Chapter 2

While I was being punished, Father sent someone to ask the usual question.

“Do you understand what you did wrong?”

I obediently said I did.

But late that night, kneeling on a prayer cushion and looking at the ranks of forbidding ancestral tablets,

I could not see what I had done wrong at all.

Father used to ask Mother that question too.

Mother always said she did not know.

She did not know what she had done wrong. She had run the household, cared for his parents, and stayed by him as he rose from an impoverished scholar to an official in court robes.

In those days, she ground his ink at night and washed his clothes by day. She could not bear to spend money even on a new pair of embroidered shoes.

Yet on the very day Father received his first appointment, he brought home Lady Liu and Cui Yueshu.

Cui Yueshu was a little older than me.

Father had been involved with Lady Liu before he married Mother.

He insisted on taking Lady Liu as a second wife of equal standing and making me call Cui Yueshu my elder sister.

Mother was stunned.

For the first time, she, who had always been so gentle and compliant, defied him.

Father treated her coldly. For a long time, he did not visit her courtyard. For a long time, he did not hold me.

Later, Lady Liu became pregnant again. But she twisted her ankle outside Mother’s courtyard and began to bleed.

Cui Yueshu pointed at my mother, crying.

“It was her! I saw her put a stone there.”

Father’s eyes were red as he ordered Mother dragged away and beaten. He demanded,

“Shuer is only a child. She could not possibly lie.”

“Do you understand what you did wrong?”

Mother’s face was white as paper, but she still said she did not know.

Father did not believe her.

Grandfather and Grandmother had always depended on her care. Though they felt guilty, their faces hardened too.

“It might have been a boy! What you have done is unforgivable!”

But how could Mother know what she had done wrong?

Lady Liu had put safflower into the medicine meant to protect her pregnancy.

She had also placed the paving stone outside the courtyard herself. Cui Yueshu had merely repeated what she had been coached to say.

Before long, Mother died of grief.

Lady Liu became the principal wife after all.

I lay over Mother’s coffin and cried.

A chill wind swept in at midnight.

I thought Mother had indeed made mistakes.

Her mistake was failing to put a spoonful of arsenic into the plain rice porridge while she waited on that entire family.

Her mistake was failing to kneel before the emperor’s hall and demand justice when Father elevated his concubine at his wife’s expense.

And so, in my previous life, I had bided my time under Lady Liu’s eye for years.

Every morning and evening, I had paid my respects and called her Mother with a smile.

I had made knee warmers for Father and brought him soup.

I never competed with Cui Yueshu. Never showed the slightest ambition.

Only when her marriage was being arranged did I act.

I stole her match.

At banquets, I let a few remarks slip “by accident,” until no one in the capital dared ask for her hand and her life became worse than death.

Once I had power, I had something added to Lady Liu’s soup. One bowl every day. She lingered in sickness for more than six months before she died.

Then I sent anonymous letters to Father’s political enemies, and he was demoted again and again.

I covered my tracks neatly.

Only the final time, when I sent my trusted maid to set fire to Cui Yueshu’s lodgings, did Pei Zheng happen to catch us.

He stood beneath the covered walkway, staring at me coldly.

“You truly are vicious. You have Guanyin’s merciful face and a serpent’s heart.”

After that, he shunned me for a long time.

Then Cui Yueshu threw herself at his feet with tears in her eyes and poured out her grievances.

“I should have been your wife. She schemed to steal you from me.”

Pei Zheng was heartbroken. He insisted on marrying her as a second wife of equal standing.

On the day Cui Yueshu entered our household, she wore the scarlet bridal robes reserved for a principal wife and smiled down at me.

“My mother replaced yours.”

“And now I have outdone you too.”

In a fit of rage, I pulled out my hairpin as she turned away and drove it into her throat.

By the time Pei Zheng rushed in, I had already swallowed poison.

Before I died, I glared at him.

“So what if you know I hurt her?”

“I wanted her dead!”

My only regret in that life was that I had not stabbed Pei Zheng too.

After all, once I married him, I had devoted myself to running his household, entertaining his colleagues, and caring for his parents. I had never failed him in a single thing.

Yet, like my thankless father, he could see only Cui Yueshu’s suffering.

In this life, what I regretted was failing to destroy everything Cui Yueshu had before he was reborn.