Thanks for the chapter!
Manga leaves out a lot of the unspoken stuff. Considering the roof top argument between Maria, Sophia and Mary over who cares the most about MC it seems like the MC is getting the whole harem, both both boys and girls! Wonder how many volumes before MC discovers how much they all care for her? In any case, she just raised Maria's affection points by a lot so the chances of MC getting a bad ending are probably nil, although the likelihood of her misunderstanding the others' interactions to avoid any one of them getting closer than each other to her are high. Curious on what they're going to do to stay by her side once they graduate school. After all, the prince is determined to marry her so would be harder for the others to see her at the castle, especially since she hasn't seemed to have started all those extreme lessons on etiquette, languages, etc. expected of a possible queen candidate and someone marrying into the royal family.
LN explains in more detail but reason the mother was surprised on page 11 was because Maria didn't have any friends from the village so hearing she had some from school who were happy to know her was a shock. When Maria was a child a friend had been injured and while wishing could do something about the wound accidentally used light magic to heal the friend. Rather than being grateful the former friend got scared and ran off telling everybody what happened. As a result she ended up ostracized because the kids were too scared to play with her, and the adults kept gossiping how her mother must have had an affair with a noble since magic almost always shows up in a member of the nobility. Her father believed his wife was true to him, but after a while he couldn't take all the gossiping, unsubstantiated comments and not knowing how to deal with a daughter who can use magic disappeared one day. As for Maria and her mother while they had started off well and even made sweets together on occasion they became estranged as time passed and the mother overcome with worries and doubts about how to interact much less directly look at her own daughter. Maria had stopped making sweets for a while because when she had brought sweets to her classmates in an attempt to make friends they were all too scared to even touch them and just left them where they lay. Studying hard and getting good grades backfired in that rather than impressing or encouraging people it was all attributed to her magic rather than effort and made people even more scared. Thanks to the MC Maria and her mother finally touched and interacted together for the first time in years.