"It wasn’t me. I really didn’t touch her..."

"Mom, you have to believe me... You raised me yourself. You know what I’m like better than anyone. Why would I do something bad..."

The voice came thick with tears, like she was explaining herself, but the tone sounded more like wheedling than crying.

Then another voice rose in Elara’s head, a child’s voice this time.

"[Mom, this new beginning... you have to live well...]"

"[This time, listen to your own heart. Don’t marry Dad, and don’t give birth to me either...]"

That fake sobbing, the little girl’s fading words, and the weaker and weaker beeping of the heart monitor all tangled around Elara’s ears. Her head throbbed so hard it felt ready to split.

And that woman’s voice just kept going on and on.

"It really has nothing to do with me. I honestly don’t know how Sister Elara fell..."

With great effort, Elara forced her eyelids open. Through the blur, she saw two people sitting by the bed.

One looked to be in her early forties. She wore a short-sleeved blouse with tiny flowers on a beige background, and her hair was cut neatly to the ears.

The other was a young girl dressed fashionably, wearing a goose-yellow dress, with two braided pigtails and matching butterfly bows tied at the ends.

Elara blinked hard a few times, thinking she had to be dreaming. Otherwise, how could she possibly be seeing Fiona Ainsley and Crystal Barlow looking twenty years younger?

But even in a dream, Crystal’s way of talking was still just as unbearable.

How to put it?

In the words of her daughter Cecily Davenport, it was pure posing, every word dripping with that fake sweet "green tea" air.

Elara curled her lip, muttering inwardly that her luck was rotten. If she had to dream, why dream of the two people she hated most?

She shut her eyes again, fully intending to kick both of them out of her dream.

But the moment she closed them, Crystal’s sticky-soft voice floated over again.

"Mom, I think Sister Elara opened her eyes."

Elara couldn’t be bothered to respond.

"Sis? Sister Elara?"

"Sis, you're awake. Why won't you open your eyes?"

Crystal Barlow's voice suddenly dropped, soft and aggrieved. "Elara, are you annoyed with me? If you're refusing to wake up because I'm here, then fine, I'll go, all right..."

Before she even finished, her voice had already gone thick with tears.

"..."

Elara rolled her eyes inside her head.

There she went again, crying and putting on a show.

Pushing forty, and the tears still came the second she wanted them to.

She was bad enough in real life.

Now she had to run into her even in a dream. What rotten luck.

Elara lifted her leg and kicked out, shoving her away at once. "Why are you bawling? Since you know I can't stand you, why don't you hurry up and get out!"

Crystal hadn't expected her to actually strike. The kick landed right on her knee. Pain shot through her leg, and it gave way beneath her. She dropped straight to the floor on her knees.

She froze, eyes wide, staring at Elara in disbelief. "Sis!!"

"What sis? What kind of relation do I have with you?"

Crystal's tears fell at once. She turned toward Fiona Ainsley and complained in a choked voice, "Mom, Elara, she... how could she do this..."

"Mom, does she not want me staying in this house? If that's the case, I can move out, but she shouldn't hit me, should she..."

Fiona Ainsley hurried over and helped Crystal up, asking with a pained look, "Xuexue, does it hurt? Did you injure yourself falling down?"

"Mom, I'm fine." Crystal leaned weakly against her. "It doesn't matter if I took a fall. What matters is that Sis hit her head just now. That's no small thing. What if something's really wrong with her now? There's no need for her to make things hard on herself over something this little."

Every word was hinting that Elara had fallen on purpose and was trying to pin it on her.

The moment Fiona Ainsley heard that, her face turned sour as she looked at Elara. "Lulu, I know you're upset after taking a fall and hitting your head, but your sister didn't do anything to you. She didn't trip you on purpose. Don't take your anger out on her."

"Get out!"

Elara didn’t even look at them. She raised a hand and pointed straight at the door. "Out. All of you, get out."

There was something seriously wrong with this dream. Completely wrong.

Only after she drove that annoying mother and daughter pair out did Elara finally get the chance to look around the room properly.

It was a tiny cubicle boxed in with wooden boards, not even three square meters. A narrow single bed and a big wardrobe already crammed the place full, and in the slit of space between them, someone had forced in a skinny little table. A light blue cloth with small flowers covered it, and on top sat only a palm-sized mirror and a comb.

The room felt both strange and familiar to her. It was in the railway bureau family compound.

This was the room she had stayed in after coming back to her birth parents’ home at sixteen. It had originally been Crystal Barlow’s. When Elara first returned, the two of them had squeezed in here together for a while.

Later, Crystal refused to listen to anyone and insisted on following the boy from school she had a crush on to Jiangxi for the countryside assignment. After that, the room became Elara’s alone. She lived here for two years, right up until she finished medical college and started work, then moved into the railway bureau’s single dormitory.

Her head hurt so badly it felt ready to split.

Elara reached up and touched the back of her head. Her fingers came away slick with blood, and there was a huge swelling there too.

No wonder it hurt like hell.

Just then, a sharp stab of pain suddenly tore through her skull. Her whole body shook as if a current had run through her. A flood of strange memories and images rammed into her mind all at once, whether she could bear it or not, forcing their way in without pause.

That was when Elara finally knew for

Ten years of marriage, and the man had felt so stifled in it he could barely breathe.]

[Then he ran into Crystal Barlow, and only then did he feel alive again.]

[All those hard years in the countryside hadn’t worn her down. Life in the village, rough as it was, hadn’t crushed the spark in her either.]

[She was still the same as before—hot-blooded, bright, full of bite—and she lit up that late-blooming rebellious streak in him.]

[Crystal Barlow was right. Neither of them had done anything wrong. They had only met at the wrong time.

Just like Shakespeare wrote in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: love doesn’t care who came first. The one who isn’t loved is the real third wheel.]

Listen to that. Was that even something a human being ought to say?

When a man is dead set on fooling around outside the marriage, nothing about you is ever right. If you’re gentle, that’s wrong. If you’re thoughtful, that’s wrong. Even being sensible and good at running a home is somehow still wrong.

And if you really cry, scream, and try to keep him from leaving, then he’ll turn around and call you vulgar, shrewish, embarrassing, a public disgrace.

What a joke. Seriously, it opened her eyes.

That was true enough—love might not care who came first.

But people ought to have some bottom line, shouldn’t they?

Messing around inside a marriage and still talking like you’re righteous about it—that wasn’t romance. That was having no morals at all, no conscience left, like it had been tossed to the dogs.

Bah!

Trash like that made Elara want to spit right in his face.

She truly could not understand it. How did a scumbag who fooled around with his wife’s own younger sister during marriage get dressed up as some reformed, sentimental good man?

And how did a woman who broke up her own sister’s marriage get praised as some modern red rose?

The author of the book had been slippery with the timeline, sure, wrote it all in a vague, muddy way. But anyone willing to sit down and do the math on the child’s age would see it plain as day—the child had been born during Malcolm Davenport’s first marriage.

And yet, this rotten book, this shameless thing that made excuses for cheating and prettied up an affair, had actually become wildly popular. It even got turned into a television drama.

Elara simply could not make sense of it. Had the people a few decades later all gotten water in their brains?

Did they really mean to throw everything else aside and worship this so-called "true love"?

So now any piece of trash could be dressed up as the lead?

If that was how this world worked, then a clear-headed woman like Elara was bound to get crushed to death by this damn excuse for love.

Fine.

Let them keep losing their minds. She was done playing along.

What hurt her most was Cecily Davenport. That child had it hard from the minute she was born, sickly all over, and on top of that, stuck with a father like that.

The second she thought of Cecily, Elara remembered what the child had asked her the day before she crossed over: "If you could go back, what would you change most?"

Truth be told, Elara did not have much she wanted to rewrite.

Her whole life had been plain and quiet. Nothing glorious worth talking about, and nothing much she could not let go of.

Her adoptive father died early. Her adoptive mother remarried after that. She had been raised by her grandmother since she was little, but her grandmother also passed when she was fifteen.

Later, she went back to live with her birth parents. Life there was decent enough. At least she had food, clothes, and school, and no one went out of their way to bully her.

People always said a person could spend a lifetime trapped by the things they failed to get when they were young. She was exactly that kind of person.

Maybe because her childhood had been too uncertain, she grew into someone extra cautious, someone who feared change in life more than anything.

She was not just the sort to please others. She also craved love terribly, from family and from romance alike.

But feelings were never something you could summon just because you wanted them. So she lowered her expectations and thought, if she could just marry a dependable man, an honest steady one, that would be enough. Love or no love, she could live with that.

So she did everything the proper way. She went on blind dates, got married, had a child, and only wished her child could grow up with a complete family and live a safe, ordinary life.

That was why she behaved herself so carefully. She did not dare make waves, did not dare try business, did not dare make even the smallest mistake.

Her marriage with Malcolm Davenport had had its good days at the start, but they did not last. The moment their daughter was born, those days were gone.

After that, the two of them went from being polite, to having little to say, to each carrying separate thoughts in their own hearts. None of it happened without a reason.

When Cecily Davenport was born, the doctors found out right away that her heart was not sound. To pay for the child’s treatment, after Reform and Opening Up began, Malcolm Davenport quit his job at the railway bureau and went into the electrical appliance trade.

Back then, money was honestly easy to make. If you had the nerve to go out and hustle, you could bring some home.

Malcolm Davenport made a few trips down south and came back with twenty thousand yuan.

He paid for their daughter’s heart surgery, then rented a shopfront too.

On the surface, life looked like it was finally turning around. But then Malcolm started pushing, wanting Elara to quit her job and go into business with him.

Elara didn’t want that.

She knew his thinking wasn’t entirely wrong. In those days, doing business did bring in cash faster than working a regular post. Still, she had her own plans in mind.

For one thing, their daughter’s heart condition was serious. One surgery wasn’t the end of it. There would be more later, and the child needed her mother there to watch over her.

If Elara went into business too, once she got busy, how could she keep an eye on the girl? How could she look after her properly?

For another, business meant risk. Plenty of people got rich, sure, but plenty lost everything too. Some were driven so far they jumped off buildings.

Elara worked in the clinic at the railway bureau. The pay wasn’t much, but it was steady. For this family, that steady wage was at least a way out, a last bit of security.

But Malcolm, flushed with easy money, wouldn’t hear a word of it. In his eyes, she was refusing to listen to her husband, refusing to stand with him, which made her a poor wife. The two of them argued till they parted on bad terms.

After that, Malcolm slipped off to the south without even saying much. He stayed away a full year.

And when he finally came back, he didn’t have a single coin on him.

Worse, he was buried in debt.