrible — the kind of face that meant there was serious trouble ahead.
The reality looked nothing like that.
Given the circumstances, shouldn’t he be the one who was angry at me?
I was, after all, someone he could not forgive — and on top of that, I had gone and made it worse by grabbing his face and acting like a complete disaster.
No. Whatever’s going on, I can’t let my guard down.
I shook off the bewilderment and brought myself back to focus.
With stiff steps I moved to the seat across from him. Between us, only the quiet sound of a maid pouring tea.
Before the real conversation could begin, I asked all the maids to leave the room. Whatever was about to be said, I didn’t know, and I didn’t want rumors spreading needlessly.
Now there was no one left in the parlor but the two of us.
The silence was awkward. I couldn’t even think what I usually said to begin a conversation.
I sat there pressing my lips together, fingers wrapped uselessly in my skirt — and then a low, quiet voice reached me.
“Are you… feeling well?”
“…What? Y-yes. I’m fine.”
I looked up, startled by the question.
Why would he ask that? He had to know I had been making excuses to avoid seeing him. Was he asking me obliquely why I’d been lying to him?
But the look in his eyes seemed to carry something faint and genuine — something like concern. I was still struggling to find my footing when Axel spoke again.
“I must ask you to forgive the rudeness of arriving without warning.”
“No — not at all, Your Highness. It’s quite all right.”
The brief exchange settled back into silence. Axel, who had been watching me carefully, spoke.
“…Do you happen to remember what happened at the Founding Day banquet?”
The moment the question landed, I — still sitting with bowed head and clenched fists — thought: it’s here.
I suppressed my panic as best I could and rushed to deny.
“Oh — no! Your Highness, I don’t remember a single thing, truly not one thing. It was the first time I had ever had alcohol, and I’m sorry to say everything from that evening is quite gone. I simply woke up in my own room.”
Even if there were things I remembered, in this moment I had to insist with everything I had that there was nothing.
That said, it wasn’t entirely a lie. I genuinely did not have a complete recollection. Only the vivid flashes had remained — the fragmented in-between was gone.
I studied Axel’s expression and asked cautiously:
“…Is it possible that I did something to offend you that evening, Your Highness?”
Please. Please say no. Please say there was nothing.
I was praying silently with everything I had.
“…Offend me.”
Axel repeated the words in a low murmur, and his face shifted — as though something had come to mind. Ice moved through me.
Had I asked the wrong question?
His face tightened, and it was clearly reddening — of all things, actually reddening, as though he was genuinely flustered.
I was weeping on the inside.
I’m done. I’m finished.
It truly felt like a river I could not cross back over.
“It doesn’t matter whether you remember or not. I can simply say it again.”
What on earth was he preparing to say, that he looked this composed and braced? My palms were wet with anxiety —
“The reason I came to find you that day, and today as well…”
“…is to apologize to you.”
I blinked.
And then I asked him, with an expression that was probably not my most flattering.
Why on earth—
Axel nodded, and a long explanation followed.
When it was over, I sat there with a blank expression on my face.
He had come to understand that everything had been a misunderstanding. Thanks to the Crown Prince.
A single action by the Crown Prince had untangled in one moment the complicated knot of misunderstanding that had wound around both of us for so long.
Yet rather than feeling relieved that the misunderstanding was resolved — I felt, if anything, slightly hollow.
So everything I went through this whole time was…
Suddenly the corners of my eyes grew hot. A tear I hadn’t noticed forming slipped down my cheek.
The expression that crossed Axel’s face was one I had never seen on him before — genuine, disarmed shock.
But I was in no condition to pay much attention to that. While my tears gathered momentum, Axel shoved his chair back and came to my side in a rush.
He began, awkwardly and with visible discomfort, to try to console me.
“I — I’m sorry, Lady Melberine. I should never have been so quick to judge. It was clearly my fault.”
But there was something Axel had wrong about the tears. They weren’t for him — they were for the Crown Prince. And less from sadness than from something closer to rage.
This could have been resolved just like that, all along, and he just watched?
My tear-filled eyes filled with murderous intent.
…That absolute lunatic—!
I could almost picture him right now — smiling pleasantly, waving at me from a distance.
