“Why should I trust someone who abandoned me? If you’ve gone that way, it’s over, so what are you asking me to believe in now?”

Evie asked as if she couldn’t understand.

Her voice was full of clear doubt, like someone who had been told to feed straw to a lion.

So Zion’s heart sank once again.

But all the cursed one could reveal was his trembling gaze, and even that was hidden by the darkness of the earth. In the end, Evie noticed nothing. Instead, Zion died again, buried in secrecy.

“……I must have talked nonsense.”

After a while, Zion reluctantly opened his mouth.

“To trust a person who irresponsibly abandoned and left.”

As always, it was an indifferent and dry voice.

“Hypocrites who pretended to be good and then disappeared, of course, can’t be trusted.”

So Evie thought that Zion had simply agreed.

“To trust a sinister person you’ve lived with but never seen their face is impossible.”

But she soon realized something strange in the words that followed.

“Then, knowing the subject, you should disappear gracefully, not trusting a person who gets in the way with foolish deeds.”

“I, don’t say it like that…….”

Evie stammered in confusion.

The Count’s attitude in scrutinizing the astrologer was strange. At first, it seemed like mockery, but on closer listening, it was neither angry nor sarcastic. It was not a joke either.

His attitude was more like a monk confessing sins. Calm, serious, and somehow shrinking.

But he was scolding others with that attitude.

Evie was bewildered by what this behavior meant, and in the meantime, Zion calmly drove home the point.

“I wouldn’t have had to get tangled up with him if it weren’t for him. It would have been better not to have met him in the first place. He’s nothing but an obstacle to the end.”

“Wait, Count. Don’t jump to conclusions.”

Evie, who couldn’t listen anymore, objected. Then Zion turned to Evie and asked in a gruff voice.

“Am I wrong?”

“You are. Both the word ‘obstacle’ and the idea that it’s better not to have met are wrong.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t think so. Meeting you is the luckiest thing for me, a miracle that happened to me only once!”

Evie answered Zion’s question firmly. Then she suddenly covered her mouth, startled by her embarrassing words.

Although she couldn’t see well in the dark, Zion expected Evie’s face to turn beet red again.

So he looked at the disconcerted Evie and asked again.

“You don’t trust me?”

“I don’t trust you, but the preciousness is something else.”

“How can that be something else?”

“It’s precious, but the fact that you left me is true, and you’ve given me too much to just forget.”

Evie said this and was surprised at her own answer. The feelings brought up by the curse felt suddenly intense.

So she was standing there like a person who had become selfaware too late.

“……What did he give you?”

Zion had definitely said not to ask personal questions, but he rudely asked as if he had completely forgotten.

So Evie opened her mouth again, annoyed but unable to resist.

“He was there for me when I was alone. When the whole world was turning without me, when I couldn’t even believe I was myself, he found me. He cherished me, who was unnecessary and useless, without reason, and made me feel fortunate to have been born. He taught me that the world isn’t always bad.”

But as she continued speaking, making a confession she had never made to anyone, Evie’s tangled emotions were unraveled in an unexpected direction.

She felt like crying. Not out of anger or embarrassment, but a little sad and overwhelming.

Even though it was her own heart, the meaning was too clear when expressed in words, and it hurt.

“Before that, the world I lived in had no hope or help, and it was a cruel world just for me, but you came and changed it. You gave me a world with miracles and salvation. So if I hadn’t met you, I would have…….”
Evie felt a lump in her throat. If it hadn’t been for the curse, she would have given up speaking long ago.

But the curse that had captured Evie, the curse that forced her to speak the truth in response to a question, finally forced Evie’s dishonest lips to confess.

“I wouldn’t have wanted to keep living.”

Having barely finished speaking, Evie hastily cast her gaze to the sky. It was to prevent the tears that had suddenly filled her eyes from falling.

Since before she had grown up, Evie had been alone, dedicating her all to live for just one day. Evie’s world was one that could barely be sustained by struggling so fiercely.

A barren and malicious world, a world where only the fortunate ones were more or less comfortable, a world that was cold and cruel, where everything seemed to go well except for her.

But one day, you appeared and changed my world. You didn’t just take care of me, but taught me a new fact.

That the world also bestows affection upon me, a fact I had never been able to believe before.

That kindness was the salvation that allowed me to live, and meeting you was still an incomprehensible miracle.

But it would have been better if we had never met.