Off-Topic 2: Reflections That Were Too Late

Fiara’s Dad POV

One day when I got home from work, I came home to find that there wasn’t a prepared meal.

Normally, a simple but warm meal would be ready at this time.

When I asked my wife what was wrong, she told me that our eldest daughter, Fiara, had gone out and hadn’t come home.

My wife comes from an aristocratic background and is not very good at housework. When she was first married, she was helped by my sister, who lived nearby, to do some of the housework, but the squares were swept round, the laundry was wrinkled, and the food was always very unpleasant.

But she was very beautiful, and even though she had three children, she was as beautiful as she was back then. I decided to take a long look at her, hoping that she would get the hang of it, since I hated to talk about the details.

When my eldest daughter was about seven years old, she gradually began to take over the housework. She was a smart girl to begin with, and if there was something she didn’t understand, she would ask my sister (her aunt), and she would handle it without a hitch.

The inside of the house, which had been dirty, became cleaner and cleaner, and the food became better and better.

My wife doted on our eldest son and youngest daughter, who were similar in appearance to her, and of course I adored them as they were both lovely blond haired, blue-eyed, angelic children. But that’s not to say that my eldest daughter wasn’t adorable.

My sister often told me that my wife’s treatment of children was pathetic because only my eldest daughter was treated differently, and that she felt sorry for her, but I didn’t mind so much because it didn’t mean I wouldn’t give them food or let them go to school.

She didn’t complain too much about it either. I left the house to my wife. But now I regret that it was a big mistake. (***That’s right you had better be regretting it!! >_<)

Neither my wife nor I had thought too much about it, thinking that my eldest daughter was probably staying at my sister’s place the night she was gone.

We lightly assumed that she would be back the next day, since she had nowhere else to go.

More importantly, my wife was furious, wondering what on earth she was going to say to her for not preparing dinner. But she didn’t come home the next day or at night, and at that point I finally began to worry. And when I went to check with my sister, I found out that my oldest daughter hadn’t been there yesterday either.

My sister and her family accused me of being a horrible parent, and I finally realized the gravity of what had happened and filed a report with the town’s security squad to search for her, but by then she had been gone for a whole day.

As expected, my wife was getting restless, too, in a daze.

But I was not at all sure of my daughter’s whereabouts after that. No one had seen our daughter.

When I asked my wife why our eldest daughter had left home in the first place, she told me that she had wanted to go to a higher school as a scholarship student, so she told her that instead she was going to make her work so that our second daughter could go to a girls’ school in Slend.

She said that she seemed angry at the time. When I heard that, I got so mad at her that I yelled at my wife for the first time. My wife, who had never been yelled at before, turned pale and was terrified, but there are things I can forgive and things that I can’t.

My eldest daughter was a very clever girl, and she could do everything without a hitch. If she wanted to go to school, we could have sent her to a higher school.

Moreover, it was impossible for me to send our second daughter to a girls’ school in Slend. Our second daughter was certainly lovely, but she could not study at all.

She was not bad, but her brain was too different from our eldest daughter’s. Our second daughter could not pass the entrance examination. There is no way that she could pass the entrance examination, even if the world were turned upside down. My wife did not understand that at all.

Also, my wife perhaps thought of our eldest daughter as her accessory or tool, and I was disgusted by the way she had wanted to push and impose on her, even though she was not obliged to bear the living expenses of our second daughter.

I regretted that I hadn’t been involved in raising the children. I wondered why I hadn’t listened to my sister when she had warned me so much.

Yet, at that time, I still had an easy feeling that we would find Fiara soon enough.

Once my eldest daughter was found, I would send her to the higher school. I talked to my wife about trying not to make a difference in how she treated our children. This time I would have to make sure I didn’t make a mistake.

But I couldn’t find my eldest daughter again. There was not a single clue.

After that, there was no way to escape from the day-to-day affairs, and my wife’s meals were unbelievably bad, and the house became more and more unsanitary, and everything in the house was not run well.

The results for all of this were coming all at once. My wife couldn’t even take care of her prized blonde hair anymore, and it was often tied back behind her.

Her life had changed completely with the disappearance of our eldest daughter. My neighbors didn’t like it, and when they found out about my eldest daughter’s running away from home, they accused me behind my back. The girl, who often worked at home, was well-liked in the neighborhood. My sister told me such stories.

Gradually my wife became less and less concerned, and more and more absent-minded and started to show signs of depression. My second daughter and I even bowed to my sister and learned how to do laundry and clean the house with the three of us.

It took us a year to get settled, but even then we couldn’t reach the level of housekeeping that our eldest daughter had been doing on her own, even when we all worked together.

It was here that we finally understood that we had put our young daughter through a lot of difficult times.

I spend my days wondering if I will hear from her soon, or if she will come back to me, but even now, nobody ever comes back to my eldest daughter’s room, where it is still the same as it was.

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T/N: Looks like Fii’s family is finally getting some perspective. Honestly, quite satisfying…

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