Chapter 4

With every passing day, I grew more frightened.

The gold and silver in the bundle had disappeared. Only two strings of copper coins remained.

I went to look for him at the shop, but the shopkeepers along the street said Wang had not opened for several days.

In other words, three days earlier he had left with all the gold and silver in the house.

Where had he gone?

No one knew.

The rumors spread through every street and alley.

People said that when my mother ran away with Chen Qinghe, she had never meant to take me. I had packed the bundles myself and insisted on following her. Only when they refused to let me into the carriage had I started screaming.

Everyone said I was young, but already cunning and manipulative.

“They say the deaf have sharp eyes and the blind have sharp ears. Wang may have been a fool once, but he’s seen the truth now. A melon’s seeds are always true to their kind. Neither mother nor daughter is any good!”

All at once, the looks of pity turned to sneers. They cut into me like knives.

On the fourth day, Wang still had not returned.

Auntie Zhao could not stand it any longer. She shut her shop for half a day and took me to Granny’s.

Holding my hand along the way, she scolded my mother for being ungrateful and shortsighted. Then she scolded Wang for behaving badly: even if he did not want me, he ought to have said so. How could he simply leave without a word?

After a few turns through the lane, we arrived. Auntie Zhao left me in Granny’s care and went back to her shop.

At the sight of me, Grandpa’s brows knotted together. He knocked his tobacco pipe hard against the threshold.

I nearly turned my ankle as I stepped inside.

Granny glanced at me, then went into the kitchen.

Her home was small. The courtyard was small, the main room was small, and even the bowl for my millet was small.

She still scraped two spoonfuls out before handing it to me.

At the table, Granny asked grimly, “When your mother was planning to run away with that man, why didn’t you try to stop her? Why did you just let her go with that Chen?”

What was I supposed to say?

That Mother did as she pleased and would never listen to me? Or that I had tried, and she had slapped me?

If Granny believed in me, she would not have put a question like that to a ten-year-old child.

And if she did not, nothing I said would help.

I said nothing. I wished I were mute too.

In the end, I could not even finish that bowl of millet.

That night, I slept in a side room crammed with junk, under a quilt as cold and stiff as a dead fish. Suddenly, I missed Wang.

He could not speak, but he gave me a spacious room and a soft bed.

He was good to me, but my mother had not been good to him.

So he had every right to be unkind to me.

His kindness before had been a generous gift, not something he owed me.

I ought to understand that.

My eyes full of tears, I was just drifting off to sleep.

Moonlight and cold words slipped through the cracks in the wall.

“Are we really not keeping the girl? She is Xiuzhu’s child, after all. Aren’t we being a little too…”

Granny sighed, but Grandpa snapped in a low voice,

“Why pick up something even that mute doesn’t want and feed it? Xiuzhu may have given birth to her, but she’s Chen Qinghe’s seed! With a faithless coward for a father, how good could she possibly turn out?”

“All right, all right. We’ll do as you say. Tomorrow I’ll…”

The wind scattered the rest. I could not make it out clearly.

But I understood this much: Grandpa and Granny disliked me because of Chen Qinghe.

When I got up early the next morning, Granny had become a different person.

She smiled as she tied up my hair, then boiled two eggs for my breakfast.

“Xiangzhi, I don’t want you to suffer. I’ve found you a good place. Would you like to go?”

I gripped an egg. Alarm bells rang inside me.

“Where?”

“The Zhang household, west of town.”

The egg fell to the ground and smashed.

A small crack opened in my heart too.

Everyone in Qingyun Lane knew that Master Zhang’s second son was looking for a child bride. They had been looking for years, but no one had sent a daughter.

It was not because everyone adored their daughters. It was because the second son had suffered from consumption since birth and would not live long. Sending a daughter there would ruin the rest of her life.

No family with any self-respect would do it.

“Granny, I don’t want to go. I can wash clothes and cook. I can even plane wood. Please let me stay.”

Her expression changed. “You don’t want to go? So what if you can wash and cook? The side room is tiny. Where would you sleep?”

“In the woodshed. In the storeroom. Anywhere.”

“The woodshed is for firewood and the storeroom is for things. There’s no place for you. You’d better go to the Zhangs right away.”

She kept saying there was no place for me, yet the room my mother had used before her marriage was empty.

They would rather let it gather dust than let me sleep there.

Granny looked down at me without a trace of affection. There was only indifference and impatience in her eyes.

It was exactly how my mother always looked at me.

Only then did I finally understand where my mother’s deep-seated coldness came from.

“If you’d had any sense, you’d have gone with your mother. But you stayed, and now Wang doesn’t want you. We can’t keep you either.”

As she spoke, Granny pulled me toward the door.

I did not want to go, but a ten-year-old had no power to resist.

All I could do was let her lead me outside.

But just as we reached the entrance to the lane, someone blocked our way.

A familiar figure stepped out of the shadows. The same unremarkable face. The same eyes, still as an old well.

Wang reached out and pulled me to his side. He looked at Granny, his meaning unmistakable.

“What are you doing?”