Chapter 34: Strange
"..." Silence reigned in an office where a man dressed in a black suit without the coat sat, facing another young man who was coincidentally dressed the same way—white shirt and black pants. The only differences were their hair colors and the glasses the older man wore, which caught the light from the large windows behind his mahogany desk.
"...How much do you remember?" the man asked suddenly, breaking the heavy silence between them. Azalea ’gulped’ quite imperceptibly, but the man—who was an expert in dealing with people of all sorts—caught this subtle gesture, though he didn’t comment about it.
"I don’t remember anything... I don’t know why, but I just don’t," he ’frowned’ in ’frustration’, the expression carefully crafted to convey the right amount of distress. It was rather ’irritating’ not to remember anything that led to this moment, or so his performance suggested.
"Sigh, it’s okay," the man’s gaze ’softened’ with what appeared to be genuine sympathy.
"...Mm," he nodded, avoiding the man’s direct gaze at every point in the conversation. It seemed he was really ’intimidated’ by the man’s presence, his shoulders slightly hunched in a display of nervous vulnerability.
"I will tell you why you are here," the man said, leaning back in his leather chair. Azalea took a calculated breath, then ’forced’ himself to overcome the suffocating feeling and look the man in the eyes with trembling determination.
"You saved my daughter, and a healer from a neighboring kingdom," he said, removing his glasses to clean them with deliberate care. "For that, I want to appreciate you... you may not remember what happened, but the persons you saved testified to your bravery. For that, I must thank you," he said, offering what appeared to be a genuine smile.
...Humans are such complicated beings, Azalea thought, studying the duke’s expressions for any tells.
[Why do you say so?]
He doesn’t fully believe my ’loss-of-memory’ alibi, but he decided to overlook it because of his daughter.
[...Not all humans are this emotion-driven, though]