357 Simple Woman (2/2)

Supposedly, a woman as strong as Andonara should be confident and determined, but she was very clingy.

Roland's heart palpitated.

Cage, however, continued with a peaceful tone. ”Their manor was in a remote corner in the capital. After my sister-in-law died, the four-year-old Andonara spent a month in the manor on her own. A month later, Cassel came home with a fortune, only to see the gravest tragedy.”

Roland clenched his hands and subconsciously squeezed them.

Taking a deep breath, Cage said, ”Cassel saw his wife's body on the bed, half-rotted, with maggots everywhere on the wet yellow blanket. Anna, who was nothing more than a bag of bones, was sleeping in a corner with her mother's clothes. Many maggots were crawling in her hair and clothes too.

”At that time, Anna was already dying, and if my brother had come home a day or two later…

”Later, we estimated that Anna had not been fed for a whole month. My brother even found a lot of rotten fruits and stems next to his wife's pillow. Anna must've picked them in the manor. She ate some of them and placed the rest next to her mother, probably hoping that her mother could wake up and play with her again after eating those fruits.

”We couldn't imagine how frightened she must've been alone in that gigantic manor, unable to wake up her mother at all. Nobody answered her call in the dark nights, nobody comforted her, and her mother was getting smellier and weirder after each day. I can't possibly imagine the horror, not to mention a four-year-old girl.”

Roland raised his head at the sky and blinked his eyes hard. He felt that his eyes were moist.

”My brother asked a Priest to save Anna and buried his wife. Then, he burned the manor to the ground and bought a much bigger mansion in a rich neighborhood with the money he made. After Anna woke up, she started looking for fruits on the lawn, claiming that she was doing it for her mother, and her mother would play with her again after eating them. But she couldn't find her mother in the new home and she kept running away. She would yell at whoever tried to stop her.”

Roland asked, ”Is that why Andonara has always felt unsafe?”

”It took a year before Anna finally stopped looking for fruits and forgot about her mother.” Cage sighed and said, ”She has been cold to her father since then. They weren't close in the first place, as my brother traveled a lot for business, and after the incident, Anna subconsciously kept her father at a further distance. She had forgotten a lot of things, but she still blamed her father in her heart for not coming home sooner to save her mother. Things weren't improved until she was twelve.”

Roland had heard and read a lot of tragedies in the information society.

But those victims were all outsiders, or people he wasn't familiar with. Though he was sad when he learned what happened to them, the feeling was never real.

He only felt sad because of his empathy, and those victims were in fact nothing but strangers to him.

But this was different. Andonara was a friend that he was very familiar with.

Listening to a tragedy that happened to a friend was completely different from listening to one that happened to a stranger.

Roland really didn't know that Andonara, who was always needy although she was strong, had such a tragic past.

No wonder she left with him so easily when she was the queen. It was only because the royal family ”abandoned” her and he promised to protect her.

She was really a woman with simple needs.