“The period he spent in the first adoptive home was only about 5 months. It’s not that long. But it would have been enough time to engrave the shock of being accepted and then abandoned again.”
To maintain as objective a stance as possible, Elian did his best. As a counselor, he didn’t want to show an emotionally weakened appearance. He gripped the wine glass so tightly that the thin stem looked like it would break at any moment.
“That’s why he must have tried hard in his own way in the second home. So he wouldn’t be… abandoned again…”
However, he couldn’t completely stop his voice from trembling in the end. He took a moment to catch his breath and drank two or three sips of wine.
Lorenz stared piercingly at Elian’s profile. Although Elian himself might think he was hiding it, intense emotions kept rising and disappearing on his beautiful face. It was as if ripples were forming on a clear lake, quietly shaking the scenery reflected on it.
“Then perhaps…”
At the end of the silence, Lorenz carefully spoke.
“Because of the fear that I might dissolve the adoption… did the child close his mouth?”
It was a question that greatly exceeded Elian’s expectations.
Lorenz Lockhart was looking straight at Elian with a hardened face. As if asking him to tell the truth.
“If I may say carefully, I don’t think it’s because of you, Mr. Lockhart.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because you can enter Lucas’s room, Mr. Lockhart.”
“……”
“If the reason he’s keeping his mouth shut and not coming out of his room now was you, Mr. Lockhart, Lucas would never let you into his room.”
Lorenz seemed to believe Elian’s words to some extent only then.
However, pain could be glimpsed in his profile as he withdrew his gaze and brought the wine glass to his lips.
“But it’s true that he’s afraid of me.”
He didn’t feel direct guilt from his words.
However, according to Elian’s observations, he didn’t express emotions in whatever he said. A person accustomed to conveying content devoid of emotion, even if the content was emotional.
Would he be like that even when whispering love?
He couldn’t imagine Lorenz Lockhart whispering words that offered his heart while pledging his fidelity to someone.
“It seems clear he finds you difficult, Mr. Lockhart.”
“Hmm.”
A heavy groan.
“But that’s different from being afraid. It’s closer to awkwardness simply because he doesn’t know you well. Lucas wants your attention and affection, Mr. Lockhart.”
“That can’t be. The child was very close to Father, but all we did was occasionally exchange greetings.”
“But Father isn’t here, and now there’s only you in this house, Mr. Lockhart. Lucas must also vaguely recognize that you, Mr. Lockhart, will be his guardian from now on.”
“You’re saying he can understand such a concept even though he’s still young?”
Elian nodded.
“It’s closer to instinctively recognizing who can control his fate. Because it’s a period when he can only survive if someone protects him, children grasp situations much more sensitively than we expect.”
Lorenz looked down at the garden, lost in thought for a moment. Perhaps he was looking at the Manhattan night view spread beyond the garden.
“That’s why you need to become closer to Lucas.”
As if drawn by Elian’s voice, Lorenz’s face turned this way again.
Elian’s eyes were calm, his tone warm, and within it was a solid conviction that gave trust. As he always did when dealing with guardians, he was fair to Lorenz Lockhart as well.
In such situations, guardians were just as unstable as children. It was also the counselor’s role to soothe and encourage their anxiety and guilt.
To give strong conviction, Elian didn’t avoid Lorenz’s gaze and met it directly.
Pale skin with dark red blood-colored lips, light green eyes.
Like Joshua Lockhart, Lorenz also had green eyes.
What the two had inherited equally from Damon Lockhart seemed to be a robust build and green eyes.
However, if Joshua’s eyes were a green so deep you could recognize them from afar, Lorenz’s eyes were a more transparent green. Because of that, sometimes they looked more cold and icy, and sometimes they looked more fragile.
Fragility. Though it was an expression that didn’t suit him at all.
When he felt Lorenz had accepted the situation to some degree, Elian brought up an important proposal.
“I’d like you to spend 30 minutes every evening with Lucas from now on.”
“30 minutes every day?”
“Once you come home, it seems you could spare about 30 minutes.”
According to his observations so far, Lorenz’s arrival time home wasn’t regular. However, it wasn’t so irregular that days of coming home in the middle of the night continued for days on end. Sometimes he would suddenly come home around 3-4 PM.
“Lucas and I aren’t close. We don’t know each other well. We’re practically strangers. The child will dislike being with me too.”
“You don’t know Lucas well, so how can you be sure he’ll dislike it?”
“……”
Lorenz’s eyes narrowed.
He seemed to think it made sense when he heard it.
“It’s a method to support Lucas. I told you that the guardian’s cooperation is essential for Lucas to become stable.”
“Can’t you do it instead, Mr. Bellotti?”
“……”
Elian examined Lorenz’s expression closely. He looked troubled like a student burdened with a difficult assignment.
He understood a bit. It wasn’t that he thought of Lucas as a bothersome and troublesome problem, but that he lacked confidence and was afraid, that facing the child was awkward, and so he was trying to avoid it.
A thirty-two-year-old man, who will be the successor to the Lockhart Group, called Count Dracula.
Elian felt like letting out a hollow laugh.
The image of the man called Lorenz Lockhart that he had been drawing while collecting materials until now kept missing the mark.
“I’m a counselor. I’m only a bridge between the guardian and the child. In the end, the child can’t help but show the greatest change through the guardian’s intervention.”
“……”
“You don’t have to do something together.”
“Does that have meaning?”
“Of course. Because it’s important for him to gain the belief that you, Mr. Lockhart, will definitely come every day for 30 minutes. What Lucas needs most at this stage is building that kind of trust with his guardian.”
Lorenz tilted his wine glass. The dark red liquid was silently sucked beyond his lips.
Elian quietly pressured him with persistence.
“30 minutes every day, you can do it, right?”
Even after completely emptying the wine, Lorenz didn’t move while holding the thin neck of the glass. Then, as if having made up his mind, he looked this way for a moment. His transparent green eyes seemed to shine, holding moisture, freed from their usual dryness.
He asked.
“Will you be there too during those 30 minutes, Mr. Bellotti?”
“I think it would be good for me to be present until things settle down.”
He had the illusion that the green of those two eyes was deepening.
Lorenz picked up the wine bottle standing beside him and answered while filling his own glass.
“Then let’s do that.”
■
Second floor, one corner of Lucas’s reception room.
Lorenz was reading The Picture of Dorian Gray.
It was a book he had challenged around the age of fifteen or sixteen, but had given up without even finishing the first chapter because the aesthetic tendencies that emphasized aesthetic experience and sensation didn’t match his tastes.
Now, more than 15 years later, he had picked up that book again.
‘This young Adonis looked as if he had been made of ivory and rose-leaves.’ — Only because of this one passage.
But this time too, it wasn’t easy to turn the pages.
Unlike his boyhood, this time there was a different factor preventing him from immersing himself in this book.
“Then… how was Lucas’s day today? Shall we choose from these?”
A comfortable and kind voice, like stroking hair.
Lorenz sat on a chair placed close to the entrance, while Elian and Lucas sat side by side on the long sofa playing with cards. They had spread out cards with various pictures between them, and it was a game where Elian asked questions and Lucas chose his answer from among the various cards.
Elian had explained it was an intervention to help the child express himself without speaking.
