Chapter 1
The betrothal gifts from the Yongning Marquis Estate had just arrived when a disheveled young woman came running up to the gates of the Song residence.
She clutched the steward’s sleeve and shouted, “I’m the true legitimate daughter of the Song family! We were switched at birth. Take me to your mistress at once!”
“Are you mad?” The steward shook her off. “Do you think our mistress receives every stranger who demands to see her?”
The young woman nearly fell. Once she regained her balance, she stared at the chests of betrothal gifts being carried inside and murmured, dazed, “I’m the true Miss Song… I should be the one marrying into the marquis’s family…”
Then she saw me step down from my carriage as the servants of the Song household bowed in greeting.
She froze before charging straight at me, shrieking like a woman possessed.
“I am the legitimate daughter of the Song family! You stole my place all these years! I want to see the mistress. She’s my real mother—she’ll recognize me…”
Before she could finish, the steward ordered several manservants to drag her away.
Everyone said she was insane, that not a word from her mouth was true.
Yet the question she screamed before they took her stayed with me, circling endlessly through my thoughts.
“Have you never wondered why your father dotes on you so much? It’s because you were born to the woman he loves…”
Everyone in our household knew that Father kept a pampered mistress outside the residence.
For years, Father and Mother had appeared civil in public, but their hearts had long since parted.
Mother had hemorrhaged after giving birth to me, and they had never shared a bed again. Father treated her coldly. He was just as distant toward my elder brother, whose eyes and brows resembled Mother’s.
Father had always ignored his eldest son.
But he doted on me alone. Anything fine that entered the house was sent to my courtyard, and he spent a fortune hiring tutors to teach me.
By the time I came of age, I was known throughout the capital as a talented young lady.
Father poured all his effort into cultivating me and boasted to everyone he met that his daughter possessed both beauty and talent.
Later, at a palace banquet, the Marchioness of Yongning took a liking to me and asked His Majesty to betroth me to her eldest legitimate son, Xie Ze.
Everyone said I was blessed. Father was only a fifth-rank official, so the Song family was marrying far above its station.
The vast difference between the way Father treated my brother and me had always troubled me.
After the young woman was dragged away that day, I sent my personal maid, Xiaohong, to follow her. Xiaohong watched her enter an estate in the western quarter of the city.
I knew that elegant little compound. Father had bought it for his mistress.
Xiaohong slipped a little silver to the gatekeeper and learned the young woman’s identity.
Her name was Liu Xiang’er, the daughter of Madam Liu, who lived in the estate. But Madam Liu had disliked Liu Xiang’er since childhood. Whenever Father was absent, she lived worse than a servant.
Just before Xiaohong left, she happened to see Madam Liu return.
According to Xiaohong, the woman was every bit as beautiful as rumor claimed. The mole beneath her eye made her face especially alluring.
At those words, I suddenly remembered a lovely woman I had met at a cloth shop two days earlier. She had warmly helped me choose fabric for new clothes.
She told me her daughter was my age and looked at me with such tenderness.
I remembered a mole beneath her eye as well.
Could she have been the mistress Father kept outside the residence?
So I truly was that woman’s daughter…
Mother had loved me so dearly, only to spend all these years raising her enemy’s child.
My heart plummeted. A violent trembling seized me, and the teacup slipped from my hand and shattered across the floor.