“Hmm.”

The reason Alice squinted at me like that was usually one of two things.

One reason was when I did something completely ridiculous and nonsensical, only to pin it all on the Emperor.

Most of my friends have seen parts of my personality, but the one person who could almost perfectly read my essence was Alice. Claire had recently started to get dangerously close to understanding me, and Charlotte had been slowly picking up on my expressions too, but for now, that was still the case.

The problem was, I hadn’t done anything like that recently.

When I returned …