Chapter 89: Someone tell me the truth.

Marin’s voice fell over her like a soft blanket.
Her hand stroked Violet’s back slowly, gently, the way one lulls a child deeper into sleep.
Marin’s body temperature was probably lower than average, yet to Violet it felt wonderfully warm; proof of how cold she herself had become, even though the weather outside was only getting hotter.

She pressed her forehead harder against Marin’s shoulder, just a little higher than her own, and desperately tried to gather her scattered thoughts into words.
Every time she opened her mouth, though, nothing came out but carbon dioxide.

If she put it into words, the truth would take on solid shape.

“M-Marin… I… I…”

Her tongue tangled; she couldn’t form a proper sentence.
Something had exploded inside her head, and if she hadn’t clung to Marin she would have collapsed.
She had acted on pure emotion, but she had no idea what to do next.

Should she scream and cry?
Should she try to explain, however incoherently, and beg for advice?
Or should she simply pour everything out and feel better the moment someone told her it was all right?

The old Violet would have chosen the third option.
Being the tragic heroine had been her only comfort; as long as someone nodded and took her side, that was enough.
Pity, sympathy; anything would do.
She had only wanted material to convince herself that Violet was not the one at fault.

But now…
Now, what she truly wanted was…

“Violet-sama, calm down. It’s all right to take your time—”

“No—no, this is wrong… all of it is wrong…!”

Marin tried to create a little space so she could meet Violet’s eyes and soothe her, but Violet’s gaze wandered wildly, forgetting even to blink.

Her brain felt like it was boiling; the heat spread behind her eyes.
Amid that scalding temperature, only her hands and her heart kept growing colder and colder.
Hot and cold, burning and freezing.
Emotion and reason tore apart.
The two things that should have been joined by her true feelings were screaming in opposite directions.

If only one of them were a lie.
If even one were false, she could have thrown it away, drawn a line, let it go.
But both were real; that was why she couldn’t carry them.

“I’m… I’m in love with Yulan…”

It was impossible, a momentary delusion, all an illusion created by possessiveness;
Please, someone, deny these feelings for me.

“It’s a mistake… everything, everything is wrong…”

Love was supposed to be begging, starving, thirsting.
Every love story piled up around Violet had ended in tragedy exactly that way.

Her feelings for Claudia had been different from love.
What she had wanted was the staircase to happiness that stood behind Claudia, not Claudia himself.
She hadn’t wanted love from him alone; she had wanted to be loved by countless people.
Anyone would do, any form would do; twisted, defiled, she would have swallowed it whole as long as it contained affection for her.
If the opposite of love was indifference, then any attention at all should have been convertible into love.

The only love Violet knew was dark, deep, heavy as lead.
A love that would sacrifice even a daughter, even one’s own life, for a single person;
a desire that bloomed by feeding on the tears of everyone around it.
The ecstatic face of a woman shining with greed;
the face of a mother condensed with disappointment, despair, hatred, and disgust;
the face of a wife lying in bed deliriously calling her husband’s name;
Bellrose.
To Violet, Bellrose was the very symbol of love.

“No… I hate it… I hate this…”

It had begun with her mother’s enraptured face.
Hands cupping Violet’s cheeks, blissfully murmuring Father’s name.
Whether it was fortunate or not, Violet had been too young to understand words or even to claim “I am Violet.”
She only remembered how terrifying those blood-red eyes had been, gleaming like fresh-spilled blood.

The education that began immediately afterward had been strict in some ways, indulgent in others.
It was terrifyingly precise when it came to making her walk the same path as Father, yet Mother didn’t care in the slightest how unladylike she was.
Running outside, climbing trees; as long as she avoided injury or sunburn, Mother was always in high spirits.
She never once found it strange that her daughter behaved like a boy.
On the contrary, she had found the idea of her daughter becoming a girl strange; she had been the kind of person who would discard her as a fake.

To Mother, Violet had been a sacrificial offering for love.
No; she had given birth to her precisely to offer her as a sacrifice.
Unfortunately, Father did not want the offering;
cruelly, Violet had been worth more than that.
What was created was a defective counterfeit,
crafted by a madwoman,
all for the sake of a single-minded love.

That was why the feelings Violet now held could not possibly be love.

They must not be love.

And yet…

“Why… does it make me so happy…?”

Tell me that an emotion this precious, this sacred, that makes me want to cry from its very dignity;
tell me it cannot be love.