Ophelia Mevasa opened her eyes.

The first thing she saw was a familiar ceiling.

Familiar, but not feeling natural.

Looking up at the ceiling that was neither the one she had last seen at the villa nor the one in her usual bedroom, Ophelia frowned. What is this? Thoughts like “Where have I seen this before?” floated around in her head.

When her reason was somewhat assembled, she remembered where this bed with fluttering fabric hanging was located.

The princess’s room in the Reden Palace.

Am I crazy?

Realizing this fact sent a chill down her spine. Ophelia, startled, sat up.

Her head throbbed at the sudden movement. As she held her aching head with blurry vision, the door suddenly swung open.

“You’re awake?”

The tone, while perfunctory, was not particularly polite and belonged to the maid she had brought from Reden. In other words, it was something she shouldn’t be hearing now.

While Ophelia blinked at the irrational situation, the girl approached her and prepared water for washing.

When she still didn’t move, the maid directly scooped up water and rubbed it on her face. Surprised by the cold sensation, Ophelia flinched. The feeling seemed very real.

“Are you a bit more awake now?”

The maid asked as she roughly wiped the moisture from her face and helped her up.

Though it probably wasn’t a question expecting an answer, Ophelia couldn’t respond. The situation was too bewildering for her to interact with people.

Whether Ophelia was being dragged along stupidly or not, the maid sat her in front of the mirror and began brushing her hair.

“As the princess knows, today His Highness the Crown Prince is supposed to come from Aglante. So stop your useless mourning…”

“What?”

Ophelia whipped her head around at the words she shouldn’t be hearing – in fact, everything was full of such things – and the maid hurriedly lowered her eyes.

“I, I didn’t mean any harm. But princess, you’re always because of that dead man…”

“No, not that. Who’s coming today?”

Realizing that she wasn’t angry but surprised, the girl blinked. You didn’t know?

“Today, your betrothed is supposed to come, isn’t he?”

Damn it.

As she had done sometime before, with flowers in her hair and her body stuffed into a dress that only fluttered without any warming effect, Ophelia paced around the room.

Damn it all to hell.

At these words spoken with more emotion, the maid watching her nearby flinched. It was understandable to be surprised since she hadn’t used such language in her princess days, but Ophelia was too preoccupied to care how she appeared to others.

Feeling the urge to bang her head against the mirror she had just passed, she mulled over the situation. How did she end up back in the past?

Surely her last memory was of sitting on the bed waiting for Idren.

It was a plan that had now come to nothing, but that night Ophelia had intended to allow the man what she had never given before.

Of course, it was closer to Idren not taking rather than her not giving.

Anyway, they had planned to do what should have been done long ago after going through a slightly awkward, tingling, and strangely warm atmosphere.

It was a plan Idren didn’t know about, but Ophelia was confident she could make things flow according to her will. Incidentally, she had intended to take her partner’s first time, which no one but her would have.

But what on earth was this?

Unless she had jumped off the balcony out of anxiety while waiting for her husband, Ophelia couldn’t comprehend this situation.

No, this won’t do.

Ophelia, who had been pacing around the room, suddenly stopped.

Surely the maid had said while preparing her:

“Today, your betrothed is supposed to come, isn’t he?”

And Ophelia knew this day well.

In her first life, on this day, she had not come out of bed, using illness as an excuse.

Then when time first turned back, she had jumped from the balcony. If now the most overwhelming feeling was incredulity, then it had been despair that made her want to resolve things even in that way.

Thinking it would be better to die, she had thrown herself off, only to be caught by Idren.

The man who was always quiet and knew how to maintain boundaries showed something close to anger towards her for the first time then.

Even so, he couldn’t even raise his voice properly let alone his hand, so it wasn’t scary.

Anyway, at that time Ophelia had no intention of seeing how decent the person in front of her was.

So she chose to sweep away everything rather than count what was left, and hanged herself on the bedpost.

Thus began her third life.

Realizing she had returned to the past again, Ophelia closed the balcony door. She locked not only the balcony but all the doors around, and smashed the furniture.

They say even the most patient person has a limit.

From then on, Idren too flipped completely.

Breaking out of his role as a docile husband, the man changed into a completely different person. He got angry, made unreasonable demands and impossible requests.

Being tossed about by him, before she knew it Ophelia was standing in the hall of Sigrasal Palace. Wearing a wedding dress, with an all-too-familiar wedding ring on one hand.

Most stories would end there, but their life was not a romantic novel, so it continued afterwards.

Even after marriage, Ophelia thought of ending her life someday.

She didn’t have the confidence to live as a protagonist in a love story. The world was too dirty and dry to live embracing an intangible emotion.

She had lived as the dirtiest person among them, but she didn’t want to do business at a loss.

But the man who had lived a life no less difficult than hers, if not more so, had a completely different idea.

Idren seemed to think he had jumped out of a fairy tale.

Where he got all that bottomless hope and enthusiasm from, she didn’t know, but he stubbornly reappeared even after being turned away nine times out of ten.

Ophelia couldn’t understand him.

Living only for romance like that was just asking to be backstabbed.

Moreover, wasn’t he a man who had a lot? Unlike her, who had gone from an ambiguous princess to an equally ambiguous queen, Idren had only what he had achieved himself.

If it were me, I wouldn’t live like that.

Looking at the man striking matches in front of a cold sea when there were wicks to light everywhere if he just looked around, Ophelia thought countless times. Stupid man. Foolish man. Doesn’t know how to look out for his own interests. He’ll ruin his own life at this rate.

But in the end, Idren was right.

At some point, Ophelia wanted to protect his back rather than stab it. Just because of him alone, she wanted to become a better person, and always wanted to show only her good side.

Although she gave up everything because the foundation was too much of a mess to build up only good things, one thing remained unchanged.

Ophelia still did not want to betray her husband, who had become inextricably entangled in her life.

So this shouldn’t happen.

Covering her made-up face with her hands, Ophelia thought about what Idren might be doing now that she had suddenly fallen back into the past. Was he crying?

If she had returned to the past – though she didn’t know why it had happened – it meant she had died, so he would probably be sad.

How did that man spend his time when she first took her own life?

And Ophelia realized she knew nothing about Idren’s life after her death.

The only information she had was just one thing.

“I lived one more month.”

That’s what the man had said when she asked how much longer he had lived after her death.

When she first heard those words, Ophelia had assumed time had turned back about a month after her death.

But now, thinking carefully, it was a statement that could be interpreted ambiguously.

At the chilling hypothesis that suddenly occurred to her, she muttered.

“…Surely not.”

There’s no way that man would have followed me in death.

The maid looked at her in confusion with fearful eyes, but it didn’t matter.

Ophelia carefully retraced Idren’s behavior so far. He didn’t seem like someone who couldn’t exercise good judgment, but she couldn’t be sure.

“Were you ever interested in me?”

Why was she remembering those words spoken in a subdued voice now?

It felt like the nape of her neck was growing cold. Ophelia shivered slightly at the eerie feeling she had never experienced in her life.

Although they had grown somewhat closer after having such a conversation on a boat crossing the canal, Ophelia couldn’t completely deny those words.

Unlike the man who had been mindful of her from the beginning and remembered every little thing, Ophelia had been indifferent to Idren for quite a long time.

So perhaps, he might have had a side she didn’t know about.

Thinking that it might have caused something terrible made her feel uneasy. Though unintended, she seemed to understand how Idren must have felt every time she didn’t give a clear answer.

Shivering briefly at the spine-chilling anxiety, Ophelia turned to the maid.

“When did you say Idren… no, His Highness the Crown Prince would arrive?”

“What? Oh, by now he should already be…”

Without waiting to hear the end of those words, Ophelia flung open the balcony door. The dazzling spring sunlight poured in.

Frowning at the excessive brilliance, Ophelia nevertheless took urgent steps forward. Just as she had done several times before, leaving behind the screaming maid, she grasped the railing and discovered it.

A pair of starry eyes looking up at her.