🔊 TTS Settings
Chapter 55
How should I define this feeling?
How should I even process this moment, realizing that he had carefully kept all the letters she had sent and repeatedly read them?
Betty tried to steady her trembling voice as she asked,
“Did you… did you really keep all of these together like this?”
“Of course.”
Ian looked back at her, brushing his hair aside as he glanced at the mess in the room with a “what should I do with this chaos?” expression.
For him, it was only natural that he had kept the letters all this time.
After all, it wasn’t like it was newly revealed that the owner of all these letters was Betty.
But Betty’s expression was unusual, and that made Ian’s expression grow serious as well.
“Is there a problem? Did I drop something and hurt you…?”
“No, not at all.”
The only thing wrong, somehow, was Betty’s own heart, which felt a tinge of sorrow. No—actually, it wasn’t sorrow.
The emotion swelling inside her, if it had to be defined, was closer to joy than sadness.
“It’s just… it’s amazing that you kept all of this together.”
“At first, I just tied them together, but if I wanted to read them again, that wouldn’t do.”
“I did send quite a lot of letters, after all.”
Betty hadn’t expected to have an opportunity to speak so openly about the letters.
Ian, on the other hand, seemed perfectly natural, as if he had been waiting for this moment.
Her heart continued to race, and it seemed like she was the only one whose emotions were stirred.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t reply more often. I thought many times that it might seem rude.”
Betty had no words to answer as he spoke while finishing tidying the desk.
She had never imagined she’d hear the feelings of the person who had received her letters, whom she had only imagined countless times while writing them.
“It didn’t feel that way.”
“I don’t think you would’ve felt that way.”
Betty felt as if her initial thought—that “this person probably never wrote letters before”—had been discovered.
“…I thought you were a rather taciturn person.”
She had softened her words; no matter what, she couldn’t say it exactly as she had thought.
Upon hearing her, Ian placed the documents he had just organized into the drawer and chuckled softly.
“Everyone knows I have no talent for writing, so you don’t need to be so careful with your words.”
Seeing him smile—not a faint trace, but a genuinely sincere smile—felt almost new to her.
“Still, I was glad when you later wrote letters and sent them personally.”
“…That you were glad?”
In truth, Ian Dayvan was far more nervous than he appeared while participating in this conversation.
He had no objection to the topic shifting to letters—in fact, he welcomed it.
Yet thinking of the brief letters he had sent as replies, he couldn’t help but worry about what Betty might have thought of him.
His lack of eloquence was painfully obvious in his writing, and there was nothing he could do about it.
Even if he went back in time, he doubted he could find the right words staring at a blank sheet of paper.
“They must’ve been terribly messy.”
“But you wrote them yourself, which is what matters.”
Betty carefully lifted the ink bottle on the desk to prevent it from tipping over.
As soon as she finished speaking, Ian suddenly looked at her—but his hand was hovering near the ink bottle, not the paper.
“…I’m worried it might fall.”
She awkwardly placed the ink bottle a safe distance away.
“I’m glad you weren’t upset.”
If she had been upset, she probably wouldn’t have treasured that emerald necklace so carefully.
Realizing how much she had spoken, Betty suddenly felt she had perhaps said too much.
She hadn’t originally intended to talk about the letters. She had simply wanted to quietly leave the past behind.
But the moment she saw firsthand how important her letters were to him—and imagined him reading them repeatedly—she could no longer act as if she had no feelings for them.
‘More than I thought…’
Her letters seemed to have reached him far more effectively than she had imagined—perhaps even more than she had hoped.
“I’m glad the letters I sent weren’t a burden to you.”
Sometimes reading long letters could be tedious, especially when they included trivial details.
Finally, Ian cleared the clutter from the desk and gestured for Betty to sit directly opposite him.
As soon as she did, Ian looked down at the letters he had kept and shared the thoughts he had long held to himself.
“The only reason I came all the way to the capital was because of these letters.”
“Excuse me?”
He spoke simply, without embellishment, knowing that only the truth would reach her.
“If you hadn’t sent me these letters, I wouldn’t have thought to return to the capital so quickly last year.”
He might have delayed coming altogether, despite the bureaucratic mess and the inconvenience of managing his territories from afar. The reason he came and stayed in the capital boiled down to one thing, fundamentally.
Betty could hardly believe she had understood correctly—that the primary reason the Grand Duke had come to the capital was because of the letters she had sent.
“I thought I was coming to see Princess Charte when I believed she was the owner. But the person I was looking for wasn’t Vivian Charte at all.”
“You must have been disappointed when you realized I was the one you were looking for.”
Her tone was self-deprecating. Whoever the letters’ owner might have been in his mind, it certainly wasn’t her.
“Not at all. Didn’t I tell you? I knew it had to be you.”
From the start, all his instincts pointed to Betty. He only needed the final proof, the ultimate certainty.
“…I hoped it would be you.”
Ian knew this was his true feeling.
The more he got to know Betty, the more he was convinced she had to be the owner of the letters, and the more he found himself hoping it was her.
Betty finally met his indigo eyes head-on, unable to gauge the depth of the emotions swirling within them.
She couldn’t easily answer. Facing Ian, who spoke as if resolute, she couldn’t bring herself to push him away as she had vowed yesterday.
How could she crush such a wish when it was being expressed so earnestly? She couldn’t.
It would also be a lie if she hadn’t wanted this very moment—to lay everything bare with Ian, just the two of them.
Noticing her hesitation, Ian shifted to a more manageable topic.
“…I didn’t ask you to make time for me because of this. It’s because the task you requested last time succeeded.”
“The task I requested?”
The sudden change of topic left her struggling to keep up.
She wondered if she had ever personally asked anything of the Grand Duke at all.
“I promised I’d investigate and tell you about your mother, didn’t I?”
“But that’s…”
She had completely forgotten. Understandably so—she had firmly told him there was no need to investigate.
‘You can forget what you suggested earlier. I’ll look into my mother myself.’
Still, she regretted phrasing it that way.
She had no words to respond to Ian, who remembered and actually carried out the investigation, only to tell her now.
“I… I’m sorry about that back then.”
“You don’t need to apologize every time. You’ve never truly done anything to apologize for.”
Ian let out a light sigh. Every time Betty apologized, it felt as if a few steps of distance grew between them.
