To My First Love, With Regret - 117

Only after they had erected a snowman in the center of the garden—a lopsided thing, yet quite dignified in its own right—did the three of them finally retreat indoors.

Coming in from the snow, their damp bodies shivered with a sudden chill. At this rate, they might well welcome the New Year bedridden with a collective cold.

Ethan skillfully stoked the flames in the living room fireplace, and soon, three steaming mugs of cocoa were placed on the table.

—Ow, hot!

Tony, having tried to take a hasty sip, scorched his lips and began to blow frantically on his cup. Eve, too, was contenting herself with merely thawing her frozen hands against the hot porcelain. It was then that Ethan, sitting beside her, pulled a silver hip flask from his coat.

—When it comes to warming the body, alcohol is the only true medicine.

How vulgar. Eve clicked her tongue in distaste as she watched him pour a generous amount of the strong spirit into his own cocoa.

A sharp, pungent scent of alcohol wafted up through the sweet aroma of chocolate. Whether he chose to turn perfectly good cocoa into swill or rot his own brain was his business, she thought, turning her head away. But that was before the hideous flask began to tilt toward her own cup.

—Stop it!

Eve recoiled, cupping her mug with both hands to defend it. Ethan mocked her overreaction as if she were dodging a vial of poison.

—Brandy in cocoa—this is the taste of a true adult. Why are you being so childish?

It’s not just an adult living inside me.

—I’ll stick to being childish, so get that away from me.

When Eve turned her body away, clutching her mug, Ethan gave a shrug as if she were being dramatic and drained the rest of the flask into his own drink. Only then did Eve exhale a sigh of relief and take a sip of her cocoa.

The warmth of the sweet cocoa and the milk, rich with melted sugar, began to dissolve not just the chill in her body but the tension in her consciousness as well. Perhaps she was simply intoxicated by the sense of liberation she hadn’t tasted in a very long time.

Soon, an uncontrollable drowsiness washed over her. The crackle and pop of the logs burning in the fireplace circled her ears like a lullaby playing from an old gramophone. Like a branch finally drooping under the weight of accumulated snow, Eve’s eyes drifted shut as she sank deep into the sofa.

When she drifted out of her light slumber, Eve found herself lying lengthwise on the sofa. As her consciousness rose to the surface, a heavy, dizzying scent—bittersweet and intoxicating—settled over her nose. It was the smell of cocoa, brandy, and Ethan’s cologne.

Sshhh.

A thick layer of fabric brushed upward over her body. The touch of the person tucking the blanket around her was unexpectedly gentle, entirely at odds with the owner’s rough temperament.

Eve couldn’t bring herself to open her eyes. She was seized by a sudden premonition that if she faced him head-on right now, something she would later regret might happen.

Only after she heard the sound of military boots treading across the carpet and fading away did Eve cautiously crack her eyes open.

The long shadows cast by the firelight flickered behind the man walking toward the hearth. He approached the child who had been guarding the fire and sat down beside him without hesitation.

Soon, the large head and the small head overlapped into one silhouette. Engaged in their hushed conversation, the pair looked unrealistically peaceful—like a scene from an old silent film.

The silence was broken by the clear clink of glass bottles touching. Then, the rhythmic scratching of a pen nib racing across coarse paper tickled her ears.

It seemed they were testing the secret ink she had given as a gift. The child, pausing his pen, murmured in a tone mixed with both suspicion and anticipation.

—It’s completely gone.

—But if you hold it close to the fire…

Click.

The blue flame of Ethan’s lighter flickered. As he carefully brought the paper over the heat, brown lettering began to bloom across the blank page like a lie. It looked as though a hidden scar was vividly revealing itself.

—Whoa! It appeared!

—Shh.

Ethan pressed his index finger to his lips and gestured toward the sofa. Eve flinched, hurriedly closing the eyes she had kept narrowed. Her heart pounded as if she had been caught spying.

—Lower your voice. Captain, this is secret ink. It must not be discovered by the enemy.

Ethan whispered in a mock-stern officer’s tone. To think that the most dangerous man in the world was so engrossed in the most trivial of games… Eve’s chest tickled with the effort of swallowing a laugh.

Ethan Fairchild was no different from her. She had believed the man who, beneath his rough exterior, was as gentle as a calm sandbar, had died. But his former self was still alive, merely encased within an armor of vengeance. Just like Eve.

Eve watched them from the shadows cast by her eyelashes. The father and son sitting side-by-side before the hearth. It was a scene from a cheap Christmas card—one she would have once scoffed at for being too perfect to be real.

She stared at it endlessly, like someone peering through a stranger’s window at a mundane moment she had dreamed of her whole life but could never possess.

As if the warmth of this fleeting moment had melted a corner of her frozen heart, a single hot tear traced a silent path down Eve’s cheek.

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—Yawn… I’m sleepy.

As Tony yawned and headed for the bedroom, Ethan followed behind him as a matter of course. Instead of asking him to leave, Eve opened a storybook. Perhaps she, too, had fallen under the spell of this perfect charade of a family.

But playing house with the king of the back alleys was devoid of romance. Sitting on the opposite side of the headboard with Tony between them, the man nitpicked every sentence Eve read, constantly trying to paint over the child’s dreams with the gray hues of reality.

The romance of princes and princesses was instantly reduced to a scandalous drama; tales of adventure were demoted to the delinquencies of reckless runaways. A storybook filled with dreams and hope was distorted into a series of gruesome, cold-blooded incidents fit only for the social affairs section of a tabloid.

—…And they all lived happily ever after.

—How miraculous of them.

—…….

It was just as the reading of the grim fairy tale came to an end. Suddenly, Tony spread his arms wide and pulled the two adults, who had been sitting awkwardly on either side of him, into a single embrace. As their faces were forced together in a moment of heightened awkwardness, the child declared in a voice full of emotion:

—Today was the best Christmas of my life.

The use of the word ‘life’ from a child who had lived a mere nine years was so eccentric it made her suppress a dry laugh, yet his confession that it was his ‘best Christmas’ forced her to swallow back a surge of tears.

In the end, Eve couldn’t help but nod.

It was the best Christmas for me, too.

It had been the most ideal day Eve had ever envisioned. She wanted to blame the uninvited guest for ruining it, but paradoxically, he was the one who had made today the most enjoyable. She had to admit that a day she thought would be fractured by the addition of such an incongruous presence was, in fact, finally made whole by that very piece of the puzzle.

The child, who had prattled on all day, fell asleep. Only the two adults remained in the room—standing on a blurred boundary, neither lovers nor quite total enemies—as a precariously frozen silence hung in the air.

Like a child reluctant for Christmas to end, Eve sat on the edge of the bed, staring endlessly at Tony’s face as he drifted through the land of dreams.

Behind her, she could feel the occasional stir of movement, but there was no foul play. Ethan, too, simply took in the sight of the sleeping child before speaking in a low voice.

—I wish every day were like today.

Those words felt like an echo from deep within Eve’s own heart, escaping into the world through Ethan’s voice. Eve could only nod as if possessed.

As if determined not to miss that fleeting moment of affirmation, Ethan reached out from behind and wrapped her in a gentle embrace. His arms were a comfortable bed, yet at the same time, felt like a grave from which there was no escape.

—Then we can live every day like today, Eve.

The temptation burrowing into her ear was all the more fatal.

—You, me, and Tony. The three of us. We can raise this boy as our son and return to being the couple who once cherished each other. Without ever betraying or abandoning one another again. Let’s start over like that.

To be honest, Ethan could not trust Eve as he once had. However, if it was just one betrayal—even one that had thrust his entire life into the gutters of the back alleys—he was willing to turn a blind eye.

This could not be called forgiveness. Ethan had not yet forgiven Eve.

He was simply willing to struggle so as not to repeat the same mistake. He was trying to ensure that the regret of ten years ago—the thought that the child might not have died if he had suppressed his resentment for just a single moment—would not be in vain.