Chapter 1

By the time I woke,

Song Wan had been taken back to her own courtyard.

The back of my head throbbed with pain.

Looking contrite, my husband helped me sit up and tried to give me medicine.

I turned my head away.

“Now that you’ve found her, you should send her back to the marquis’s residence, to her own parents.

“You shouldn’t be keeping her in our house like this.

“She’s convinced I stole her identity, that the life I’m living was meant to be hers.

“One of these days, she may decide to kill me.”

My husband’s face darkened. He set the medicine bowl on the table, neither gently nor with much force.

The clack made my heart jolt.

“She’s your cousin!

“Look what’s become of her. Have you no sympathy at all?

“All these years, you’ve occupied her place as her mother’s daughter. You enjoyed the love her mother should have given her.

“Don’t you think you owe her something?

“She was wrong to hurt you, but she has so little time left. Seeing you so happy with your family distressed her. That’s why she did it.

“When it comes down to it, you were flaunting your happiness!”

His words set my heart racing and my body trembling.

Before I could stop myself, I seized the vase beside me.

I brought it down hard on his head.

His body went slack, and he hit the floor with a thud.

At once, there was silence.

My heart stopped racing. My hands stopped shaking.

I felt better in every way.

After a moment’s thought, I instructed my maid.

“Go to the Marquis of Pingyuan’s residence and invite my aunt here. Then go to the Duke of Ding’s residence and invite my mother.”

Some things needed to be settled.

When my aunt arrived and saw the bandage on my head,

she cried out in alarm.

“What happened? Did Wang Heng hit you? Has he lost his mind?

“Get a divorce. Right this instant! We’ll go home. I’ll stand up for you!”

I studied her tearful expression of concern.

I wasn’t moved in the slightest.

I only found it laughable.

During the first few months after Song Wan was abducted,

my aunt had been out of her mind. She clung to me day after day, calling me Ah Wan over and over and refusing to let me go home.

She and my mother were twins.

Song Wan and I also bore a fair resemblance to each other.

We even had a red mole in the same place between our brows.

Before she married, my mother had stolen my aunt’s marriage match.

The guilt had weighed on her for years.

Then she saw my aunt clutching me, frantic and unwilling to let go.

And she used me to make amends.

She gave me to my aunt in adoption.

I was forced to eat and sleep beside her.

Because she was always having fits, I had to learn to care for her and soothe her when I was only five.

It went on until I was fourteen.

After I became engaged to Wang Heng, heir to the Duke of An,

her illness miraculously improved.

She would no longer let me call her Mother.

I had to call her Aunt again.

The resentment in her eyes, the accusations she hurled at me—

I remembered them as clearly as ever.

“Whenever I think of my Ah Wan, somewhere out there, it tears my heart apart.

“Now you have two mothers to love and spoil you, and you’ve made such a fine match with a duke’s family.

“But my Ah Wan has nothing.

“Heaven must be blind. Why do you get to live so well? Why weren’t you the one who was taken?”

I felt as if I had been struck by lightning.

The pain and bitter disillusionment were so great

that I retched up blood.

Holding my shattered mind together, I broke with her completely and moved out of the Marquis of Pingyuan’s residence.

My mother came to scold me.

She said I couldn’t get angry and come home over one thoughtless remark.

My aunt cried and called me petty.

She had raised me for nine years, she said, and one sentence was enough to make me resent her.

There was no point in saying more.

I took the money I had saved over the years, bought a little house, and moved in.

There was nothing they could do. They called me stubborn.

In the end, my mother relented.

I returned to the Duke of Ding’s residence and stayed there until I married.

From then on,

I refused to see my aunt or allow her through my door.

She could cry or make a scene. She could send as many people as she liked to plead for her. None of it worked.

I was married. I had a new home, a new family.

I didn’t want to remain trapped in the pain of the past.

I only wanted to get away from her and my mother.

For six years, I lived without them intruding on my life.

Then my husband, Wang Heng, found my older cousin Song Wan in a brothel.

And I was caught in the same cycle again.

My peaceful life was gone.

I tried hard to resolve the situation with Song Wan, to get my life with my daughter back on track.

But Wang Heng kept wavering.

Again and again, he softened toward Song Wan and gave way to her.

Again and again, like my mother and aunt, he ignored the wrongs done to me.

I had no choice. Just as I had left the marquis’s residence and my aunt so decisively six years before,

I had to leave Wang Heng.

But first, I would collect what I was owed. I would not surrender a single coin of the compensation due to me.