The Ugly Wife of the Shady Duke - Chapter 55.1
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Grace struggled to catch her breath.
“Now it’s quiet.”
After a moment, her mind became calm. When Grace looked up, she saw Benjamin’s face.
Without him asking anything, an excuse naturally came out of Grace’s mouth.
“…I’m not used to horseback riding.”
“I see, so that’s the case.”
She heard the slow sound of hooves. There couldn’t have been a more peaceful sound.
Still, Grace’s heart raced anxiously. It was the reverberation of the previous commotion still lingering.
⋆★⋆
“Madam, you have worked hard.”
“It was fine.”
Riding a horse required more physical strength than she had anticipated. Grace could clearly feel the fatigue in her exhausted body, and she could also anticipate the muscle pain that would come tomorrow.
‘But Benjamin, who led me the whole time, and Amber, who carried me, must have had it harder.’
“I’ll bathe alone today.”
The bathtub was already filled with warm water.
After the maids left, Grace sank into the water and fell into deep thought.
‘Why is this happening all of a sudden when it’s never happened before?’
What saved her all this time was the certainty that this depression was not her own.
But if the voice whispered not about “Duchess Felton” but “Grace” herself, with the doubts and anxieties she currently had, her confidence would crumble.
‘…Yes.’
All of this anxiety kept coming back to her, as the ‘original story’ as she knew it was not yet finished.
‘In addition, there’s a possibility that there’s actually some hidden storyline in the original work that I don’t know about.’
Even though the original Duchess of Felton faced an overwhelming depression, she had too much knowledge far from being what one calls incompetent.
‘If I didn’t have her knowledge, even if I knew about the original work, it wouldn’t have been easy to use it.’
Still, the self-doubt and anxiety she felt at times were inexplicable.
The knowledge possessed by the Duchess of Felton was diverse. It was a substantial amount to make use of the information from the “original story.”
‘She might have been very forgetful from the beginning.’
However, the Duchess had many vague and blank spots in her memory, and her emotional state was always fluctuating.
Grace’s body, submerged in water, sank heavily.
“An Incompetent and Ugly Duchess.”
It was the disgraceful description that always preceded Duchess Felton’s name in the original work.
Grace slowly closed her eyes. Through her closed eyelids, she could see the lingering image of Benjamin and Aria standing side by side.
“Yeah, that’s usually how it goes.”
One has to be like Aria, to become the protagonist, Grace thought.
If someone who looked like her, like the Duchess of Felton, became the protagonist, everyone would be dissatisfied.
In the first place, she never wanted to become the protagonist.
She just wanted to live.
She thought she had died in her previous life, but suddenly she was given a new one. Even this life seemed more precarious than a candle on a windy field, according to the original work.
After Grace entered Duchess Felton’s body, she gradually began to remember her original self, which had been buried by her.
The ugly child born between perfect siblings, a shameful offspring to be hidden away somewhere.
She fell ill for an unknown reason and had to live in the hospital from a certain point on. Her parents were conscious of the people around them and gave her a private room, but the days they visited her can be counted on one hand.
Grace thought it was inevitable that her parents were busy, but she was lonely and dying day by day.
That’s why she may have loved novels even more. It wasn’t until she became someone else that she came to this thought.
‘Maybe that’s why I liked Benjamin more than anyone?’
In the novel, everyone sympathized with Benjamin’s marriage and criticized the Duchess of Felton.
Benjamin was so unhappy and unfortunate in everyone’s eyes, but he never said a bad word about his wife in the novel.
“I hope you’ll meet my wife someday.”
She remembered that he often talked about his wife in front of Aria and smiled affectionately every time he did so.
“……”
That’s why I liked and hated him at the same time.
Even when talking about someone that everyone else would be ashamed of, he never showed any sign of dislike, and in fact, in person also he was as gentle as ever.
But after Grace died, Benjamin changed and didn’t hesitate to kidnap and imprison Aria to make her his own.
It was really strange.
I can’t ask him now why he did such a thing in the future.
If such a future were to happen, Grace would already be dead.
I can’t even ask him what he is thinking about right now. The questions could be packaged in any way, but the situation and emotions that would change because of those questions could not be reversed by any words.
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