The Wife Without Color

"Living with you suffocates me. It's like dwelling with a gray wall." Alan, the head of an impoverished noble family, uttered these words to Elena, the daughter of a merchant house whom he had taken as a political marriage, before divorcing her. Elena was plain, taciturn, and spent her days facing nothing but account books—a "boring woman." Unaware that this very "mundane daily life" was a happiness more precious than anything else, Alan dreamed of marrying his brilliant and lovely mistress, Lilia. Elena nodded quietly and left the mansion. All she left behind was a single thick household account book. From the day after Elena's departure, Alan's life began to crumble. The warm meals that had appeared without thought, the tidy bedding, the seasonal flowers—when he realized that these were not "magic" but rather maintained through Elena's meticulous calculations and labor, Alan had already lost everything.