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chapter 1
[1. The Woman Who Carries Luck]
The beginning was very trivial.
Natalie stared intently at the hat she was about to pick up.
‘Something feels off.’
The pale yellow hat displayed an elegant charm.
To buy that limited-edition hat—decorated with the finest satin ribbon and lace imported from Valentin—she had put her name on the waiting list and waited for a long time.
And then, after exactly three years, the limited sale finally opened. The moment she received notice that she had barely made it into the first-come, first-served list, she rushed straight to the boutique.
“Lady Ailsden?”
As if urging her to hurry up and choose, the baron’s daughter who had come along with her gently prompted her.
Natalie had secured this stroke of luck by keeping both of their names on the waiting list for three years, even paying an enormous fee on her companion’s behalf.
Of course, they weren’t friends. Natalie didn’t have friends to begin with.
“Ah, yes.”
Snapping back to her senses, Natalie reached out to pick up the hat in front of her.
But somehow, she didn’t feel drawn to it. It was a hat she had dreamed of for three whole years, yet now it even gave her a sense of discomfort.
Strangely, Natalie turned her gaze to the display case beside it.
‘For some reason… I want to buy that one.’
It was a small silk hat.
It wasn’t as flashy as the pale yellow one, and being black—something one might wear to a funeral—it wasn’t particularly pretty either.
Moreover, compared to the latest trend where wider brims were considered more elegant, this small, corsage-like hat looked rather odd.
“Lady Ailsden, shall I wrap this one for you?”
The shop assistant politely gestured toward the pale yellow hat.
Beside Natalie, the baron’s daughter was already waiting, holding a hat of the same design but in a different color.
Natalie stared back and forth between the two hats.
But whenever she tried to make up her mind to buy the pale yellow one she had longed for, her gaze kept drifting back to the black hat.
In the end, Natalie frowned and muttered,
“…No. Give me that one.”
“Pardon? But that is only a sample Madam Dupre made as a practice piece!”
“It doesn’t matter. Wrap that one.”
“W-What? Lady Ailsden, are you serious?”
At Madam Dupre’s exclusive, reservation-only boutique, each customer was allowed to purchase only one hat. There were no exceptions.
Both the shop assistant and the baron’s daughter were shocked and tried to stop her, but Natalie stubbornly bought the sample hat anyway—
and paid the full, expensive price of the pale yellow one she had originally intended to buy.
“Why would you do that? You waited three years for this beautiful one, and instead you chose something so strange…”
The baron’s daughter, who had ridden back in the Duke of Ailsden’s carriage with her, trailed off.
Natalie herself couldn’t understand why she had spent such a large sum as if possessed and grabbed that bizarre sample hat.
‘For some reason, it kept drawing my attention. Like it was telling me not to buy the yellow one, but to choose it instead!’
But if she said that out loud, she’d only sound like an idiot throwing a tantrum after stubbornly making a strange choice.
And now that her name had been removed from the waiting list, she had lost her chance to buy it again.
“It was my decision.”
In the end, that was all Natalie could say curtly.
After all, the baron’s daughter—who wasn’t even her friend, yet had cleverly flattered her way into obtaining an expensive limited-edition hat—pouted and fell silent.
Then, two days later—
“Lady Ailsden! Lady Ailsden!”
“What is it?”
The baron’s daughter came running up, breathless, and blurted out,
“You won’t believe this—early this morning, Madam Dupre’s hat shop caught fire! Madam Dupre had rushed to the Kingdom of Nayuta because her father passed away, and when she returned late this morning, she saw everything!”
Natalie, who had been sipping her tea with composure, nearly spat it out at the shocking news.
“They say it was a mistake by an employee! And the hat you bought the other day—the one you chose—that was actually the real limited-edition piece!”
