Chapter 119
What the queen told Isaac amounted to no more than fragmentary facts. She had only brushed past Sasha’s past—the part Sasha would have found most shameful, the part someone had exposed to the public in every detail through a special bulletin. The only thing the queen impressed upon him was her true identity.
The woman he knew as Sasha Grayson was, in truth, not the real Sasha at all, but a fake who had spent her whole life acting as her stand-in.
Isaac was dumbfounded. It sounded utterly out of nowhere.
…It sounded truly absurd.
And no wonder. There had been no explanation to go with it. Once Isaac had regained a little of his senses, he wondered if perhaps the queen had been making some sort of joke and blankly shifted his eyes. But that couldn’t be. The queen was looking at him with a face utterly devoid of laughter.
Still more bewildered, Isaac left the place and went in search of Sasha. He walked down the long corridor, turning over the strange, slapdash words he had just heard—stand-in and whatnot—because he could not understand them at all. What on earth did that mean? A stand-in? She was not Sasha Grayson?
Then who was she?
With no preparation whatsoever, Isaac found Sasha. By the time he came to his senses, he had already walked right up to her. His wife was sitting amid flowers blooming in profusion. Anyone could see she had not overcome the shock; she stared at the ground in a daze, her face buried in her hands.
When he called her name with force—Sasha—her face as she looked up at him was empty. She was looking up at him without any discernible expression, her face steeped only in dismay and resignation.
Yes. “Dismay.”
The moment Isaac realized that, he laughed hollowly to himself.
Lies, of course, and shallow tricks besides—Isaac had experienced them countless times. He had simply encountered them so often that he had grown numb, naturally building walls as if to defend himself; it was not as though being deceived so often had given him any special ability to see through lies.
It had only been an instinctive aversion. Even as she behaved as though she wanted to look good in his eyes, now and then her indifferent face would appear, as if she truly had nothing to do with him, and that added to the sense of wrongness. So he had merely guarded himself by instinct and confidently branded that woman an outright fraud.
Of course, he had never dreamed it was the truth.
He truly had not imagined, at this late hour, that it would be the truth.
The woman really was a fraud. And what she had hidden was not some trivial matter, but something so important it was genuinely absurd. It was a matter of trust. Not only did she not trust Isaac at all, she had told him nothing. Without a single word about her identity, she had simply driven him into marriage.
What the woman told him afterward, once she returned to the mansion, was even more ridiculous. There were no excuses, only a clean apology. Very dry, as if she had expected it.
…As if it were only natural that he would cast her aside.
It would be a lie to say he had not felt betrayed in that instant. But greater than that was bewilderment, and greater than that bewilderment was disappointment.
And greater than that disappointment was hurt.
The woman was shameless. When even a sincere apology and a detailed explanation would not have been enough, she merely told him, very briefly, that it had been because of that inheritance.
It was unkind.
Therefore, it was exceedingly infuriating.
Watching that infuriating side of her, Isaac found himself feeling both disappointment and hurt at once, and that made him feel even stranger.
And what about the conversation that followed? She kept talking about that damned “compensation.” As if everything could be solved with that “money.” Like a parrot, a damned parrot, with a brazen face.
“How should I compensate you?”
Ah.
At that belated realization, Isaac let out another bitter laugh.
“To what extent can you compensate me?”
“Within the realm of what is possible. …No, if it goes beyond that, I will take the time to repay you little by little.”
It was the moment when the words he had once spat out not long after meeting her, in order to be rid of her quickly, returned to him. He had not expected her to repay him in this way.
“What I want isn’t anything material, Captain.”
If there was any difference between him then and her now, it was that she was clinging, strangely and persistently, only to that damned “money.” When Isaac, unable to understand it at all, pointed that out, Sasha blushed as if an even deeper shame had been exposed and instead grew angry at him.
In many ways, it was a situation where conversation did not work. At least, that was Isaac’s judgment. That woman alone was already more than he could handle, and the feelings he felt toward her were even more unfamiliar, so he could not pull himself together at all.
Hurt, at a time like this?
“Wasn’t this a softness I never would have imagined in my original self?”
Softness was by no means a compliment. Even less so in the world he had lived in. It meant being weak.
Unable to overcome his bewilderment at himself and his lingering disappointment in her, he opened the door and left. But before long, she caught him again. With a feeble strength so slight it made him wonder if she truly had any will to hold him back, she tugged at his clothes.
Yet that was enough to stop Isaac’s steps at once. As if bewitched, he followed her.
He looked at the back of her head. She continued to talk about money, no different from before. But there was more sorrow in it than before. As if venting her anger on him, she poured it out like a lament.
“Only money mattered to me. Not you.”
Listening to her absurd words, which sounded as though she blamed him, as though he had ruined her, Isaac went blank. That was what he wanted to say back to her.
She had deceived him all along, repeated soulless apologies, and then gone on about compensation, provoking his anger on top of everything else. How could it possibly make sense for him to feel hurt at the sight of her like that? He wanted to demand why she, of all people, had ruined him.
“…I love you.”
It was a confession in utter shambles. Isaac quietly looked down at her.
At her face as she cried, staring at him with eyes full of resentment that did not look at all like those of someone apologizing and confessing.
…In this situation, not only did he find her unbearably pitiful.
“…I know it must sound absurd. I didn’t mean to say it like this, as if I were blaming you.”
How could it possibly make sense that she looked lovely?
“…I didn’t.”
…How could it truly make sense?
By the time he came to his senses, he was already reaching out to her. He had already touched her.
Isaac lowered his head as he was and pressed his lips down on hers. Rather hastily.
In his impatience, their noses bumped lightly. Isaac did not care and tilted his head, taking her lower lip again. As if afraid she might pull away, he cupped the back of her neck and head fully with his right hand and drew her in as he kissed her.
Far from being deep and languid, his movements were still clumsy, and impatience had been added to them. With a soft smacking sound, their lips parted. As if he could not help regretting it, Isaac looked at her glistening lips, then slowly raised his gaze to her green eyes.
Her neatly combed-up hair had long since fallen into disarray, her tears had dried on her cheeks, and the corners of her eyes and her nose were still red.
Even that sight of her was so pitiful and lovely that he could not bear it.
Isaac finally felt, in his bones, that this was love. He admitted that only love could have changed him like this.
“I….”
It was just as Isaac belatedly opened his mouth to try to say something. Sasha’s small hands abruptly caught his cheeks and pulled him back down. Helplessly, their lips collided again.
Unable to do a thing against this small woman, his body was pushed backward.
Thud—his back struck the wall.
Feeling his neck and shoulders gradually growing stiff, Isaac lowered the hand that had been cupping the back of her neck and scooped her up in his arms. When he easily lifted her by the waist and hips, Sasha naturally wrapped her arms around his neck and clung to him.
She was just as clumsy as he was, but she had a far more tenacious side than Isaac. She did not care whether their noses bumped or whether her lips landed not on his lips but somewhere near them.
Smack. Each time their lips touched and parted, that was the only sound that came, and after repeating it for a long while, Sasha looked at him as if she had finally come to her senses.
Then her expression turned as though she might cry.
“I didn’t want to confess like this.”
She said.
As if she did not want him to see her crying face, she buried it in the nape of his neck. A quiet silence flowed between them. Through the cloth, the warmth of each other’s bodies was so keenly felt it brought tears.
She burst into tears again. Feeling the nape of his neck and his left shoulder growing damp, Isaac tightened the hand around the back of her neck and gently kneaded it.
Then, carefully brushing aside the hair that had fallen loose, he kissed her exposed shoulder.
“…It’s true.”
She raised her head again and said it. In the end, Isaac could not hold back and laughed. Then his own face twisted as if he, too, might cry.
The two of them gazed at each other without a word.
And kissed again.