My eldest legitimate sister hanged herself the night before she was to marry into the Eastern Palace.
The Court of Judicial Review’s postmortem report recorded an impossible finding: she was a virgin, yet three months pregnant.
Her baffling death destroyed my family—my mother killed herself, my father went mad, and the once-glorious Pei estate became a house of ghosts overnight.
Ten years later, I became the Court’s only female coroner and pushed open the carved door of my sister’s long-sealed chamber.
There, buried in my memories of that night, I found a truth monstrous enough to overturn everything I believed.