THE LATE DUKE’S WILL

Three weeks later, I sat in the study — the room that had always been locked to Isabelle, now stripped of its heavy curtains to let the light in — reading Voss’s final report: Friedrich was ordered to repay the entire discrepancy within two years and was removed from every position of authority within the family.

He left Aldenburg on a rainy morning, with no one to see him off.

Konrad and Sophie left the castle that very night, not waiting for morning.

But a confession made in the great hall, before more than twenty of the region’s most influential noble witnesses, was not something that could be kept quiet.

Within a month, not a single family sent them an invitation to any winter banquet that year — no one needed to shun them loudly; people simply stopped mentioning their names at all.

Cut off from noble society, Konrad — a man who had spent his whole life being flattered and indulged — couldn’t bear no longer being the center of attention.

Sophie, meanwhile, gradually lost her composure: to her, Konrad had never been love, only a ticket into high society — but his own wandering eye now kept her in constant fear of losing him.

The two of them fought almost every day.

Once, in a drunken slip, Konrad even called Sophie by another lady’s name.

I heard about all of it through the occasional letter from afar, and found I hardly cared.

Perhaps that was the most fitting ending for two people who had built a relationship on calculation and vanity in the first place.

As for me, on a late autumn afternoon, I stood on the balcony looking down over the vineyards in their final harvest, listening to the workers laughing below, the scent of ripe grapes drifting on the season’s first cold wind.

Greta brought up tea, set it on the table, and said quietly, “The estate’s harvest this year is better than the last three years combined, my lady.”

I didn’t answer right away, only looked down at the rows of vines stretching to the foot of the hill — the land that, for thirteen years, Isabelle had believed she wasn’t capable enough to hold onto.

For the first time since waking up in this body, I felt that it truly belonged to me — not because of a will, but because my own hands had sat and checked every figure by candlelight, my own hands had chosen not to bow on the night I was supposed to.

“Yes,” I said.

“Next year will be even better.”