Love Me Just Once (Completed Main Story) - Chapter 100

The gloomy topic soon passed. Anika began making various remarks about the things in the courtyard.

“In the north, such flowers bloom. It’s a species I’ve never seen in the south.”

Only upon hearing that did Ophelia realize there were flowers blooming in the castle courtyard, and she turned to look where Anika was pointing. Indeed, there was something with leaves slightly different from the usual.

Anika had somehow recognized its shape, entirely unlike any flower she’d normally know.

Ophelia asked the woman observing the plump plant,

“Do you have a strong interest in flowers?”

“My mother loves plants.”

And Anika smiled faintly—a genuine smile, unlike the polite one she’d worn all along. Seeing that brief flash of affection for her mother made Ophelia feel strangely unsettled.

She had never, in her life, been someone’s daughter. Not unless it was a blemish.

The woman who had once been a princess of a now-vanished kingdom could not bear that blemish and took her own life. Each time Ophelia realized that woman had died because of her, she grew upset—though she had done nothing wrong, it felt as if she still owed something in return.

Her thoughts didn’t linger long. They soon reached a uniquely shaped bench at the center of the courtyard. The bench, carved from a massive circular stone, had a shallow depression in its center that served as a small pond.

In the artificial pond, which carried a faint fishy smell, aquatic plants and cold-water fish swam about. Golden and silver scales glimmered bluish beneath the water’s surface.

Ophelia gazed down at the tiny pond she’d never paid attention to in her previous life. It was then she heard Anika’s voice.

“Oh, so that’s the royal well.”

Ophelia turned to look where Anika was gazing. There stood a well covered in reddish vegetation.

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