Guidelines for the Perfect Goodbye - Chapter 92
No, to someone, that might not be ‘just’ that. But still, compared to death…
And more importantly,
‘Infertility. This isnât what I expected…’
In this case, the harm is not to Lilith or Ulysses, but to Caroline.
‘What? Louise ClĂ©on… who exactly are you targeting?’
Lilith, Ulysses, Caroline…
The characters at the vertices of a triangle did not come together as one.
They all seemed like puppets in an amateur puppet show. When one puppet’s right hand was lifted, another’s left leg would unexpectedly rise.
Itâs impossible to figure out. It suddenly felt like itâs impossible to see even an inch ahead.
Ha, this is really something.
‘Disgusting.’
Cecilia hated ‘not knowing’. She despised pretending to know while ignorant, and she dreaded pretending to be unaware more than anything else.
As a result, she routinely berated herself.
‘Cecilia, what are you doing? Why can’t you realize it right away now that you’re here!’
She had already seen a bleak future. Yet, this was all she amounted to. She couldnât bear her own foolishness.
To be flustered by a variable like Louise Cléon and waste so much time.
Even if her mother had hidden the former countess’s wedding dress in a past life…
‘Wait.’
Cecilia paused.
‘An event that already happened…?’
Her pupils shook. The tips of her neatly straightened ten fingernails trembled.
Surely… Louise had possessed Poenaâs Tears even before she enacted her scheme.
Otherwise, how could Ulysses and Caroline have predicted and intervened in the engagement breakup overnight?
They couldnât have predicted it. It would have been impossible. Just a few days ago, even her ordinary seventeen-year-old self couldnât have imagined such a scenario.
‘She must have been hiding dark secrets all along.’
This makes more sense contextually.
Like she had plotted, she too had her own cunning plans and objectives.
To satisfy some deep desire, tearing her own flesh and drawing her own blood…
‘Clenching a handful of cursed tears, she waited for the right moment.’
This time, Cecilia was just a little quicker.
‘I’m sure Louise would have eventually given that vial of Poenaâs Tears to Caroline even if I hadn’t done anything.’
Through a different circumstance.
At a time when peopleâs attention would not be focused on Cecilia, when everyone was weary from the incident and scrambling.
‘Or at some moment when Caroline had come to rely entirely on me…’
Not like now, where Cecilia just hung around her, picking and choosing her words to flatter and grovel to Caroline.
‘When I had her completely in my grasp.’
When she alone would be closest to her.
Cecilia intuited when in her past life the woman had used this ‘bitter medicineâ.
Fundamentally, a woman is given away in marriage when the time comes. It’s a sad unwritten rule.
Whether she has a lover or not, whether she loves or not.
A woman gets married.
She bears children.
She spends her life serving her husband, raising her children, and then scrambling to arrange her childrenâs marriages.
Like the trumpet flowers blooming profusely in the night, she endlessly rotates through moonlit social gatherings and afternoon rose gardens.
So marriage is not the end point of life; it’s merely a phase.
Due to the original sin of biting into an apple, they must inevitably produce offspring.
In the past life, Caroline was unable to bear children.
Was it simply because she and her husband were distant to each other?
Ulysses would not have disgraced her just because he did not love her.
The diligently sincere second son of the Rosencrantz family wouldnât have neglected his wife like someone else might have.
He was cynical, but he wasnât the type to waste time on unnecessary malice.
He wouldn’t have spent long, ambitious nights alone, chewing on self-reproach and sorrow, with bitter tears wetting his lips.
He would have fulfilled at least the minimum obligations.
‘Therefore, if there were no severe defects on either side of the couple…’
Caroline should have conceived a child within a few years.
She should have completed her life’s tasks on time and looked at Cecilia with a smug face.
But she failed in her duty. It was the moment her beautiful garden, like something out of a fairy tale, was brutally destroyed.
