She had loved being “a noble mother who sacrifices herself for her son.”
In other words, outwardly she claimed to love her son, but in reality, it was self-love.
As long as Gerald didn’t strongly rebel against her and more or less went along with what she said, the relationship between the two of them could be maintained in a stable state.
However, yesterday, when Gerald violently poured out his anger at her without restraint, Helga’s defensive side inevitably reared its head.
‘How could he do this to his poor mother, after how I raised him?!’
Rather than the shock and wounds he must have suffered, protecting her own ego was more important to her.
Moreover, as the saying went that blood would tell, Gerald’s self-pity was something he had inherited from none other than his own mother.
After lamenting her own plight, Helga thought of something.
‘Ah, right.’
She had one of the few remaining servants deliver a short letter to Veronica.
‘She is a smart and kind child who takes after me exactly.’
A useful daughter who always obeyed her mother’s words, and who, even after marrying out, would come running on her own as long as Helga dropped even a vague hint.
‘So this time as well, if I call her while crying and complaining, she will hurry over, listen to this pitiful mother’s lament for half a day, and will probably even give me some money to use for a while before leaving.’
Deciding to wait for Veronica for now, Helga pressed a hand to her forehead and slumped back against the sofa.
***
Veronica sat in her office and unfolded the letter brought by a servant of House Lansval.
After quickly reading it, she handed it back to her secretary with a cold expression.
“She’s telling me to come again. Burn it.”
She pointed with her chin toward the fireplace crackling as it burned over there. Taking the folded letter, the secretary asked,
“Is it really all right for you not to go?”
“Hm? Why would I?”
Veronica asked back with a face that genuinely didn’t understand.
“It’s always the same. She wants me to come running over and listen to her crying.”
Thinking about it, it was laughable.
One would expect the side that needed something to come seeking the other, yet even in a situation like this, Helga was telling her daughter to come, insisting that “it’s always the junior who visits the elder.”
In reality, after Veronica got married, Helga hadn’t visited House Epode or their trading company even once.
Regardless of hierarchy, it would be natural to wonder how her married daughter was doing, or to simply want to see her, but Helga was always like this.
In the end, it was no different from saying that she wasn’t particularly concerned about Veronica’s well-being.
To Helga, a daughter was a parasite that siphoned off money that should have gone to her son while being raised, a trash can to receive her emotions when she was tired or angry, and…
‘Someone who, even after being raised that way, still has to drop everything and come running whenever she is called.’
Veronica let out a bitter, crooked smile. Until not long ago, she had lived like a fool, desperately yearning for even that kind of maternal love.
‘Just how cost-effective a child did she think I was?’
However, a series of strange dreams she had about three months ago had changed her way of thinking quite a bit.
Those dreams carefully showed her everything, starting from her own childhood. Helga, who showed extreme favoritism toward Gerald while treating her daughters like her husband’s illegitimate children, and herself being hurt by it every single time.
Seeing it from a third-party perspective, as if she had stepped into a book or a play, she was newly able to realize just how unfairly she had been treated.
The strange dreams continued every day.
The next day showed her own adolescence, the day after that showed how casually her parents had handled her marriage, and so on.
After several such unsettled days had passed, this time the dream focused not on herself, but on someone else. It was Evelyn, who was engaged to Gerald and was soon to enter the Lansval household.
But something was strange.
Up until now, the dreams had shown past events, yet with Evelyn, they seemed to be showing things that hadn’t yet happened.
That was to say, events after she entered the Lansval household.
In the Lansval mansion, Evelyn was despised and trampled on by everyone, living miserably before dying just a little over two years later.
After waking from the dream that day, Veronica sat blankly for a long while, replaying the vividly remembered cruel scenes from the dream in her mind.
‘If the earlier dreams showed things that actually happened in the past, then this dream today might also be showing things that will truly happen in the future.’
Considering what Veronica herself had gone through, and the nature of her mother and younger brother, those events were entirely plausible. Thinking that way, Evelyn became endlessly pitiful to her.
‘But still… It’s just a dream.’
It might have been nothing more than a meaningless, nonsensical dream.
‘I can’t act based on believing in a single dream like that.’
Cautious by nature, Veronica tried to simply forget about the unsettling dream.
However… a small problem arose. Unlike the previous dreams, the dream about Evelyn continued to repeat itself afterward, exactly the same each time.
‘It’s already been a week.’
As if it were being shown to her again and again until she believed it.
Faced with a phenomenon she couldn’t understand, she finally changed her mind.
‘There must be something to this after all. The events in this dream might truly be things that are going to happen soon. Then what can I do?’
After thinking it over carefully, she concluded that the only thing she could do was deliver a warning to Evelyn.
‘Even if I hadn’t seen this dream, it would be the same. No daughter-in-law could ever be happy in that household. Let me at least speak to her, if only to save one person.’
Having made up her mind like that, she went to Marquis Baden’s ball, looking for a natural opportunity to strike up a conversation with Evelyn.
And through the connection that began that way, it was actually she who ended up receiving even greater help from Evelyn.
‘All I did was throw out a single warning for her based on what I saw in a dream.’
There was no way for Veronica to know that an action born of pure intent for the sake of someone she barely knew had returned to her as a great reward through the law of causality.
Her gaze returned to the letter from her mother, which was still being held in her secretary’s hand.
“I’m far busier as the chief administrator of the trading company than Mother, who is sitting idly at home, so what can I do? The one who needs something will have to come.”
Of course, this wasn’t because Veronica was cold-blooded.
If the relationship between mother and daughter had been good, she might have been able to play the role of an emotional trash can once in a while.
But when Helga was raising Veronica, she hadn’t soothed or willingly accepted even that young daughter’s emotions.
“Stop it, be quiet! You should be the one to give in, as the older sister! What is there to feel wronged about, crying like that?! Honestly, this is why girls are…”
At times like that, Gerald would peek out from behind Helga’s skirt and stick his tongue out at her in a mocking way.
‘Since Gerald was young, that might have been excusable, but…’
Shaking her head at the bitter and unpleasant memories from her childhood, Veronica suddenly seemed to recall something and crooked her finger toward her secretary.
“Still, shall I write a reply?”
She took the letter back and wrote just a single line on the back of it. It meant that she didn’t even have the heart to give Helga a fresh sheet of letter paper.
[Receive filial devotion from the child you raised with such care and indulgence.]
“That precious and treasured son of hers doesn’t seem inclined to listen to his own mother’s crying, though.”
Recalling the news of Gerald’s accident that had spread widely among the lower-ranking nobles of the Capital, she let out another small, amused snort of laughter.
‘How amusing. After making such a fuss about the Lansval bloodline, bloodline, and more bloodline… in the end, the only grandchild Mother has now is my daughter.’
The fact that there was now absolutely no chance of seeing a grandchild from the son she had obsessively clung to as the one to carry on the line somehow felt deeply satisfying.
And with Melanie not having had a child yet, the fact that Veronica’s daughter was the only descendant carrying the Lansval blood made it all the more so.
‘I will raise that one and only Lansval descendant well, right here in House Epode.’
She was curious about the expression Helga would make upon receiving the reply, but she had no intention of setting foot in the Lansval estate again of her own accord.
It would be enough to hear about Helga’s reaction through Solvey.
With a refreshed expression, Veronica returned her focus to her work.
Having wasted her expensive time on a pointless letter, she intended to make up for it by picking up the pace.
***
Helga took the crumpled scrap of paper brought by the servant.
“…? The one I told to come is not coming, and instead I get a letter…?”
Seeing the words she herself had written on the outside of the folded paper, she tilted her head in confusion, wondering if something had been sent by mistake.
As she unfolded the paper, however, and saw the single carelessly scrawled line, she doubted her own eyes.
