Chapter 30: The Day the World Changed.

The hellish scene clung to my memory like tar, impossible to scrape away.
I never imagined that seven years later it would still haunt my nightmares.
I told no one about that day; I couldn’t even bring myself to ask Violet.

Everyone in the house surely knew.
They knew, and could do nothing about it.
If the adult servants were powerless, what could a child like me possibly do?

All I could manage was to slightly increase the moments I spent as Violet’s conversation partner.
Even that was canceled the instant her mother called, rendering it almost meaningless.

Those days came to an end less than half a year after I began working there.

Suddenly, visibly, the number of times Violet was summoned dropped.
Bellrose no longer left her room; eventually she stopped leaving her bed.
In the end, she could not even sit up.

She spoke to no one.
She looked at no one.
She only repeated the name “Old,” the master of the house, like delirious muttering.

“Violet-sama… are you all right?”

“I’m… I’m fine.”

On a garden bench, Violet’s hair fluttered in the breeze.

Once she stopped going to Bellrose, Violet began to change before my eyes.
Her hair grew a little longer; her speech, her clothing—everything shifted bit by bit.
That was when I finally realized Violet was a girl.

That was the source of the discomfort I had felt from the start.
For a ten-year-old boy, the wrists peeking from the sleeves, the nape visible through the hair, the waist seen beneath clothing—all had felt too fragile, too slender.
She was tall enough, yet her build was unmistakably feminine.
Until recently I had thought her a delicate boy; now she was unmistakably a beautiful young lady.

And Bellrose, no doubt, could not accept it.

The daughter she had loved as Old was becoming a woman.
Unable to bear that natural change, she fled the slightest scrap of reality into dreams.
She had already forgotten the Violet cast out from those dreams entirely.

“I’m sorry, Marin.”

“Eh…?”

“Because of my selfishness, I made you see a world you never wanted to know.”

Was it a world I didn’t want to know?
Yes, probably.
I had long given up on my own parents—the moment they abandoned me.
That was precisely why I had dreamed of other people’s families.

A gentle mother, a strict father.
The mother scary when angry, the father secretly soft on his daughter.
Such ordinary happiness had to exist somewhere in the world.

A father who threw away his home.
A mother who overlaid her husband onto her daughter.
A daughter left alone in a vast mansion, facing reality.

“Why…”

I never wanted to know a world like this.

“Why did you hire me?”

A girl with no connection, only a few years older.
No family, no money, no education.
A filthy, homeless child with nothing to offer.
I could barely perform the work that guaranteed food, clothing, and shelter; even now there were endless reasons to throw me out.

“What… do you expect from me?”

I had nothing.
I could do nothing.
Even though that scene still jolted me awake from nightmares, I was powerless to pull Violet out of that hell.
I was narrow-hearted enough to feel jealousy instead of gratitude toward the very person who should have been my benefactor.

What could someone so powerless possibly give her?

“…Those eyes.”

“…Eyes?”

“I thought those eyes were beautiful.”

Looking straight at me—at my eyes—Violet said it.

My crimson eyes.
The proof of betrayal that had shaped my entire life.

I hated my own eyes.

Being abandoned was an unchangeable fact; even if my parents came back now, I could never love them.
All I felt was distrust and disgust.

Yet sometimes—when I saw families visiting the church, parents and children passing on the street, lights glowing in ordinary houses—I wondered.
If these eyes had not been red.
If they had been an unremarkable color inherited from father or mother, would my life have been different?

“I was afraid of red eyes.
They made me feel as though Mother was watching me.”

A mother who superimposed her husband onto her daughter and begged for love.
She should have been faithful, not adulterous—yet why did she seem far more tainted than my own mother who had cheated?

The memory of her deranged profile brought back the nausea from that day.

“That’s why I was shocked when I saw Marin’s eyes…
to think red could be this beautiful.”

Violet rose and stood before me.
A slowly extended fingertip brushed my brow through the gaps in my hair.

A girl with the same eyes as her mother had collapsed behind the mansion.

In those faintly opened crimson depths, what she felt was not the usual creeping chill along her nape.
It was the color of a blazing sunset—the countdown to liberation.
For her mother it might be the hue of parting with love, but for Violet it was the moment the lies ended, the moment hope began.

“They were so vivid, so beautiful that I couldn’t look away.”

I had thought red was a sticky color, like heated iron.
Her mother’s obsession and blind faith clung to the body, slowly tightening around the throat until breathing became painful.

I had always feared that one day I would be dragged in too.

“That’s why I wanted you by my side.
When I look at your eyes, I can believe we’re not the same.”

Not the same.
How much feeling was packed into those words?
Did she mean that even with the same red eyes, we were different people?

Or that even parent and child were not the same?

“Do you think it’s a foolish reason?”

Most people would laugh in disbelief that a ten-year-old would hire someone to live in just because she found their eyes beautiful.
Indeed, it was far too simple a reason to bind a person to the household.

“But for me… it was big enough to change the world.
When I look at you, Marin, I can believe I might be freed from red eyes.”

The hand touching me was small; the face before me far younger than I had imagined.
She really was a child younger than I was.
I was no adult myself, but this girl a few years my junior was undeniably more fragile.

“I’m sorry for dragging you into this, sorry for making you stay…
If you ever want to leave, I won’t stop you.”

Her smile was forced, crooked with sadness and loneliness pushed down inside.

She could voice the wish stay by my side, yet could not reach out with don’t go.

If no one granted her wishes, they were worthless trash.
She had repeated the cycle until she learned not that her wishes went unfulfilled, but that nothing she desired would ever reach her.

She looked exactly like the version of me whose time as a daughter had ended in only four years.

Myself, cast out from a world that would not love me.
Violet, unable to escape a world that would not love her.
We knew the same world, yet walked toward entirely different endings.

Which of us was happier?
The moment I asked myself that, it felt absurd.

Some would call the orphan who escaped unloving parents and found the sisters’ charity “happy.”
Some would call the noble lady who possessed wealth and status despite lack of love “happy.”
Some would call simply being alive “happiness.”

People can easily label others happy.
Look down and there is no end; there are always those worse off than Marin or Violet, and they crush hearts while pretending to comfort.

I saw such people in that cotton-soft church—truly good people, genuinely gentle—who smiled and told me my pain was a misunderstanding.
I wanted no part of that kind of happiness.

Neither of us was happy.

The child abandoned for lack of parental love.
The girl forced to indulge twisted obsession.

So surely—this was pity.

“…I won’t quit.”

The girl standing alone without even tears looked far too lonely.
The fact that no one stood behind to support her back was heartbreaking.

Even if I could not stand beside her, I wanted there to be someone she could turn to and see smiling.

And if her parents abandoned that role, then I could take it for myself.

“I will stay by your side—always.
Because you saved my life, Violet-sama.”

That day, it was undeniably this small hand that saved me.
If Violet had looked away then, my life might have ended right there.

The one who saved my life and still keeps it tethered is Violet.

Nutritious meals, clean clothes, pure water, warm bedding.

The church that believed everything could be solved through devotion to God was always poor, overflowing with orphans.
Life squeezed between my parents had been average at best.
This was more comfortable than any existence I had known—both in treatment and in the pressure on my heart.

Laugh and call it foolish.

She called these eyes I hated beautiful.
That tiny kindness became the trigger for everything.

Right in the center of my heart, at the core of my life—where it beat thump, thump—a soft heat bloomed.

I want to stay by her side.
I want to tell the girl who called me beautiful that she, too, is beautiful.

This was surely pity.
And undeniably—the first love Marin ever felt.

On that day, the world changed not only for Violet, but for me as well.

×　×　×　×

Discussing tomorrow’s breakfast menu made me return to my room later than usual.
If I have dark circles in the morning, Violet will worry.

“Ah, tomorrow’s schedule…”

She said she would go out after school, so she’ll be home a little late.
I opened my beloved planner and adjusted the timetable I had already roughly predicted.

The scratching of metal nib on paper rang out; the fountain pen in my hand caught my eye.
Its cherry-blossom pink seemed far too cute for me, but I will probably never change it for the rest of my life.

A twentieth-birthday gift from Violet.

I have become an adult; Violet will soon be seventeen.

Seven years that began with pity—I stayed by her side exactly as I promised that day.
I watched her selfish parents with almost refreshing shamelessness, and I watched her gradually twist.

Pity turned to love, growing stronger every day.
The more precious she became to me, the more it hurt that she was not cherished, the more I cursed those who failed to cherish her.

(She looked so happy—I’m glad.)

Someone skilled at suppressing emotion, rarely letting it show on her face.
I’m not one to talk—my own feelings rarely rise or fall dramatically.

Yet today Violet was visibly happy; even at the gloomy dinner table she had seemed, in a good way, distracted.
None of the others at the table noticed, of course.
Even if they had, they would only lecture her.
Since they cannot consider her feelings anyway, it is better they notice nothing at all.

When I asked the reason, she said she had made plans to go out with Yulan.

I know of Yulan Kuglus.
We have met with Violet as the connection, but barely spoken.
My impression of him comes from watching him beside Violet and from the things she says about him.

I know his name and face, possess a certain amount of information, yet our relationship is little different from strangers.

Even so, the trust I feel toward Yulan is a conviction strong enough to call us comrades.

We who cherish Violet.
We who desire her happiness above all else.

If she were going out alone I would worry, but with Yulan she will be protected even from troublesome attentions.
For all that she draws every eye, Violet does not properly understand her own beauty.
She could hardly develop such awareness in a home where her name is never spoken—but outside, awareness or not, people are drawn to her all the same.

“I should reduce the amount for dinner…”

She’ll be home in time for dinner, but if she eats something while out, I must lessen the portion for my small-eating lady.

I wrote the necessary reminder, placed it atop tomorrow’s clothes, slipped into bed, and sleep immediately pulled me under.

As consciousness gently sank into dreams, I wished that tomorrow Violet would come home smiling.