The collapse of a perfect world happens with the swiftness of a candle extinguished by an unexpected breeze. On her eighteenth birthday, Shailoh stood in silent witness to the chaos unfolding before her eyes—her family drenched in tears, the household staff sobbing with unrestrained emotion, their cries echoing through the grand hall like mournful music.
“Where have you been! Do you know how worried we were?” The words hung in the air, sharp with accusation and relief.
“Claire! Your face is so pale!” Her mother’s voice trembled with emotion. “This mother never doubted that our daughter, our daughter, was alive.”
“Neither did this brother!” His eyes shone with unshed tears. “I always believed you would come back someday.”
One by one, her family clung to a woman, sobbing as they poured out their longing. Only moments before, they had been celebrating Shailoh’s birthday with affectionate kisses and tender embraces; now, they surrounded the uninvited guest without so much as a backward glance, as though Shailoh had become invisible, a ghost at her own celebration.
“Mother… Father… Brother…” The words emerged as barely a whisper, but they were already lost in a world of their own making. An invisible wall had risen between them, impenetrable and cold. Her throat constricted, a physical manifestation of her emotional suffocation.
Shailoh’s lips moved silently, forming words that would never be heard. She had become like a goldfish in a bowl, her unspoken thoughts dispersing like delicate bubbles in water, rising to the surface only to disappear without trace or consequence.
The final blow came with the desperate cries that followed, each word a dagger to her heart.
“If we had known you were alive! If we had known you would return like this, we wouldn’t have brought your stand-in from the orphanage!”
“We never forgot you! She was just a stand-in!”
The truth revealed itself with cruel clarity. On her eighteenth birthday, the woman who had walked through the duke’s door in tattered rags was Claire Diponz—the ‘real’ lady who had been presumed lost.
In other words, it was time for Shailoh to relinquish her borrowed identity and return to being the ‘fake’ lady. Back to the slums where she was born and raised.
* * *
Claire Diponz—or rather, now returned to being ‘Shailoh’—remembered her childhood in a dirty, cramped room where shadows danced on walls thin enough to hear a neighbor’s sigh. The memories came to her not in a rush but in fragments, like pieces of a broken mirror reflecting a life she had once tried to forget.
Shailoh’s mother had been a nameless bar singer. She had talent that might have carried her far, but one day, she became pregnant with a regular customer’s child and abandoned her dreams to give birth to her daughter. Raising a child alone, her mother soon fell ill, her vibrant spirit dimming until she became bedridden, a pale echo of the woman she had once been.
“Shailoh… my daughter… will you promise me one thing?” Her mother’s voice was thin as parchment, her breathing labored.
“Mom… Mom…” Nine-year-old Shailoh trembled with fear and loneliness at the thought of being left alone in a world that had shown her little kindness. Tears spilled down her cheeks, each one a silent plea for her mother to stay.
Her mother reached out with a bony hand and caressed Shailoh’s cheek, the touch as light as a butterfly’s wing. “My daughter, you must be happy.”
“…”
“You must become desperately happy… more than anyone else. No matter what the cost.” Despite her weakness, her mother’s eyes burned with an intensity that bordered on madness.
Despite the fear and sadness flooding her small body, Shailoh screamed in pain from the hidden strength in her mother’s frail hand gripping her arm. In their thin, partitioned room, normally, she would have heard curses from the next room, but today, strangely, it was silent—as if the world itself was holding its breath.
“Promise… me…” Ignoring Shailoh’s cries, her mother gasped and demanded an answer. Her fierce eyes were bloodshot, the whites completely red, like those of a woman possessed.
Shailoh, shivering at her mother’s almost demonic appearance, nodded frantically, her sorrow momentarily forgotten in the grip of terror.
“Good… that’s enough.” Her mother, seemingly relieved, released Shailoh’s hand. And she never opened her eyes again, her final breath escaping in a sigh that seemed to carry with it all the disappointments of her life.
The next morning, until the magistrate and the orphanage director arrived after being notified, Shailoh clung to her mother’s cold, stiff body in the shack where the wind cut like a knife, slicing through the gaps in the walls and chilling her to the bone. She held her mother’s dying wish to become desperately happy deep in her heart, a secret talisman against the darkness that threatened to engulf her.
What followed was the same for all orphans in the slums—a descent into a world where childhood was a luxury few could afford. Shailoh was admitted to an orphanage that gathered street vagrants and orphans like discarded trinkets. Her shabby clothes and small, undernourished frame made it clear she hadn’t been well-fed or well-cared for. Her face, streaked with grime, was so off-putting that even the other orphans, who were in similar situations, avoided her as if she carried some contagious misfortune.
“Beggar! Filthy Beggar girl!” The taunts followed her like persistent shadows.
“They say she survived by eating sewer rats! Disgusting!” The words were spat with childish cruelty.
“I heard she even ate her own mother’s corpse to stay alive!” Each accusation is more outlandish than the last.
“Eew! Get away! You’ll spread disease!” They scattered before her as if she were death itself.
The lice and fleas were gone, thanks to the orphanage director’s obsessive cleanliness, who had scrubbed her skin raw with ice-cold water in the dead of winter, leaving it red and chapped. Yet, the horrifying first impression she made was not easily erased from people’s minds; it clung to her like a second skin, impossible to shed.
“Shailoh! I heard you stole Anton’s bread again! I told you not to do that! No matter how hungry you are!”
Even in the bleakest of circumstances, humanity finds solace in the most primitive of entertainments. The orphanage children, possessed of that peculiar innocence that so often veils cruelty, had made Shailoh their chosen target—this girl who moved through their midst like a silent shadow, perpetually alone. False accusations fell upon her like autumn leaves, and punishment followed with grim inevitability; a day without food, a night in isolation. From the moment of her arrival, her tattered appearance had marked her as an object of contempt in the eyes of the supervising teacher.
“Honestly, you’re beyond redemption! How could the director possibly think to bring in a child from such a squalid hovel beneath a bridge?” The teacher’s words cut through the air like winter wind.
“…”
“Look at you, stubbornly refusing to speak! Are you rebelling against me? You’ll spend the entire day in the punishment room!”
How could she fulfill her mother’s dying wish to become desperately happy? Shailoh pondered this question endlessly in the dark, frigid solitude of her confinement. Yet no matter how deeply she searched within herself, the answer remained elusive, dancing just beyond her grasp.
Would happiness come from emulating the children who ostracized her, who leveled false accusations against her, who pinched her flesh when no one was looking? Or perhaps she should pattern herself after the teacher who had judged her irrevocably based on a first impression, without a moment’s consideration for the truth of her circumstances?
When they crushed her spirit, a fleeting satisfaction crossed their faces—but it was ephemeral as morning mist. Above all, Shailoh recoiled from the notion of finding happiness through the torment of others. No matter how far she might fall, she refused to descend to such depths.
“There is no one here.”
The answer came to her unexpectedly, approximately a year after her arrival at the orphanage. She was enduring the second day of starvation, punishment for allegedly breaking another orphan’s toy, when a visitor arrived at the establishment.
Shailoh lay curled upon the cold stone floor, too weak to sit upright. The director’s voice drifted to her from the corridor beyond her door.
“But there is a room here.”
The response came in tones so elegant and gentle that Shailoh’s ears strained toward the sound, unfamiliar as it was. She summoned what little strength remained and crawled toward the door to listen.
“T-That room is used for the temporary confinement of children who steal or harm others so they might reflect upon their misdeeds and repent. And we have no such children in our orphanage.” The director’s hasty explanation betrayed his discomfort.
“Is that so?”
The lady’s voice lingered in the air like a question mark, and Shailoh heard the soft rustle of fabric as she turned to depart.
“Then let’s continue elsewhere.”
“Cough.”
Before her footsteps could fade into silence, a dry cough echoed through the hushed corridor. The lady halted, and Shailoh heard her approach. Seizing the moment, Shailoh deliberately coughed again, more pitifully this time.
“My goodness!”
When the lady finally reached the door and glimpsed Shailoh through the bars, it seemed to Shailoh as though a radiant light had descended upon her from above.
“Duchess… this is—”
“Open this door immediately!” The duchess’s command cut through the air, cold and sharp with shock and anger.
The moment the flustered director swung open the heavy iron door, the duchess gathered Shailoh into her arms without hesitation, embracing her dirty, malodorous, ragged form. Shailoh’s eyes widened in disbelief.
“Dear child, are you alright?”
The duchess, her eyes swimming with tears, appeared to Shailoh like an angel descended from heaven, with her luminous blonde hair and eyes blue as summer skies. The moment felt dreamlike, unreal, and Shailoh instinctively reached out a trembling hand. The duchess did not recoil but allowed Shailoh to touch her cheek. The warmth of her skin beneath Shailoh’s fingertips confirmed her corporeal presence.
“You’re… not an angel.”
“I’m a living person.”
The duchess shook her head, tears glistening in her eyes, and stroked Shailoh’s hair. Though covered in soot and dust, upon closer inspection, it was the same blonde as her own, with an unusual hint of pink. A fleeting memory passed through her mind, there and gone like a shadow.
“You have a lovely voice.”
The duchess hesitated momentarily before confessing in tones meant only for Shailoh’s ears. “I had a daughter your age… until recently.”
As the words registered, disappointment spread through Shailoh’s heart like poison seeping into clear water. She had no right to expect anything, yet tears of despair fell unbidden down her cheeks.
“Dear child!”
“I had a mother too.”
Her mother hadn’t been as beautiful, elegant, or kind as this woman. She had been tough, focused on earning money, and had often left Shailoh behind while she worked. But still, she had been her mother. Shailoh thought of her with eyes closed and even when open—her only family and the person closest to her heart.
“If I were to be born again… I wish I could be your daughter.”
Smiling faintly, Shailoh’s eyelids fluttered closed, heavy with exhaustion and something akin to surrender. And when she opened her eyes again, fate had rewritten her story with an unexpected flourish; she had become the daughter of the Duke Diponz—replacing the secretly missing Claire Diponz.
Her actions that day had sprung not from calculation but from the deepest wells of longing within her heart. Yet through this unplanned confluence of circumstance and desire, Shailoh had grasped the slender thread of opportunity dangling before her and, with it, found the happiness that had so long eluded her grasp.
Until eight years later—when the ‘real’ Claire Diponz returned.
