Chapter 2

Night had fallen, and the CEO still had not come home.

Madam had not left her room all day either.

Delighted to have the place to myself, I cooked a bowl of noodles and prepared to enjoy my dinner.

The moment they were ready, every light in the living room went out.

Through the darkness came the faint sound of a little girl sobbing.

The hair on my arms stood on end.

How had a humble Mrs. Wang like me wandered into a horror story?

Old mansions belonging to wealthy families were always haunted. I thought of all the ghost stories I had read on a certain Q&A site and began to tremble.

Summoning my courage, I switched on my phone’s flashlight and ventured out.

I saw nothing, but something rustled toward me through the dark.

Then a small, ice-cold hand shot out of nowhere and seized my ankle.

I shone my phone downward. A little girl with tear tracks on her pale face, huge eyes, and two tiny braids stared back at me.

I screamed, shaking with fright.

Uncle Zhang, the security guard, heard me and came rushing inside. After checking the wiring, he discovered that a breaker had tripped.

When the lights came back on, he walked over and peered down.

“Young Miss, why are you scaring us folks again?”

Young Miss?

I looked more closely. The child’s eyes and brows did resemble Madam’s.

Angry and still frightened, I scooped her up. “Young Miss, why did you scare me?”

Only after lifting her did I realize how little she weighed.

She was all skin and bone. Beneath her ill-fitting dress, bruises mottled her legs.

She was tiny, and even her sobs sounded like a kitten’s mewls.

Uncle Zhang gave her a disgusted look that said, Causing trouble again, are you? Then he left without another word.

Under my gaze, the girl ducked her head lower and lower. She did not resemble a pampered heiress in the least.

That was when I remembered what my mother had told me about her.

The Old Master disliked her because she was a girl. He had berated the CEO for making such a spectacle of chasing his runaway wife abroad, only to bring back a daughter.

The CEO had consequently come to dislike his own child as well.

Madam, meanwhile, was exhausted day after day, withering like a flower. She had no strength left to care for her daughter.

The Young Miss had been banished to the attic as a baby. Now three years old, she had hardly ever left it.

Whenever she saw people, she only watched them with those large black eyes and said nothing.

Everyone called her eerie. Eventually, no one went to the attic at all.

“The Young Miss is another pitiful one,” my mother had said with another sigh. “The richest family in the capital is no easy place to live.”

After I held the girl for a while, she stopped crying. Her eyes tracked the bowl of noodles in my hands instead.

“I’m hungry.”

“It suddenly went dark.”

“It wasn’t me.”

It took me a moment to understand what she meant.

I quickly set her down and handed her the bowl. She hugged it to her chest and ate in huge bites, while I hurried back to fry three eggs for her.

Even after finishing, she continued to stare at me.

Her irises were pitch-black, her skin unnaturally pale, and her body painfully thin. With her eyes rolling after every movement, she really did look a little frightening.

But I was Mrs. Wang.

I fetched a handkerchief and wiped the grease from her face.

I remembered that she had a beautiful name: Fu Ziling.

Madam had chosen it in the hope that her daughter would have a free and unfettered spirit.

Sadly, fate had given her the opposite.

Fu Ziling stared blankly as I washed her face, clipped her nails, and changed her clothes.

“You’re not scared?”

“Why?”

“Mommy is scared of me.”

“No one likes me.”

My hands paused as I pulled her clothes into place.

“I like you.”

“You’re pretty.”

I stroked her head.

“Your dark eyes are pretty.”

“Your nose looks like Madam’s. That’s pretty too.”

“And your little red lips are pretty.”

Perhaps the meal had given her fresh strength, because she burst into loud, heartbroken sobs.

She wrapped both arms around me and wailed.

What could a three-year-old possibly understand?

A child was only a mirror reflecting the adults around her.