Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Wei Ningyao seemed terrified. She kept glancing around, her voice trembling as she called, “Bao’er, Bao’er, please open the door. Save me…”

All was silent. Her voice rang out with painful clarity on the empty street. My hand rested on the door, my heart pounding like thunder, but I could not bring myself to open it.

I had thought I had long since let go. Yet now, seeing Wei Ningyao again, memories surged over me like a tide, pressing down until I could hardly breathe.

Once again, one of us was inside and the other outside. Only this time, the one crying was her.

Before long, her strength gave out. She slid down against the door little by little until she was kneeling, sobbing in broken gasps, like a kitten on the verge of its last breath.

At last, I could not bear it anymore. I opened the door and looked down at her. A thousand words choked in my throat, yet not a single one would come out. In the end, I merely stepped aside in silence, making room for her to enter.

The candlelight was dim. We sat facing each other across the table. She was still trembling, clutching her bundle so tightly that her knuckles had gone white. After a long while, she suddenly covered her face and broke down, sobbing as she spoke in a disjointed rush.

“Bao’er, I was cast out. They all want me dead…”

From her fragmented words, I pieced together what had happened.

In the second year after I left the manor, she got her wish and married Second Young Master Liang as his wife. She even brought her maid Bitao with her as part of her dowry retinue.

But before long, Bitao climbed into Second Young Master Liang’s bed and became pregnant. No matter how furious Wei Ningyao was, she could not stop Bitao from rising in status on the strength of the child in her womb, step by step, until she was formally taken as a concubine.

So Wei Ningyao became desperate for a child of her own. She drank bowl after bowl of bitter medicine and tried every means, soft and hard, to make Second Young Master Liang spend more nights in her room.

But her belly remained silent.

As time passed, Second Young Master Liang grew tired of her. He tore away the mask of the refined gentleman and revealed his true nature: lustful and fickle. One new woman after another entered the manor, each pretty and skilled in her own way, coaxing Young Master Liang into delight until he threw his lawful wife to the back of his mind.

Worse still, her mother-in-law began to look down on her more and more. First, because she had borne no children. Second, because her nature was too weak to control the inner household.

Her mother-in-law blamed her entirely for Second Young Master Liang’s obsession with beauty and neglect of his studies, and every few days, she would find some excuse to rebuke her.

Wei Ningyao was miserable and helpless. She wanted someone to confide in, only to realize far too late that there was no one left at her side whom she could rely on.

Her natal family, Dingyuan Marquis Manor, became her last support.

But half a year ago, terrible news arrived. Wei Ningyao’s birth mother, Concubine Xu, had been caught in bed with a stable hand by the marquis himself.

In a fit of rage, the marquis ordered her beaten to death with cudgels.

By the time Wei Ningyao learned of it, Concubine Xu had already become a handful of withered bones in a mass grave.

What followed was a letter of divorce from the Liang Family.

She had been married into the Liang Family for five years. In the end, she was kicked out like a stray dog, without even enough time to pack her valuables. All she managed to take were a few pieces of old jewelry.

Dingyuan Marquis Manor refused to accept such a “disgraceful” daughter. They threw her a length of white silk and told her to end her own life.

But she was only twenty. She did not want to die yet.

So she ran. Using the last of the money she had on her, she stumbled all the way to this small town to seek refuge with me.

After hearing this much, I silently brought over a plate of pastries. Watching her snatch one up and stuff it into her mouth, I finally asked the question.

“Why me?”