Chapter 5

My engagement to Xun Yang became official.

He took me out riding and boating. We flew kites together.

In front of me, he was a wealthy young gentleman who knew everything, unfolding a dazzling world I had never encountered.

Every day, I went out smiling and came home smiling.

Day by day, Gu Zhiyao grew more sorrowful, more withered.

But I knew we were both acting to some extent.

I pretended not to mind, not to care, to be perfectly happy on my own.

She wallowed in her sorrow, trying to prove her suspicions right: I was a despicable girl.

My wedding date was set.

Gu Zhiyao set hers for the same day. She would marry my brother’s classmate.

“Didn’t you say our parents meant to harm you? Then I’ll marry him. You’ll see who was judging honorable people by her own petty standards.”

Both of us were marrying partly out of spite.

On our wedding day, my brother carried Gu Zhiyao to her bridal sedan. He refused to carry me.

I was neither surprised nor eager for the favor.

But as I stepped over the threshold, Mother suddenly spoke, very softly.

“Don’t blame your brother.”

“After you beat him, as soon as he could get up, he went and fought Xun Yang.”

“He said no sister of his would ever marry Xun Yang. Your insistence humiliated him.”

“His classmate really is a good man. And yes, he has favored Ah Yao.”

“But people aren’t puppets. You can’t expect him to change all at once, can you?”

The red bridal veil covered my eyes. I could not see her face, yet a sudden rush of feeling filled me with aching sorrow.

My eyes grew damp. I wanted to cry and laugh at once.

In the end, I forced the tears back.

This was my wedding day. I ought not to cry.

My makeup had taken so much work. I must not ruin it.

It was one of the most important days of my life. I wanted to be a beautiful bride.

Yet inside the sedan, I wept all the same.

They were not entirely good. They were not entirely bad.

Good and bad, mingled together.

I could neither hate them completely nor love them enough.

Perhaps a smooth life was only a dream. Perhaps struggling through suffering, scrambling to stay alive, was the ordinary course of things.

One day, understanding might bring release.

But no one knew when that day would come.

I could only keep walking without looking back, and hope that each footprint led a little closer to the right road.

That was how my marriage to Xun Yang came about.

Ill-omened from the beginning.

On our wedding night, I asked him only one question.

“You had just fought my brother when you came to rescue me. When you asked to marry me then, did any part of you enjoy the thought of revenge?”

The smile faded from his face.

“It’s our wedding night. Let’s not spoil it with this.”

His words chilled me a little.

He wanted to bury the conflict too.

But I had already suffered for that once.

I knew it could not work. Everything you suppressed would erupt one day, more fiercely than before.

It could not be held down forever.

“I understand,” I said.

I lifted my own veil and looked at him calmly.

“Xun Yang, I’ve become your wife. There are things I must tell you.”

“After I returned to the marquis’s house, before you demanded to change brides, my life was quite good. They weren’t bullying me the way you imagined.”

“I accepted Gu Zhiyao as my sister willingly.”

“My adoptive parents never knew I wasn’t their own child. Until the day they died, they were always good to me.”

“I wanted to repay their kindness. That is why I never blamed Gu Zhiyao.”

“In fact, I tried to care for her sincerely. In the end, I found I couldn’t.”

“Perhaps some part of me resented her for taking the comfortable life that should have been mine. But I never meant to harm her, much less steal her betrothed.”

“You turned my life upside down.”

“We had our own problems too. You were only one of the causes.”

“But I cannot be a wife to a man who wants revenge on my parents, my brother, and my sister.”

“Our bond as husband and wife ends here, like this cloth.”

I threw the red veil at my feet. It crumpled into a heap, as tangled as my life.

Xun Yang’s expression changed.

“If you hate me, you shouldn’t have married me.”

“You asked for this. I’m what you’ve brought upon yourself.”

I closed my eyes.

There was something else I could not say: I hated them too.

In the sedan, I had finally understood why Gu Zhiyao and I could never grow close. My parents treated us equally.

But that was wrong.

Think of farmland.

I should have owned ninety-nine mu of fertile fields. Through a twist of fate, I had only one.

Not for one year. For more than a decade.

When my parents brought me home, they divided their love between us, as though giving each of us fifty mu.

They thought that was enough. They thought it was fair.

My mind told me I could accept it. But my body refused to draw close to Gu Zhiyao, and that refusal told me it was not enough.

True fairness would have meant making up for all those years of deprivation, then dividing what remained.

Not asking me to swallow the past and look only at the fairness of the present.

The past was part of me. Remembering my adoptive parents’ love over and over could not make me let it go entirely.

I needed a great deal of favoritism before I could lay the past aside and live well in the present.

Sadly, that chance was gone.

Everyone had turned away from me. Now even the last possibility of affection between husband and wife was gone.

I could have swallowed my anger, hidden the conflict, refused to think so clearly.

But I would not pretend everything was well again.

Whatever lay between my family and me, they were part of me.

By taking revenge on them, Xun Yang was treating me with contempt.

If I endured it today, I would be failing them as their child and degrading myself. I would regret it every day afterward.

I had already made one mistake. I would not keep making it.