Now then. While Leonardo was receiving a severe dressing-down from his mother and brother at the Linden estate, at House Calendula, Chloe’s father — the Duke of Calendula — had returned after a long absence.
[It’s been a while, Chloe. Is all well with you?] (Duke)
[It has been some time, Father. Yes, nothing out of the ordinary.] (C)
Silence fills the reception room where the two of them sit. Sunlight slanting in through the curtains wavers and reflects on the surface of the tea poured into polished cups. A fragrant scent rises with the steam, and neither of them so much as turns toward it.
Chloe sits straight-backed, hands folded in her lap, gazing steadily at her father across from her. There is neither respect nor affection in the look from those sapphire eyes. Only a distance that seems impossible between a parent and child.
[And your fiancé…… how do things stand with Leonardo?] (Duke)
[Yes. There is nothing out of the ordinary there either.] (C)
The curtness of it startles the Duke of Calendula badly. Was his daughter ever a girl with eyes this cold? To hide his agitation he picks up his cup and takes a mouthful of tea to wet his throat.
[……I’ve heard the rumours. That Leonardo never gave you so much as a gown for a soirée, and that recently he pressed some piece of junk on you as an ornament…… Is it true?] (Duke)
The duke fully expected his daughter to deny it. Not because he trusts Leonardo, but because by the duke’s standards such a thing is simply not possible.
Giving one’s fiancée a gown before a soirée is the natural courtesy of a gentleman, and he has never heard of a man failing to do it. Giving a fiancée junk is beyond consideration entirely.
Behaving that way would bring more than personal shame. To a noble, an engagement is a contract, and treating the other party to a contract with contempt does serious damage to a house’s credibility. That was why the duke believed the rumour to be groundless nonsense — and what came out of his daughter’s mouth overturned that belief from the foundations.
[Yes, it’s true. Leonardo-sama has never once given me a gown. And when I attended a tea party wearing the hairpin he sent me the other day, everyone present was quite astonished. They said it looked like the cheap goods sold at market stalls.] (C)
Chloe wears a faint smile, and her eyes aren’t smiling in the least.
With that expression to go with it, the startled duke stammers, uncharacteristically, [Th-That can’t be……]
In Chloe’s blue eyes, which don’t waver at all, there’s nothing left of her childhood innocence, no trace of the girl who once sought her father’s affection. Only a coldness with refusal folded into it.
The memory surfaces without warning: a daughter who laughed easily, who ran about the gardens, who picked flowers and arranged them on his desk. Now only the faintest shadow of that girl remains, and her face holds a coolness well beyond her years.
[Wh…… why did you not tell me……?] (Duke)
The words come broken; he can’t put the confusion in his chest in order. The common sense he believed in crumbles away like ice. And to a father wearing that bewildered expression, Chloe shows a face close to a sneer.
[And what would that have accomplished? However senseless my fiancé’s behaviour, he is the man you chose as suitable for me, Father. You would never permit the engagement to be dissolved, would you? In which case there would be no point in saying anything……] (C)
The blood drains from the duke’s face in an instant. His vision recedes, as though the colour is draining out of the world. That was never my intention — he wants to say it, and no voice comes; he can only let his lips tremble.
[Leonardo-sama was everything you said he was, Father. A man suited to House Calendula…… or so he should have been. It seems that only held true because I kept my eyes shut to the inconvenient parts.] (C)
Chloe murmurs it almost to herself.
Her blue eyes, like the sea, aren’t looking at the father in front of her but somewhere far away. The sight of his daughter like that squeezes at the duke’s chest.
[Elegant, beautiful, flawless in bearing and in conversation — the ideal young lord. He was so dazzling that…… without realising it, I closed my eyes to the things that didn’t fit. Looking back, from the very start of the engagement, the things other young ladies receive as a matter of course were things I never received.] (C)
[Things you never received…… meaning what?] (Duke)
[……As you said a moment ago, Father: no gown before a soirée, and not one ornament in all that time. Other young ladies attend soirées in gowns from their betrothed, and I have always prepared my own. ……When I attended my first soirée with Leonardo-sama, I naturally assumed he would arrange one, and there was nothing. I attended in a dress I already owned, at the last moment, and the loneliness of that night is still in my chest.] (C)
It was so wretched and so painful that she had sealed the memory away at the bottom of her mind.
Her heart had been racing over what sort of gown Leonardo would send, and that anticipation was shattered in a moment. That night, the moment she came home, she lay alone in her bed and wept with her voice stifled, and the bitterness of it aches to recall.
[What…… such a thing happened…… Why did you not tell me?] (Duke)
[……It was so unbelievable that I wanted to forget it at once. And…… I didn’t want anyone to know I was a wretched woman whose fiancé wouldn’t even send her a gown.] (C)
[…………] (Duke)
Faced with his daughter lowering her face in sorrow, the duke has nothing to offer.
Kept away from the estate by his own workload, the duke had not been home on the night his daughter attended her first soirée with her fiancé either. The thought of her alone, enduring what was done to her, tightens his chest.
How sad she must have been, how wretched she must have felt. It hurts simply to imagine it. Why had he not been at her side?
And along with the regret comes a fury at Leonardo, welling up until it’s near boiling.
[Not once since then has he given me a gown for a soirée. Every time, I wear one I prepared for myself beforehand.] (C)
[And you did not press him on it? It’s plainly unnatural, whichever way you look at it. Not sending one’s fiancée a gown…… there are limits to how senseless a man can be.] (Duke)
[Yes, I said nothing. I thought the Linden finances might be in difficulty, and that I mustn’t shame him.] (C)
[There is no possibility of that……! Do you imagine I’d take the son of a house too poor to buy a gown as your husband?!] (Duke)
[Perhaps you’re right…… But I wanted to believe it. That Leonardo-sama didn’t send me gowns because he hadn’t the money to buy them. If that were the reason, then it couldn’t be helped…… Perhaps I wanted to force myself into accepting it.] (C)
[…………! What foolishness……] (Duke)
[Yes, foolish. But…… if that wasn’t the reason, then it would mean Leonardo-sama bore me ill will. That my own fiancé directed ill will at me was something I didn’t want to accept……] (C)
Before his daughter, lowering her head in loneliness, the duke can’t manage a single word. Ashamed of himself for having neither a comforting word nor a gentle voice, he quietly draws back the hand he’d begun to reach out.
As she recounts these sad experiences to her father, a thought occurs to Chloe. That one cause of Leonardo’s scumminess growing steadily worse may have been this — Chloe’s own excessive endurance.
‘With the memories of my previous life back, I can look at Chloe’s behaviour objectively. And she has clearly put up with far too much from Leonardo. She should have voiced her own opinions and made that deluded man understand where he stood.’
There were three reasons she couldn’t.
The first: she didn’t want Leonardo to dislike her.
The second: self-preservation. Saying it aloud would make her wretched and force her to look his ill will full in the face. That, quite simply, frightened her.
And the last: it was in her nature to hold herself in check far beyond what was necessary.
‘She apparently made childish demands of her mother, at least. Of her father, not one. Because she was afraid that being selfish would make him dislike her……’
Trace back through the memories and there isn’t a single instance of Chloe being wilful with her father. Children being demanding with a parent is an ordinary thing, and there isn’t one memory of it. From her earliest years, what her father wanted from her was that she become a fine heir and a fine lady, and nothing else. It may well be that environment that made endurance her default.
The matter of the gowns was the same: she thought it was something she could settle by simply bearing it, and said nothing. As though she believed that bearing it was what was right.
That there are times when anger is permitted, that she was allowed to complain instead of enduring — Chloe doesn’t know that. Her father and her tutors taught her nothing but endurance.
‘I’m starting to get genuinely angry. The reason Chloe became a girl who suppresses herself this thoroughly — isn’t that this father’s fault? If you’re a parent, teach your child that voicing her opinion matters……!’
She glares at the man across from her, and his shoulders jump.
She’d wondered whether the man in front of her fails to register as her father because her past-life memories have come back; probably that isn’t it. There was never a parent-child bond formed between these two to begin with.
That’s why, when he asked a moment ago why she hadn’t told him, all she could think was ‘you don’t get to ask that.’ How is she supposed to confide in someone she’s never built that kind of trust with?
She’d like to ask him who it was that saddled Chloe with a piece of scum like that.
Ah — she did say that, come to think of it.
[……I will lodge a formal complaint with House Linden myself. I’ll speak with them properly about their son’s conduct as well.] (Duke)
[No, that won’t be necessary. I hardly think that alone would reform him, so thank you, but no.] (C)
At his daughter cutting his offer down flat, the duke can only stare, dumbfounded.
That the daughter who was once so meek and obedient should speak this plainly—— He looks at her in disbelief, and finds a pair of bitterly cold blue eyes.
[……Chloe…………] (Duke)
[Leonardo-sama was a perfect young lord in the beginning, and he has been reduced to a fool who commits blunders like this, and I believe one cause of it is my own excessive endurance. He grew comfortable with a woman who never complained no matter what he did, and the arrogance he was born with steadily swelled. Which makes it as good as my responsibility. I will be the one to settle it.] (C)
‘I will not let Chloe endure another thing. Now that the memories of my previous life are back, there isn’t a single reason left to endure. Leonardo, my father — let them dislike me, for all I care. What is there to gain from being liked by a stranger who happens to be scum, and a middle-aged man who’s a father in name only?’
[Settle it…… What do you intend to do?] (Duke)
Her father turns eyes on her that are almost pleading, impossible to square with his usual air of authority. Chloe gives him no answer at all, and only smiles, quietly.
Simplyrical 
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