A Butterfly Through the Mist - Side Story 12

Enough, don’t look. Faced with the raw desire of passionate youth, Tilia firmly shut the notebook and stood up. To preserve the sliver of affection she still held for him, to avoid seeing the very bottom of a man she was already married to, Tilia resolutely turned her back and walked away.

Step, step. …Step.

But after barely three steps, hesitation crept into her pace.

It was quite a thick notebook. It looked like every page was filled to the last.

Unable to resist the lure of the observation log whispering come back, there’s more fun written at the end, Tilia turned back.

Just a little peek, just a bit. It’s all about me anyway—what does it matter?

With forced rationalization, Tilia reopened the notebook in a rush, driven by curiosity.

Ilex’s “Tilia Ambrose Observation Log” followed a mostly consistent format.

Notes on her behavior or peculiarities. Then a brief impression or question. If not that, a related resolution of his.

It was only through his meticulously recorded entries that Tilia realized when she had been passed notes by younger male students, or when an upperclassman had asked her out.

‘Was I really… that blunt when I rejected them?’

Seeing the note where he resolved to never let her find out after she threw away a gift, Tilia wore an awkward expression.

But how could I eat that? I didn’t know what was in it.

Even as she made excuses to herself, Tilia couldn’t take her eyes off the everyday life he had written about her.

Her posture, crouched like she would leave at any moment while skimming through the pages, soon shifted to one of leaning against the wall. Unaware that the sun was setting and slipping behind tall buildings, she focused intently on her reading.

Through Ilex’s eyes, she was a woman as cold as ice. The kind of heartless person who, even if a man died beside her, would mutter serves him right and walk past.

And yet, no matter how unkindly he described her, he always ended with a line like, Still, she was damn beautiful today too. That contradiction made Tilia burst into laughter before she even realized it.

Thanks to a father obsessed with selling her off, Tilia had long known she was considered quite beautiful.

But in the end, it was only a shell. If one looked, there were surely countless women more dazzling, more radiant than her.

Yet foolish Ilex Davenport praised her face as if she were the only woman in the world—as if no one else could ever surpass her.

Poor thing. He’s completely blinded by love.

Clucking her tongue, Tilia softly traced the letters describing the luster of her black hair. Unlike the handwriting in his rhetoric textbooks, his writing in the journal was carefully penned, as if with great effort.

With a smile spreading across her face like a fire in autumn fields, Tilia turned the next page. But her gently moving white fingers halted as if pricked by a needle.

Unlike the other pages filled to the brim with black ink, this one was blank. On the entirely white paper, only a single line was written:

Tilia Ambrose hates me.

No date, no situational explanation as was customary. Ilex had left the entire page blank except for that sentence.

What had happened? Tilia unconsciously tapped the empty sheet with a nervous face. But no matter how hard she tried to recall, nothing particular came to mind.

And rightly so—she had been consumed entirely by academic pressure at the time.

And to be fair, without any excuse, she truly had disliked Ilex Davenport during those academy days.

It was nothing more than reaffirming something they both already knew, yet Tilia couldn’t help but feel flustered that he had known her true feelings back then.

That likely came from reading through the full extent of his unrequited love. Though she had understood intellectually that Ilex had long harbored feelings for her, she hadn’t emotionally realized just how earnestly he had clung to her.

After staying on that empty page for quite some time, Tilia finally moved her fingers.

What if the next page is also blank? she worried. But fortunately, that wasn’t the case. Ilex, perhaps feeling down, had soon resumed writing in the observation log with a handwriting that looked noticeably sulky.

Even so, the time he must have spent feeling down was so vividly apparent that Tilia gently brushed her fingers over the sagging strokes of his handwriting as if to comfort them.

After skipping the vacation period, the resumed journal once again recorded her every move. As she slowly turned the pages, Tilia realized things like, ‘Ah, I cut my hair around this time,’ or ‘I laughed at the sight of a chubby cat back then.’

Royal Calendar XXX, Month X, Day X

Read the classical literature anthology again.

Just how many times has she reread it? Doesn’t she get tired of it?

Seeing a note that implied he didn’t quite approve of her reading literary texts, she laughed again. It was because she could vividly picture the sulking look on his face.

That smile turned slightly complicated at the next journal entry.

Royal Calendar XXX, Month X, Day X

She seems to like rhetoric more than I thought.

Strange girl.

Does she like men who are good at rhetoric? –Will put this thought on hold for now.

Reading that note filled with deliberation, Tilia glanced down at the next date. Just another record of mundane stalking—nothing more about rhetoric.

But something nagged at her. Tilia turned her head toward the bookshelf again. She reached for a textbook beside the rhetoric volumes, one that clearly seemed to be his.

Flip. She hastily opened the theology book—clean, not a single note. Startled, she quickly pulled out a history book. Same.

Even after checking all of them, every book signed by Ilex Davenport looked as pristine as if brand new.

Staring blankly at the open books, Tilia reached again for Ilex’s Classical Literary Criticism.

Instantly, pages full of chaotic annotations and highlighted summaries flooded her vision. Though rough, the underlines looked like they’d been drawn with a ruler.

The sun at dusk released its final flare before setting. In the halo of sunset behind her head near the window, Tilia recalled what Ilex had said last autumn:

“I hate rhetoric.”

“It’s not rhetoric I like. It’s you.”

…Idiot.

Still clumsy in expressing her emotions, the woman avoided the urge to cry by muttering a cowardly complaint.

How’s anyone supposed to understand when you say it like that?

Though no one else was in the storage room, Tilia lifted the notebook close to her face as if to hide her embarrassment.

Her eyes reddened like the sunset as she stared at the journal where the life of a poor girl had been recorded as though it were some divine revelation. Her heart, shaken by a love whose origins she couldn’t pinpoint, felt as though it had been tossed into a stormy sea.

Yet even while feeling seasick, she kept reading determinedly—until her eyes, as if their engine had failed, froze.

Royal Calendar XXX, Month X, Day X

Almost got caught.

Will suspend tailing for a few weeks.

Her eyes lingered on the next entry—written less than a week later, when he resumed the journal.

Royal Calendar XXX, Month X, Day X

Tilia Ambrose wants to go to graduate school.

For a long time, her green eyes remained fixed on that sentence, breathing quietly.

How?

That was all that entry contained. Yet Tilia could instinctively tell, just like when he’d written about rhetoric before—he hadn’t let this go lightly.

A strangely vivid vision formed in her mind. A man lying on the bed, imagining her entering graduate school. A man who stayed up all night worrying over how to make that dream happen.

And over that illusion, a voice rang clearly, untouched by time.

“The admissions schedule for the rhetoric master’s program is out. Exams are this fall.”

As she sat on his lap and listened to Ilex Davenport casually list the academic calendar, she wondered—just when had he started dreaming this dream? Since when had her hidden wish and his hope started to align?

The sun, now on the other side of the globe, no longer shone. In the shadowy storage room, only the small lamp Tilia had brought remained lit, like an isolated island.

Sitting at the edge of that circle of light, Tilia was no longer reading the notebook. But in her green eyes, still staring into the air, the image of the man lingered.

Idiot. Fool. Tilia, who had been stuck on that cowardly grumble, finally rose unsteadily when her legs began to tingle from numbness.

After quietly tidying the books and taking only the notebook with her, not a trace of the confusion she had felt when she entered remained on her face.