Chapter 1
Mother stared at me.
“Why? You and the crown prince love each other. All you’re waiting for is the decree granting your marriage.”
In my previous life, I had thought so too.
That was why I had never complained when Crown Prince Mu Zheng was deposed.
I had grieved when my family was implicated, but I knew he could do nothing about it. I had never held it against him.
Later, when he lost his mind, I had tended him myself.
We were husband and wife, I thought. We could not share only wealth and honor, and refuse to share hardship.
Then came our tenth year in that ruined garden.
The world outside had changed beyond recognition.
The emperor had named a new heir.
Mu Zheng’s maternal family had been purged.
The ministers gradually forgot him. Even the people who had slipped in to bring us news stopped coming.
He must have realized he would never regain his position.
He stamped over my vegetable beds, kicking the already straggling plants into a mess.
He slumped in the brown earth and gazed hopelessly at the sky, muttering as though he had nothing left to live for.
“Thank goodness it isn’t Qianyi locked up in here.”
Only then did I learn that my cousin, Song Qianyi, had a place in his heart.
After her parents died, Song Qianyi had come to live with us.
My parents pitied her and took good care of her.
She had known the crown prince for barely a year. I had never imagined his feelings for her ran so deep.
Later, when the new emperor ascended the throne, he forcibly took me into his palace and made me Consort Yu.
In private, Song Qianyi accused me bitterly of stealing her husband and demanded to know why I had not died with the deposed crown prince.
Fury filled her face. She hated me to the bone.
I looked into her eyes and asked the question that had been troubling me.
“Before the deposed crown prince drank the poisoned wine, he said he was glad it wasn’t Qianyi at his side.”
“Your Majesty, which of us stole the other’s husband first?”
Song Qianyi’s expression changed.
She slapped me hard and told me to shut my mouth.
“The two of you truly have no shame.”
“He coveted me, and you coveted my husband.”
“You’re both equally vile.”
She ordered me to kneel in punishment and hurried away.
But I heard the guilt beneath her words, the haste to cover something up.
I knew then that Song Qianyi had lied.
She and the deposed crown prince had loved each other before our marriage. He had simply weighed the advantages and chosen me over her.
Now I had another life.
There was nothing worth having in the title of crown princess.
I wanted my parents to live long lives, my brother and sister-in-law to be safe, and my little nephew to grow up happy and healthy, calling me Auntie.
I did not want more than a decade of separation from my own flesh and blood.
All of us scattered to distant places, barely clinging to life.
With our loved ones held over us, unable even to decide whether we lived or died.