chapter 3

I studied him for a long time.

Very carefully.

Instead of answering his question, I said, “You called me Yaoniang.”

His face reddened, and he started to explain.

But I cut him off. “I won’t marry you because I refuse to live through that life again, Shen Yanchu.”

The color drained from his face.

A breeze swept past, carrying a faint chill, yet my voice reached him with perfect clarity.

“You came back too, didn’t you?”

Back from the dead.

He stared at me in astonishment, his thin lips trembling.

“How did you know…?”

I gave him a faint smile. “Because I know you too well.”

I had lived beside Shen Yanchu for a lifetime. He had not loved me, but I had loved him.

When you love someone, you cannot help observing every tiny thing they do.

Besides, the Shen Yanchu of this life had never called me Yaoniang. He could not have known how desperately I once longed to hear such intimacy from him.

But that longing had already been ground to dust by the torment of my previous life.

All that remained was a wasteland inside my heart.

I no longer loved Shen Yanchu.

As though sensing what I meant to say, he stepped forward instinctively and reached for my hand.

I moved away.

I met his gaze with a gravity he had never seen in me before.

“Shen Yanchu, since both of us have been given the chance to live again, let’s stop entangling ourselves with each other.”

“The person you love is not me, and I no longer love you. Our bond in our last life was a mistake. Now that we know it was wrong, we should not repeat it.”

Looking back, the marriage everyone praised had been rotten with wounds beneath its gilded surface.

There had been a Chief Minister’s wife who yearned for her husband’s love, and a Chief Minister whose heart belonged wholly to the empress.

Together, they formed a husband and wife who both loved someone they could never have.

Every step through that enormous residence had been torment. Every corner had been cold.

In my previous life, the Chief Minister’s wife sat in her exalted place like a serene, unfeeling statue of the Buddha.

I did not want to be her again.

“It was too tiring. Too bitter.”

Since I had returned to the past, I would not live as anyone’s appendage or anyone’s pawn.

For once, I wanted to live as myself.

I turned and walked away from Shen Yanchu.

His low voice sounded behind me.

“And what if I insist on making the same mistake again?”

I stopped and looked back, meeting his pitch-black eyes.

An emotion I could not name burned beneath them, fierce and scorching.

I did not understand it.

“Shen Yanchu, you may be willing to marry a woman you don’t love for my sister’s sake, but I will not marry a man I don’t love.”

Sunlight spilled over me. I raised a hand as if to catch a ray in my palm and felt its gentle warmth.

When I looked back at the dazed Shen Yanchu, I spoke each word with perfect clarity.

“I said I won’t marry you. That means you will never have me as your wife.”