Chapter 2
Someone once said that God only gives humans trials they can endure.
When Rowena first heard those words at the age of ten, she prayed that they were true. But after a terrible incident at sixteen, she stopped seeking God altogether. Now, at twenty-four, recalling that saying did nothing but draw a hollow laugh from her.
How could it not be laughable?
“You have a serious heart condition.”
After enduring countless trials, if the end waiting for her was something like this, how could she not laugh?
“Your pulse is irregular. It beats unstably, like a drum that has lost its rhythm. I imagine you’ve felt it yourself—shortness of breath even after minor exertion, a tightness constricting your chest. These are symptoms of heart disease.”
Before dinner, Rowena had visited a small clinic near Wellington Department Store simply to refill her usual prescription. She had never once imagined she would receive a diagnosis like this.
“…Didn’t you say before that it was just anxiety?”
“At the time, madam, you asked for medication for anxiety, so that is what I assumed. But after listening to your heartbeat today, I can say with certainty—this has nothing to do with anxiety.”
Dr. Kingsley Watson spoke firmly as he adjusted the gold-rimmed glasses perched on the bridge of his nose. He had never been a particularly gentle physician, but perhaps to ward off any accusation, his tone today was colder than usual.
“I experienced similar symptoms as a child. Ever since I had a high fever around the age of five. But I was never told I had heart disease…”
“Diagnosing illness is the doctor’s responsibility, not the patient’s. If you’ve had these symptoms since childhood, then it simply means the problem has existed in your heart for a very long time.”
A slow, dull child.
That was what her mother had called her since she was young.
Her sluggish movements had been an attempt to avoid becoming breathless, and her delayed answers were the result of carefully searching for words that wouldn’t earn her scolding—but her mother had never considered such reasons.
“It would have been better if treatment had begun when the symptoms first appeared. Unfortunately… it is too late now.”
Silence settled over the room. After a brief pause, Rowena asked quietly,
“…Am I going to die?”
Dr. Watson’s eyes alone were enough of an answer.
“At most, a year. At least, three months. I suggest you prepare for your end without regrets, surrounded by those you love.”
And so, in the autumn of her twenty-fourth year, Rowena was sentenced to death.
It had been barely a week since her family had fallen and her father had passed away. She had been married to Killian for less than two years, and she had never truly enjoyed even that brief married life.
That day, over dinner, she had intended to speak to him carefully.
She wanted to say that she hoped they could spend more time together from now on. That if his coldness stemmed from her own shortcomings, she would gladly correct them. That she wished for them to understand each other more deeply and walk together for a long time.
That was before she learned she would soon die.
Before she encountered a reporter on the way back to Ravenhill and heard words she had never expected to hear.
Before her husband admitted, in his own voice, that all of it was true.
“God only gives humans trials they can endure.”
Rowena let out another quiet, bitter laugh.
The world was overflowing with people who died because they could not endure the trials given to them. In the world she knew, there were those who were loved from the moment they were born—and those who were never loved, even at the moment of death.
That day, Rowena did not tell her husband about her illness. There was no reason to share such news with someone who did not love her.
Still, she wanted to know.
Even though she understood that many things in this world had no reason at all, she wanted one.
When had love disappeared from her husband’s heart?
What had been the decisive reason that drove away the feeling she had once so clearly sensed…?
—
Three years earlier, on a summer day.
Twenty-one-year-old Rowena stood half-submerged in a lake whose surface shimmered with reflected light, staring blankly at the water. Located on the western side of the Bernier estate near a forest path, the lake was rarely visited—quiet and cold.
Beneath the silvery ripples, scraps of paper slowly sank. The drawings she had carefully outlined and painted dissolved in the water, losing their color and form, melting into formless stains.
From somewhere far away, laughter drifted toward her. Her mother’s voice was surely among them. As if the cold command she had issued moments ago—to throw all the paintings into the lake—had been a lie, she was probably smiling brightly and warmly now.
Rowena stepped forward, toward the drawings that had sunk deep into the lake.
She knew it was meaningless the moment her foot entered the water. The paintings were already gone; all that remained were the emotions pooled within her.
For a long time, water had been an object of fear for Rowena. Her mother knew this well—that was likely why she had given such an order. But paradoxically, that very knowledge was what pushed Rowena deeper into the lake.
The water lapped higher, rising to her shoulders before she realized it. Each time the damp chill brushed the nape of her neck, her breathing grew more labored.
A familiar fear slowly swallowed her vision. It felt as though something beneath the water had seized her ankles, dragging her downward. Her throat closed; she couldn’t even manage a cry.
That was when a stranger appeared.
“What do you think you’re doing?!”
A firm hand seized her wrist. Before she could react, the man lifted her cleanly into his arms.
Instinctively, Rowena tried to push him away. But the man stopped her.
It was an unfamiliar expression.
The face of someone who was worried about her.
For the first time in her life, Rowena saw such a look.
In that instant, the suffocating pressure around her chest eased. The fear that had surged up to her throat slowly receded. Beneath her soaked skin, she felt the steady heat and pulse of another body.
“What on earth were you trying to do, alone in a lake like this?”
Carrying her, he strode back toward the shore, his voice sharp with reprimand. Rowena murmured blankly,
“I was just… looking for something…”
At that, the man furrowed his brow slightly. With a short sigh, he continued in a low voice,
“You should leave such tasks to the servants. You were in real danger.”
He gently set her down on the grass and removed his outer coat, draping it over her shoulders.
He was far more restrained than most nobles, yet carried an air entirely different from theirs. Beneath neatly combed black hair lay refined features edged with something faintly rough.
Eyes bluer than the lake itself were fixed solely on her, still holding that unfamiliar concern.
Who is he?
Who is this man, to look at me like that? To come all the way here and worry over me…?
As if answering her silent questions, he knelt on one knee before her and spoke in a quiet voice.
“Allow me to introduce myself. Killian Vale.”
That was how they first met.
Killian Vale.
Among the guests invited to the Bernier estate that day, he was the most renowned of them all.
In a turbulent age, he was a man who led the charge into the future—laying railroads across lands once deemed the sole province of nobility, shattering the old order and opening the curtain on a new world.
And yet, on that day, such a man slipped away alone from the banquet hall and came to the lake where she was.
After that, he continued to visit the Bernier estate. Not calling for Viola, but for Rowena—seeking her out, the one who had always been alone.
That was how love began.
At least, that was what Rowena believed, without a shred of doubt.
But now—
The very next day after being told she would die by a doctor, and betrayed by her husband—Rowena discovered a single unfamiliar handkerchief hidden deep within a jewelry box in Killian’s study.
Its fabric was faded with age, and along its edge was embroidered a pattern she knew all too well: a bird circling a grapevine—the crest of the Bernier family.
She had never given such a handkerchief to her husband.
After staring at it for a long while, Rowena folded it neatly and placed it back into the jewelry box, then pushed the drawer deep inside as though nothing had happened.
“Madam, there you are.”
Just then, the butler came looking for her. He seemed not to have noticed what she had been doing, arriving a moment too late.
When she turned to him with an indifferent expression, the butler hesitated awkwardly before holding something out.
“I’ve come to return a pair of earrings. It appears that about a month ago, one of the maids secretly took them after finding them in the laundry. She has since been confined and is awaiting punishment.”
“In the laundry?”
“Yes. It was my failure to supervise properly. My apologies.”
The butler bowed deeply, but Rowena’s gaze remained fixed on the earrings.
“…Do you know which garment they were found in?”
“Pardon? Ah—inside the master’s jacket pocket—”
The butler’s words faltered. The wrinkles around his eyes trembled slightly, as though another possibility had only just occurred to him.
Rowena let out a hollow smile and slowly exhaled.
When had love disappeared from her husband’s heart…?
No—had it ever existed at all?
“These aren’t mine either.”
A pair of ornate gold earrings set with dark red garnets.
They belonged to Viola.
