Guidelines for the Perfect Goodbye - Chapter 95
The weight of Guinevere blaming Cecilia and her father’s abandonment were starkly different. They were incomparable.
Even if Guinevere went mad and killed Cecilia personally, that still wouldn’t compare to the neglect of a parent.
Of course, Father, you might feel a bit unjustly treated. Among many lies and cruel tricks, you only turned your head away.
It’s true that he didn’t steal his own child’s inheritance or spread rumors about them. Hmm, such actions were weak then, objectively.
But Adam, aren’t you my parent?
A parent abandoning their child?
Using them at will and even discarding them?
It’s absurd. It’s laughably horrific how she was suffering from this more than death itself. It’s so ridiculously pitiful that she could vomit out her own heart from laughing so hard.
‘I didn’t hate you this much before.’
Because the betrayal became so severe and vile.
The more she saw it.
The more she came full circle and would see right through him again.
The way he was from the days her biological mother was still alive in the past life… if she thought about it with a head that has grown, aged, and withered.
It angered her.
And with this blistering anger, she realized.
As she sat upright in that witness stand, eyes brimming with tears still unshed, thinking that he was surely on his side.
Ah, I still hold love for my father.
“Ha.”
It’s suffocating.
No, her chest was so blocked that there’s no room to feel suffocated. Everywhere she went it would feel blocked, like walking barefoot in a godless desert, stepping on thorns.
And yet, after experiencing all that, feeling all that, realizing all that…!
The hatred…
The terribly painful hatred that she couldn’t rightly call by its name, so she must call it ‘love-hate’.
The feelings she must call love-hate towards him until the day she’d die.
Ah, right.
This was what’s unjust.
It’s maddeningly unfair.
You do not love me…
Yet even in moments of hatred, I must love you.
‘How can this be?’
What’s more devastating was that this love-hate was all she knew of love.
Not from her parents, not from her husband, and not even from herself.
The purely affectionate feelings have died. Buried with the past in a land of no ownership. Because faith is fearful, she decided to leave it forever as a land of no ownership.
Trust. Hope. Love. Now, she dared not even think about these things, fearing to dig again in a bottomless desert with bare hands.
“Ha ha…”
Not twice.
That would be less than foolish. Not even human. Even an animal guards its first love. Love wrapped in trust, how silly, like a rock.
Cecilia did not forget ‘hatred.’ Like a castaway marking the days amidst bone-chilling cold and loneliness, she engraved hatred daily.
Since there was nothing she could receive back with affection.
So love-hate, let’s just look at the end of the word and live.
“….”
In contrast to Cecilia’s feeble laughter, Diana’s mouth was quiet.
Naturally, if the other party doesn’t respond, the fun fades. Cecilia slowly withdrew her smile.
Behind her, Dane peeked out curiously. Seeing her keep laughing, he seemed curious if they were whispering something funny.
‘It’s because I’m turning my back on Diana.’
If anyone would see this face up close, they’d lose any desire to join in.
“Oh, what to do…”
Cecilia scratched her chin, appearing puzzled.
“I’m of no use to your revenge.”
A forced, dry laugh seeped out as if scraping the bottom of a barrel.
In contrast, Diana’s lips were tightly sealed in a straight line, her eyes glaring fiercely as if they would never open again.
But her expression was different from the one filled with suspicion just before.
It was merely astonishment.
She was shocked that Cecilia could laugh off such self-deprecation as if it were nothing.
Regarding the confession that Adam did not love her, despite it being an unthinkable assumption until now, surprisingly, she did not doubt it at all.
She was once again astonished that she trusted Cecilia’s terrible statements.
Cecilia, as if pitying Diana, stroked her cheek.
“Father will think of me for at most a week. He won’t suffer from pangs of longing or ambivalent feelings like love-hate.”
