After bringing Alphonse to his room and finalizing plans with Elena for tomorrow, I turned my footsteps back toward the Isilia Pavilion.
Upon arriving, I walked through the hallway of memories, a long corridor where portraits of past hostesses lined the walls in solemn silence.
There were countless portraits—women of different eras, expressions frozen in oil and canvas—each one a fragment of the family's long and storied history.
Elegant smiles, composed gazes, eyes that had once watched over this place just as I did now. Yet despite the abundance of faces, there was only one I truly recognized.
At the very end of the hallway hung my mother's portrait.
Unlike the others, hers remained uncovered, as if time itself had refused to obscure her presence. The painter's skill was remarkable.
The woman in the portrait retained the same liveliness and vitality she had possessed when she was alive—soft eyes that seemed to follow me, lips curved with quiet warmth, and a familiarity that struck painfully deep.
It stirred memories I never truly allowed to fade.
For a brief moment, I stood there in silence, letting the weight of nostalgia settle in my chest.
I wondered how many times she had walked these same halls, how often she had stood where I now stood, carrying responsibilities I was only beginning to understand.
Eventually, I tore my gaze away and continued forward.
When I reached the door to the room Alphonse was in, I placed my hand on the handle and paused.
Pushing the door open, the layout of the room came into view—neatly arranged, modest yet refined, clearly prepared with care.
I stepped inside and closed the door softly behind me.
Even after several years had passed, this place remained exactly the same as it had been back then, without a single visible change.
The air felt untouched, as if time itself had politely stepped around the room instead of moving through it. The furniture stood where I remembered it, the faint scent of old wood and dried linen lingering stubbornly in the corners.
However, perhaps because Alphonse had been here, there were subtle signs of disturbance.
The duvet on the bed, which should have been neatly folded, was slightly crumpled, its edge hanging carelessly over the mattress. Beneath the pillow, something protruded just enough to be noticeable, as though it had been hidden in a hurry.
Without realizing it, my thoughts began to wander.
I found myself imagining what Alphonse had been doing here—how long he stayed, whether he hesitated before touching anything, whether the silence of the room weighed on him the same way it did on me now.
Had he sat on the edge of the bed? Had he sighed, or simply stood there, lost in memories that were not entirely his?
When I finally lay down and lifted the pillow, the answer revealed itself.
There was an old book tucked beneath it.
The cover was worn, its edges frayed from age and repeated handling. The moment I opened it, my breath caught. The handwriting inside was unmistakably familiar.
No—more than just the handwriting.
The words themselves, the way the sentences curved and flowed across the pages, felt deeply familiar, as though I had heard them spoken aloud countless times before. A quiet realization settled over me, heavy and undeniable.
It was my mother Arwen's diary.
In the past, I had occasionally seen my mother sitting alone, pen in hand, writing something by herself.
Each time I asked her what it was, she would smile softly and tell me it was a secret, brushing off my curiosity with gentle laughter. She never once showed me what she had written.
Eventually, I stopped asking.
I must have forgotten about it somewhere along the way, burying the memory beneath years of loss and distance. Yet now, here it was, resting beneath a pillow that did not belong to her anymore.
Alphonse must have found it—left behind in my mother's room, overlooked by time and everyone else.
The beginning of the writing seemed to start from the time I, Damian, was born, yet the flow itself was inconsistent, as though the writer had been guided more by emotion than by chronology.
Strangely enough, that inconsistency made it easier for me to recall fragments of the past as I read.
Each uneven line carried weight. The act of writing down those intense emotions from that particular day must have been overwhelming, because even now, the feelings bled through the pages with startling clarity.
The Damian written in her diary was not me—not entirely.
The child described there felt distant, almost like a reflection warped by memory and longing.
Yet despite that, the memories she shared of her and me were undeniably real. They were left behind here, carefully preserved in ink, refusing to fade.
What I felt while reading was not the sorrow of losing my mother. Instead, it was a quiet happiness—one born from being able to remember the warmth I had once known.
The sound of her voice, the way her presence filled a room, the comfort that lingered even after she was gone. Those memories resurfaced gently, like sunlight filtering through old curtains.
Of course, not everyone would feel the same way upon reading the same words.
Alphonse, in particular, might have felt something entirely different.
Arwen Kraus passed away during an epidemic that spread through the southern region when Alphonse was only two years old.
The disease claimed countless lives before a cure was finally discovered.
Among the dead was Kraus's mistress as well, swept away without mercy. In that sense, it could be considered fortunate—almost cruelly so—that young Alphonse never fell ill.
But luck did not grant him memories.
At two years old, Alphonse was far too young to remember our mother.
Her face, her voice, her warmth—none of it remained with him. To him, Arwen Kraus existed only as a name spoken in hushed tones and as an absence that shaped our household.
So when Alphonse read this diary, when he saw her thoughts and emotions laid bare, he would not have felt the quiet warmth that I did.
Instead, he would have felt the sharp ache of loss and the heavy sorrow of never having known her at all.
Where I remembered, he mourned.
Perhaps that was why it hurt him more deeply.
He was trapped between an older brother who still carried memories of her and a father who could never forget her.
For Alphonse, who lost his mother at an early age, only Father and I remained as his family.
Or at least, that was how it should have been.