After I Died, My Husband Went Mad [EN]: Chapter 47

Time returned to the moment the two were reunited. Sevelia, having arrived at the restaurant first, waited for Dihart, steeling her resolve. *Don’t be surprised when you face him. Don’t bow your head unconditionally before him like you used to, and don’t act weak.*

‘I am not Sevelia Inverness.’

She died with a grand funeral. So, the one here wasn’t the Duchess who had betrayed and run away from him twice. Sevelia took a deep breath. She heard someone coming down the stairs.

The sound of footsteps, as resolute and unreserved as his personality, naturally stiffened her shoulders. But there was no wavering in her expression. She had stayed up all night, imagining numerous scenarios and preparing herself for how to handle them.

‘Ignore him if he gets angry, ask Watts for help if he yells. If he cries and clings…’

Would he really do that? Sevelia was skeptical. But her thoughts didn’t last long. She heard the curtain separating the restaurant and the living room rustling. Sevelia held her breath and looked up.

He was there. Dihart, his face pale from the illness, his golden eyes shining brightly. Sevelia clenched her hands in her lap.

‘Calm down.’

She took a careful breath. Then, Dihart suddenly stared at her. Their eyes met.

“……”

A precarious silence hung in the air, as fragile as a thin pane of glass. Dihart approached her, his golden eyes fixed on her. Sevelia’s heart began to race.

Thump, thump. It felt like her heart was in her head, not her chest.

Finally, he reached out his hand. Sevelia almost squeezed her eyes shut. *Now, what are you going to say to me? What do you want from me?* Her feet, hidden in her shoes, instinctively recoiled. Her mind raced through all the countermeasures she had prepared.

But he rendered all her plans useless.

“Nice to meet you, I’m Dihart.”

‘What?’

She almost screamed. Forgetting her manners, Sevelia stared at him in surprise. His outstretched hand remained extended. The smile on his lips was innocent and friendly.

‘What kind of joke is this?’

Her heart, which had been racing, stopped for a moment. The blood that had been flowing quickly cooled. Embarrassment rose in her throat and spread through her body. But first, she needed to understand what was happening.

She carefully called his name.

“Dihart?”

Then, a beautiful smile, like a blooming flower, lit up his face. Sevelia almost admired his smile before reality snapped her back.

“Are you perhaps someone who knows me? I’m sorry. I’ve recently lost my memory…”

Dihart claimed he had amnesia. He looked downcast, saying that his memory seemed to have been erased due to extreme mental shock and physical pain.

“I wonder how painful it was to erase his own memories…. I’m honestly scared.”

Sevelia’s blue eyes hardened like ice at his weary smile. The events in the Nightmare Forest flashed through her mind: thousands of lightning bolts that turned night into day, and his figure, wandering in a fantasy and dying.

‘Could it be.’

Her blue eyes narrowed. Just as she was processing this, Dihart smiled softly and reached out his hand again, as if noticing her confusion.

“Anyway, please take care of me.”

Sevelia’s golden eyelashes fluttered faintly. She slowly closed and opened her eyes, looking at Dihart. His smile seemed to radiate purity and honesty, an expression she had never seen before.

‘Ah.’

Goosebumps rose all over her body. At the same time, the fog-like confusion that had been clouding her mind cleared. The man before her was not the Dihart who had despised and pushed her away.

Dihart with no memory, a man with no connection to the past. A complete stranger who didn’t call her Sevelia, who looked at her with unfamiliar eyes and reached out to her with a strange smile. If so…

‘It doesn’t matter whether this is a lie or not.’

Sevelia realized that this situation wasn’t so bad for her. It was something Dihart would be horrified to know.

Sevelia thought that if he was pretending to be someone he wasn’t, she could just play along. Of course, if he really lost his memory, she would help him appropriately. The disappearance of the head of Inverness would cause great confusion. If it was real, she would leave him a suitable letter and leave the lab as soon as her treatment was over.

‘So I’m going to treat you as Bella.’

Whatever your intentions are.

Sevelia smiled unconsciously. Then, Dihart’s hand flinched. But Sevelia, lost in thought, didn’t notice. She calmly sorted out her thoughts.

‘Yes, the important thing is not his condition, but me. I must not waver. I must not be caught up in the past.’

So, it doesn’t matter whether you’re lying to deceive me, or whether you’ve really lost your memory. I just need to do what I have to do and walk the path I have set.

‘And I’m no longer powerless.’

She smiled kindly, recalling the times she had abandoned him. If necessary, she could just create her own doppelganger again and leave. Sevelia felt much more at ease. She carefully placed her hand on his.

“I look forward to working with you too. Please call me Bella from now on, Mr. Dihart.”

Thus began the days of deceiving and being deceived, guarding against and suspecting each other.

* * *

Short brown hair swaying lightly over her shoulders. Blue eyes that looked straight at him without fear or guilt. Dihart clenched his teeth at the unfamiliar sensation as he grasped the small hand that landed on his.

‘More cunning than expected.’

He ignored Watts’ gaze, which looked at him like he was crazy, and grabbed Sevelia’s hand. She smiled nonchalantly, shook her hand a couple of times, and then took her hand away.

“Please sit down.”

“…Yes.”

Sitting down, Dihart received the meal that Claude handed him and clicked his tongue inwardly.

‘She definitely seemed flustered.’

The moment he introduced himself as if he was meeting her for the first time, Dihart saw her blue eyes widen in surprise. He was secretly convinced that he had figured out her plan.

Showing a person who resembles him to a power figure who is going crazy while longing for his departed half, and using him to bring him down is a very classic method. Dihart thought that she was using the same trick on him, and decided to take advantage of it.

‘It’s a trick that only stupid tyrants in history would fall for.’

Scoundrels who don’t recognize their only love and regret it after the other person leaves. Those around the tyrant would not miss the opportunity and would bring in an opponent who looked exactly like him and say this:

[You barely survived, but you have lost all your memories.]

And the tyrants would believe those words and keep the fake close to them, only to be betrayed and killed.

‘As if I would fall for such a trivial trick.’

So, Dihart decided to lose his memory first before she claimed to have amnesia. As expected, Sevelia seemed very embarrassed to hear his words.

‘If she’s fake and this is a trap…’

They were definitely trying to completely break his mind by exploiting his guilt. And he knew very well what he would collapse in front of.

Sevelia’s death.

Dihart was aware that if he experienced the actual death of Sevelia once more, not in a fantasy or nightmare, he would become irreversible. And his enemies probably knew this very well.

‘In fact, it’s probably known not only to the enemies but to the entire empire.’

He smiled coldly inside and picked up a knife. The atrocities he committed after Sevelia’s death were scattered throughout the empire through newspapers, especially among the nobles in the center. They must have known very well why he was doing such bizarre things.

Because he went directly to the center, rummaging around, saying that there was a secret hidden in Sevelia’s death.

‘I don’t care about other tricks. But… to dare touch Sevelia. His mind is so gone that he’s begging me to kill him with his own hands.’

He could tolerate being directly insulted, ridiculed, or insulted as a cursed family as much as he wanted. But they should never have touched Sevelia. Dihart took a deep breath, forcibly giving strength to his trembling hands.

“…Are you okay?”

“Yes.”

Giving Claude a smile as if telling him not to worry, Dihart put a piece of bacon in his mouth. The reason he left the brown-haired Sevelia alone was to catch the culprit who dared to wear her shell and deceive him.

At that moment, Sevelia made eye contact with him, her voice soft.

“Would you like some more bread?”

Only then did Dihart realize that he was staring at Sevelia too intently. He swallowed and shook his head urgently, clenching his hands.

‘Damn it.’

No, it can’t be. Dihart struggled to suppress the hope that kept popping up. But the hope, with its shallow expectations, did not close its shining eyes.

‘What should I do if she’s the real Sevelia?’

The doubts that he had constantly ignored and forcibly turned away from pierced through his heart. Dihart received the bread that Sevelia handed him and bit into the soft interior.

He wanted to strangle himself for constantly thinking like those foolish tyrants.

When he first saw her in the square, he was just happy. At the thought that she might be alive, he wanted to cry out madly, offer prayers of gratitude to the sky. He chased after her, saying that it was okay if she hated him, as long as she was alive.

But that was a terribly arrogant thought, a foolish judgment that only considered the time after she left, and not the time before at all.

If the brown-haired Sevelia was real… it meant that she had left his side alive. It meant that she had left a fake corpse by his side and ran away without caring that he was crying out in pain and regret.

[The young lady had already said her goodbyes to the Duke in her heart.]

Denisa’s calm words came to mind. It felt like dozens of spear blades were piercing through his chest.