🌷 🌷 🌷
WHAT was the director trying to say?
Thinking back on the encounter, Ophelia could feel a blush break out across her cheeks, and she squeezed the broom in her hands tightly, clutching it to her chest.
Ophelia was cleaning the interrogation room by herself again today. The Ministry of Justice employed professional cleaners to keep the entire building spick and span, so there wasn’t any dust to speak of, but since Ophelia didn’t possess any special skills, the only tasks for her to occupy her time on days there weren’t any interrogations were cleaning and tidying up.
Each of the other Director’s Office team members was busy with their work. Ophelia had wanted to begin studying so she could help them out a bit more, but Bruno had stopped her. He said it was best if she could focus solely on the accused, without any extraneous knowledge that might influence how she perceived them.
And so, Ophelia continued working in the Director’s Office as a complete amateur.
Things had been pretty peaceful recently, and there were hardly any interrogations. Left to her own devices with far too much free time on her hands, Ophelia inevitably found herself daydreaming.
“Sigh. I want to see Lord Gian…”
She wanted to hang out with Gian, eat snacks, and forget about everything. She wanted to gab about the latest trendy novels and play cards late into the night until they fell asleep.
Ophelia sank into a nearby chair and put her head down on the table. With her vision obscured, Claudio’s image rose behind her closed eyelids. Previously, she’d always been able to stop herself from thinking too deeply about it by reminding herself that he had a fiancée, but she couldn’t use that excuse anymore.
Claudio was the king’s brother and a duke. But he wore the same standard-issue uniform as everyone else and ate in the same cafeteria. He read through all the paperwork that crossed his desk properly and signed everything requiring a signature with his own hand. At the end of every month, his desk was piled high with reports from all the divisions under his jurisdiction, and he worked late every night to get it all done. The fact that he worked so hard without using his status to his advantage earned him a lot of respect within the ministry.
Spending time around him and interacting with him daily had lulled her into a sense of being almost equals, but seeing arrogant nobles who looked down on Bruno and the others fall all over themselves to bow and scrape before Claudio drove home the massive difference in social status.
Ophelia was just the plain daughter of a simple earldom where all members of the family worked for a living; there was no way she could ever stand proudly by Claudio’s side. She would just have to stop this feeling at “admiration” and shove it down somewhere deep inside.
Although this was the same conclusion she always came to, for some reason… Ophelia’s heart felt especially heavy, full of feelings she couldn’t act on.
Ophelia thought the table shifted ever so slightly, and when she raised her head to check, her gaze immediately landed on the same strawberry-blond hair that had just been in her mind’s eye. She was so startled that she fell right out of her chair, causing Claudio, who was sitting across the table, to look at her incredulously.
“I didn’t say anything, never mind lie. This one’s not on me.”
“D-Director! How long have you been sitting there?”
“Since around the point where you said you wanted to see Gian.”
“Eep!”
Claudio didn’t forbid Ophelia from seeing Gian, but he always got especially grumpy when the topic arose. Ophelia frantically searched her head for something to say to change the topic. But she couldn’t think of anything.
“We’re going out. Come on.” After Claudio, who’d been observing Ophelia with narrowed eyes, said that, he turned and began walking away.
“Huh? O-Okay!”
Scrambling to put together an appropriate response to Claudio’s sudden announcement, Ophelia did as she always seemed to be doing and hurried after him.