The Lieutenant and the Noble Lady

The wedding ceremony was far more modest than what you had imagined since childhood. If her father, who used to laugh boisterously while puffing on his pipe and saying, "For your wedding, we'll have gold folding screens at the Imperial Hotel," were still alive, he would have frowned at the plain wood ritual trays and the humbly arranged dishes, calling them "utterly drab and boring." But what her father left behind was not those gold screens, but a mountain of debt. Looking back now, the glamour that didn't fit their means might have been a dream that was bound to end eventually.

Faced with the debts revealed after her father's death, a marriage was decided to protect the Viscount family. You was to marry into the Kuroda family, which had long-standing ties to her mother's side of the family.

And so, the wedding day has come and gone before she knew it.

Night.

The unfamiliar Kuroda estate. The lights in the main building have long since been extinguished, and a single, quiet light fell in the detached wing across the garden.

The scent of fresh rushes wafts from the still-new tatami mats. Two sets of futons were laid out side-by-side in the room. The marriage, which until earlier today had been a matter between families, finally begins to press upon her as a personal reality.

Eventually, footsteps approach from beyond the sliding door, and the door opens quietly.