That evening.
As the shadow of the Silver Tower stretched long beyond the office windows, Lucas came in carrying a leather-bound folder.
"I've revised the terms upward from what I offered the other day."
That was all he said before setting the bundle of papers in the middle of Rosalind's desk with a soft clack.
"Look it over."
Rosalind set down her quill and drew the bundle toward her.
Grand Duchy of Vernant: Contract of Employment for Economic Advisor (Official Version).
As she turned the pages, her fingertips stiffened, ever so slightly.
Monthly pay. Annual salary. Bonuses. Housing allowance. Medical allowance. Severance clause. Penalty clause. Intellectual property clause—
She traced each one with her finger as she read. The kind of document Ritsuko Tanaka had never managed to read to the end in ten years now lay before her, neatly ordered, for her own name.
At the penalty clause, her eyes paused for a moment.
The sum written there was one the Kingdom of Albert could not pay to drag her back even if it mortgaged its entire national budget. It already stood on her side as a defensive wall.
(...Motive number six: answered.)
In her head, she added a circle to the list of six motives she had drawn up on the eve of changing jobs.
Then her eyes fell to the salary column.
(—This is the monthly pay...?)
(Monthly. Monthly pay. That isn't the daily rate, is it...?)
Rosalind half reached for her quill again, then counted the digits once more. The zeros. Once more, just to be sure.
They were right.
(That's ten years of what I earned in my past life.)
For a moment, her hand stopped.
She laughed, briefly. No sound came out. No one could see. The silver rooftops beyond the window, the small flame of the candlestick, Oswald straightening his posture across the desk—nothing changed in the slightest.
Only, deep in her chest, a single call rose up.
Ritsuko. I'm so glad for you.
Ritsuko Tanaka had lived twenty-eight years and never been found by anyone. Between the endless last trains and weekend shifts, she had never even been able to say aloud what her labor was worth.
(—And it isn't only labor.)
(Making breakfast for someone, running the laundry, stamping a child's notebook from school. Right this very moment, all over the world, there are people whose every bit of that work no one has ever put a price on.)
Ten years of work by women like that—and someone was properly turning it into numbers, on paper.
Ritsuko's ten years of work.
Here it was, written quietly on the paper before her, as one year's compensation for one human being named Rosalind.
It was not in the past tense. She was not calling out to "the me of back then," but to "the me who brought me all the way here."
—It's all right. You made it, right on time.
Rosalind dipped her quill in fresh ink.
The signature line.
She set the nib down.
Rosalind Abel.
Not the Crown Prince's family name. Not her former fiancé's name. The family name her father had given her, and her own name. That alone was enough to seal the contract.
Lucas sat down across from her and added his own signature on his side. A light, practiced hand.
Then, without lifting his eyes from the document, he said:
"If you're ever unhappy with the terms, request a revision anytime. I won't change them unilaterally."
Rosalind let a single beat pass before she answered.
"I accept this with gratitude."
The instant she said it, she noticed her own voice.
—The same words.
Last night, beneath the chandeliers, she had answered Crown Prince Alfred with "I accept this with the deepest gratitude, I'm sure." That piece of sarcasm and this had exactly the same bones.
And yet the "I accept this with gratitude" she had just spoken rang with a different meaning.
The same woman, saying the same words, with a different meaning. She had truly arrived at a life where that was possible.
Lucas started to say something, then stopped.
His lips parted; he drew a light breath; then he turned his gaze out the window.
"...I've had dinner prepared in another room."
That was all he said, briefly, before rising.
"Rest for today. You may decide your own workload from tomorrow on."
The office door closed quietly.
The secretaries withdrew as well.
Just before the door, Oswald looked back once as though he wanted to say something, but in the end he only bowed and left.
Alone in the office, Rosalind wrote something very small in the margin of the contract.
Valid until: the day I decide to quit.
She would show it to no one. Not her father, not Lucas, not the secretaries. With the same feeling as slipping something under her pillow, she tucked it away at the very back of a desk drawer.
Not many days had passed since the night of the broken engagement. Ritsuko Tanaka would never have imagined that a night when she drew a circle around the price of her own labor, with her own hand, would come so soon.
Rosalind closed her eyes.
For just a few seconds, inside her head, she caught the smell of a station platform at the last train.
It vanished at once.
Outside the door.
Walking down the corridor, Lucas steadied a single breath within his chest.
—Draw a circle around the price of your own labor, with your own hand.
—It's still too soon to say that.
Tonight, once again, he swallowed the words he truly wanted to say. The woman he had been watching for three years had just now signed her own name in her own salary column.
For a man who had waited three years at a distance, simply being in the same place as her like this was already enough.
No more words were needed tonight.
His aide was waiting at the corner of the corridor.
"Your Grace. Regarding tomorrow morning's customs meeting—will Advisor Rosalind be attending?"
"Ask her yourself."
"Sir."
"Not me. Ask her."
The aide gave a short bow and withdrew without a sound.
Lucas glanced back toward the office door just once more, then went on to his own chambers.
Tomorrow, she would set down on paper the first structural flaw she had found. The seam in an antiquated trade route bound to a single homeland.
—And with that, the first country will begin to tilt all on its own.
Rosalind did not yet know that, starting the very week after she handed in her resignation, she would begin to topple a country without dirtying anyone's hands.