What’s Wrong With My Marriage? I Was Bought as a Wife, Yet My Husband Is Madly in Love With Me! - Chapter 24

Klaus’s eyes widened at Luce’s words.

“…You remembered?”

“A little while ago, I thought you looked like that person. …But…”

“But you couldn’t bring yourself to ask if a wealthy nouveau riche noble was the same person as a pauper being cared for at a relief shelter.”

Klaus understood immediately. If she were any ordinary noble lady, there was no way she could have asked such a thing.

However, Luce continued, “That was part of it, but…”

“Even… even if you were that person, I still didn’t understand why you would choose me. I couldn’t understand why you are so kind to me…”

Why go this far for me?

To answer that question, Klaus had to speak of the time when he was a foolish boy.

He gazed steadily into Luce’s eyes as she waited for his answer.

She was a person who had always kept her head down, enduring everything. But Klaus knew she was more than just that.

She was kind.

That was exactly why Klaus wanted her to be happy.

He wanted to be the one to make her happy with his own hands.

“Luce, will you listen to my story?”

“…Yes, of course.”

Encouraged by her words, Klaus began to tell her about himself.

Klaus has money.

Vast, overflowing amounts of it.

He lives in a grand mansion that everyone envies, wears the finest clothes, and drinks the best wine. It is enough money to buy anything he could possibly desire.

But that money was obtained through nothing more than a stroke of luck.

The truth was, Klaus had no blood relation to his grandfather, Earl Barth.

While the Earl was ill and unable to move in a dangerous back alley of the city, Klaus had happened to pass by and help him. Out of gratitude, Earl Barth bequeathed his enormous fortune to Klaus.

If they knew the truth, anyone would envy Klaus’s luck.

But at first, Klaus rejected that fortune. Because even with all the money in the world, what Klaus had lost would never come back.

Klaus was born and raised in a settlement of day laborers commonly known as the slums. He had no father for as long as he could remember; his mother raised him alone, working from dawn until late at night, sparing even the hours she should have slept.

He didn’t know the circumstances of how his mother ended up in such a place. He only knew the fact that she loved him enough to sacrifice her own well-being.

Because she could only find day labor, they were so poor they could barely afford a decent meal. Even then, his mother would give her share to Klaus, smiling and telling him to eat his fill. New clothes were out of the question; she would bow her head to neighbors to receive rags they could no longer wear, which she would then patch up for him to use.

Even among slum children, those with both parents were slightly better off. Klaus couldn’t help but envy the children who ate better food and wore better clothes than he did. As a young boy, he would often press his mother, asking why they didn’t have a father.

His mother would only knit her brows with a sorrowful expression and say, “I’m sorry.”

He hated seeing his mother like that.

Eventually, Klaus began to find her very existence burdensome.

His mother sent him to a place in the slums that served as a private school. She believed it was better for him to know how to read, write, and calculate, so she took on extra work in the dead of night and early morning just to scrape together the tuition.

Unfilial as he was, Klaus began associating with a bad crowd at that school. They were low-level thugs who picked fights and committed thefts. Everyone there was a scoundrel who was dissatisfied with their life and didn’t want to go home. Some, like Klaus, had only one parent, and the place felt comfortable. A place where they could lick each other’s wounds.

His mother said nothing to Klaus when he skipped school, hung out late into the night, and repeatedly got into brawls; she only expressed her worry, telling him not to get hurt.

That only drove Klaus further away from her.

(…Working until she looks like that. I hate it, I hate it so much. It’s embarrassing.)

He rarely went home, but one day, he was kicked out of a friend’s house that had become their hangout. The cause was the friend’s infidelity; his girlfriend, his mistress, and the mistress’s other lover had all stormed in, resulting in a massive brawl. Knives were drawn, the commotion escalated, and eventually, the local vigilantes arrived.

The vigilantes were an organization formed by people from the underworld to maintain order through patrols. There was no telling what would happen if one was caught. Klaus and his friends scattered and fled.

Since it was late at night and he had nowhere else to go, Klaus had no choice but to return home for the first time in a while.

It was a very cold night.

The sky had been cloudy for several days, and a freezing wind was blowing. If he slept outside, he would surely freeze to death. He decided it was better to endure the discomfort of home than to die in the cold.

Being the middle of the night, the house was silent. Klaus let out a sigh of relief, thinking his mother might be out, but then he heard a sound like something falling from the back room. Thinking a thief had broken in, Klaus rushed back, intent on throwing them out—only to find his mother.

She was lying on the bed, her breath coming in labored gasps. One hand was draped over the side of the bed, and an empty cup lay on the floor. It seemed the sound he heard was his mother dropping the cup while trying to take a drink.

She was emaciated and pale, and she was burning with fever when he touched her. He realized she was suffering from some kind of illness, but there was nothing Klaus could do. He had no money to call a doctor.

He had to do something, yet he could do nothing.

After a moment, his mother’s eyelids fluttered open. When her gaze caught Klaus, she looked surprised, but she immediately gave a joyful smile and whispered “Welcome home” in a raspy voice.

Then, pointing toward the table, she told him that dinner was ready and he should eat.

And then, her breathing stopped.

It happened in an instant. Without being able to hold her hand, without saying words to comfort her, and without even being able to accept reality, it became an eternal farewell. When someone in the slums dies, their final destination is the incinerator. They aren’t even allowed burial in a communal cemetery.

The person who found Klaus the next morning still unable to accept her death was a member of the vigilantes. If an infectious disease broke out in the slums, the whole city would be in danger. Therefore, the disposal of bodies was strictly regulated, and his mother’s body was cremated in an instant. Klaus resisted, of course, but he was nothing more than a skinny child of the slums, and he could do nothing.