The Day She Decided to Hold Her Head High

“I’m sorry, Dahlia. I want to call off our engagement.”

It was Dahlia and her fiancé’s first day together in their new house. They had moved in little more than an hour ago.

Her fiancé’s sudden announcement felt to Dahlia like something out of an otome game. It was the kind of fate that befell the villainess, determined to have the handsome prince in her clutches, at the school graduation ceremony. But there was no such wicked young woman in the room now; the two of them were completely alone. It seemed Dahlia’s mind was just trying to distract her from reality.

“Can I ask why?”

Tobias’s—her fiancé’s—familiar light brown eyes glistened with tears.

“I’ve...found my true love.”

For Dahlia not to burst into laughter at that moment took a praiseworthy amount of self-control.

Theirs was a world filled with magic, monsters, knights, and sorcerers. Such things had been mere fantasy to Dahlia until the day she’d been reincarnated here. In her previous life, she’d been born into an ordinary household in Japan. She had gone to high school and college, then found work at a company that produced household appliances. Although she had hoped to stay in their manufacturing department, she’d been transferred in her second year to a position handling customer complaints. It was grueling, soul-crushing work. Late one night, while working overtime, she’d suddenly felt an intense pain pierce her chest. That was the last thing she remembered. She could only guess she’d died of a heart attack.

The next time she’d opened her eyes, she had found herself in this world, in the body of a small child. Her new name was Dahlia Rossetti. Unlike the flower she was named after, Dahlia was rathersubdued in her appearance. If you were to be less kind, you might just call her plain. Her reincarnation hadn’t panned out quite like the stories she’d read in her previous life—ra