Guidelines for the Perfect Goodbye - Chapter 194

He was the one who felt more at ease. Even though she left with an unpleasant expression, he wasn’t particularly anxious, just puzzled. To exaggerate a little, he was more surprised than anything.

‘What’s the problem?’

Sienna Port’s words suddenly came to mind.

‘Lieutenant, you’ve got a sharp tongue. You hurt people without even having a purpose.’

She said that, crying after confessing to him. He thought he had politely and honestly rejected her, but she suddenly got angry.

‘I have no interest in children.’

Was that really such a problem?

Logan still didn’t understand why she had been hurt. After all, she was young. She had only just turned seventeen last year.

…Seventeen?

Logan furrowed his brows. Something seemed worth reflecting on, but he swallowed the thought like a pill.

‘Seventeen is young? My mother was married at my age.’

Sienna Port’s voice kept echoing in his mind.

Logan quickly searched his pockets. In his haste to leave, his inner pocket was empty.

“Damn it…”

Nothing was going right today. His mood had sunk all the way to the earth’s mantle. In the space where Sienna Port’s voice had once been, Cecilia’s face as she turned away kept flickering in his mind.

‘Why did she look like that?’

If we’re being technical, I’m the one who was rejected. So why am I the one acting like I’ve been heartbroken? Why do I feel like I’m the one who’s been hurt?

Even though he didn’t understand, he couldn’t help but keep thinking about her. It seemed certain that he felt something for her, something he hadn’t yet named.

That feeling would swell up whenever he saw her, then gradually shrink as the distance between them grew.

However, it would start to grow again—just a little—when he passed a cheap bottle of wine between his comrades, when he saw a purple cloth flutter in the breeze, or when he looked into his own eyes in the mirror.

In other words, he had thought of her every single day.

He only recently realized that even his eyes resembled her.

One day, after being soaked by seawater and climbing back onto the ship, he had taken off his shirt, wrung it out like a rag, and shook the water from his hair.

As he was heading into the cabin after laying his clothes out on deck, his eyes met the shattered mirror.

The mirror, cracked into four large pieces, reflected parts of him as though pieced together like a puzzle.

In the bottom right, silver hair hung limp, dripping water. He looked like a drowned rat.

In the bottom left, the wound beneath his collarbone glowed red from the salt. His eyes, split in two by the upper cracks, blinked simultaneously.

His wet silver lashes fell down and then slowly adhered to his skin. A droplet, too heavy to hang on to just one lash, fell and wet his eye. It stung as blood vessels rose to the surface of the sclera.

He should have closed his eyes. It would have been better to at least wipe them clean.

But Logan stood there for a while, enduring the needle-like pain.

His gaze met his own. His irises reflected off each other, creating an endless tunnel of pupils.

His irises, usually close to a blue-violet, glowed purple under the red light inside.

From that moment, Logan began to see Cecilia in the broken mirror every day.

Ever since he realized that his eyes shimmered the same color as her hair.

***

Logan had little attachment to human relationships since birth. He had never been saddened by his origins, nor had he ever been consumed by fiery rage over betrayal, nor had he ever loved anyone passionately.

Some people considered him a ‘boring man’.

In particular, Logan was fundamentally different from a certain man who took pleasure in seducing women—full of emotions and had a lot to say, drawing attention wherever he went.

But no matter how dazzling the path that man walked was, the trail he left behind was littered with rotting petals.

That man’s character was rotten to the core.

He loved women but simultaneously looked down on them. He criticized women for being overly emotional.

‘That damn love. Always harping on about love. I was born on the sea. If I settle down, I’ll die.’

That’s what he claimed. And despite his grumbling, he was always the first to cozy up to emotional women.

‘You know, people’s feelings are a hassle, but sometimes they’re convenient. They’re easy to use and easy to discard.’

In truth, that man had no real connection to the sea. He wasn’t in the navy, nor was he a sailor.

Christian Pierce, who had once enjoyed a leisurely trip near the port of Odridge with his grandmother, left the port after having scattered rotten love affairs wherever he went.

Sienna Port cursed him, saying he had wronged more than a few women. She wished him double the pain for all the betrayals he had committed.

Logan was astonished to learn that the scandal involving his half-brother, whom he rarely even saw, had spread across the continent and reached his ears.

And now, that scandal had brought them even closer.

With rumors spreading throughout the capital that Cecilia’s older sister, Caroline, had become Christian’s lover.