"My God! Whose child is that? How’d the kid get outside the window like that?"

"Somebody save him!"

"Where are the adults? The child’s about to fall and nobody’s watching?"

The shouting tangled together from all sides. Iris Hartwell, who was just passing by, drowsily lifted her head. Right then, she saw a bare little toddler slipping down through the crack of an upstairs window.

"Oh no—"

Cries broke out everywhere. A man clinging to the security bars on the second floor hurriedly reached out to grab the child, but he was just a hair too late. He could only watch as the little one dropped past his hand.

Iris’s heart clenched. There was no time to think. She ran forward in a rush, almost stumbling, and instinctively threw her arms open to catch the falling child.

Thud.

The baby landed in Iris’s arms, but the force of the fall was too strong. Her arm was dislocated on the spot, and her whole body was slammed backward onto the ground.

A sharp, piercing pain shot through her. Iris’s vision went black, and she passed out.

She didn’t know how much time had gone by before she heard someone calling near her ear.

Her eyelids twitched, but she still couldn’t open them.

Was she dying?

Maybe that was fine.

Widowed while still so young, the only thing that had kept her alive in this world was finding the daughter who had been sold away.

But she had searched for most of her life, only to learn in old age that her daughter had been gone long ago.

Iris felt as if her heart had already died. She truly had no wish to keep living.

"Sister-in-law, wake up? Wake up?"

Bella Hartwell bent over, calling as she reached out and pushed Iris on the shoulder.

She shoved her a few times and still couldn’t wake her. Then her mother, Vera Hartwell, grabbed her by the arm and dragged her out of the room.

"Enough already. Stop yelling. She probably fainted from the shock. Come on, let's step outside and talk."

The two of them went out of the main room one after the other. Before long, low, hushed whispers drifted in from the yard.

"Mom, Iris Hartwell is almost seven months along. Once the baby's born, it'll live for sure. If we make her get rid of it now, how could she possibly agree?"

Her belly?

What belly?

She was already pushing fifty. How could she still be...

No. Something was off.

The more Iris listened, the stranger it felt. She suddenly snapped her eyes open. What came into view was a wooden bed frame that looked both unfamiliar and weirdly familiar, along with a dingy mosquito net gone gray with age.

On the paper-covered window, there were still a few faded red wedding cutouts pasted there.

This... wasn't this the bridal room she and Victor Hartwell had lived in back when they first got married in the countryside?

What was going on?

Hadn't she been knocked unconscious by a child who fell from upstairs?

Why wasn't she waking up in a hospital? Why was she in the old house from her younger days instead?

She lifted a hand and touched her stomach. It was swollen high and round. Could it be...

Could it really be like those things on television—growing young again, going back in time—and somehow it had happened to her?

Iris Hartwell sat there in a daze. Just as her mind was still reeling, an irritated snort came from the yard outside the window.

"Why are you asking me? I'm not even her real mother-in-law. No matter what I do, I won't get any credit for it. I wouldn't dare stick my nose in and make decisions for her. If you want to know, ask your father."

Iris recognized that voice at once. It was Victor Hartwell's stepmother, Vera Hartwell, with that loud, sharp mouth of hers.

That vicious woman had taken her daughter away, then stood in front of her and acted smug about it.

Iris had cried until her eyes were nearly ruined, begging her again and again to tell her where her daughter had been taken. But Vera Hartwell had not only kept her mouth shut, she had also kicked her while she was down, saying the girl had been born with a short fate, and even if she were found, she would not live long anyway.

Iris hated her to the bone. Even if she died and turned to ash, she still wouldn’t forget that face of hers, or that voice.

"I’m just the younger one. Why would Dad tell me something like that?" her sister-in-law Bella Hartwell answered awkwardly.

She had long since grown sick of living in that mud-brick house. She’d had her eye on her eldest brother’s brick-tile place for who knew how long.

But she and her eldest brother Victor Hartwell weren’t born to the same mother. They’d never been close, not since they were kids, and after they grew up, they barely even spoke when they met.

Ever since that brick house was built, she hadn’t spent even one single day living in it.

Ever since she secretly overheard her parents talking in their room, Bella Hartwell would think about the money Victor had left behind, and those three new rooms that would belong to her family sooner or later. The thought made her so happy her heart nearly floated. Some nights she was so thrilled she could wake up grinning in her sleep.

But once that burst of excitement passed, worry started creeping in again.

Bella Hartwell let out a sigh, edged closer to her mother, and lowered her voice. "Mom, my big brother’s really gone this time. The child in Iris’s belly is the only bloodline left in the Hartwell family.

"If she’s dead set on keeping it, and later she uses my brother’s money and lives in his house, then what are we supposed to do?"

At noon today, a telegram had come from the army.

It said Victor Hartwell, while carrying out a mission, had fallen off an icy cliff trying to save a comrade.

He had been missing for a full week. No one had found any sign of him. For now, the case was being listed as missing, and the family was told to prepare themselves.

The telegram said missing, sure, but everyone knew perfectly well what that really meant. Odds were, Victor Hartwell was never coming back.

From a cliff that high, if a man fell, what good ending could there be?

It was only because the body hadn’t been found yet, and because not enough time had passed for the formal procedures, that they were still calling it a disappearance for now.

The moment the news reached home, Iris collapsed on the spot in the village head’s house.

And on the way back, while they were carrying her home, Vera Hartwell was already making plans in her head. No matter what, the baby in Iris’s stomach could not be allowed to be born.

Iris had been sent down to the countryside as an educated youth. If the policy changed one day, she might have to return to the city.

If she gave birth to a girl, that would actually be easier to handle. Whether Iris went back to the city later or remarried, she could take the child with her.

Then the money and house Victor Hartwell left behind would still stay with the Hartwell family.

Three big red-brick rooms facing south and north proper—there wasn’t a second house that decent in the whole of Yanjia Village.

It would work out nicely for Derek Hartwell and Jasmine Shelby to move in. That way, once the young couple got married, they wouldn’t have to keep squeezing in with his sister in those two shabby east-side rooms.

And if Iris Hartwell gave birth to a boy, that would be real trouble. A son carried on the family line. On top of that, he’d be a martyr’s son. Even if Iris remarried someday, the child would still have to stay with the Hartwell family.

By then, all the relatives and elders in the clan would be watching with eagle eyes. If nothing got divided out, people would talk. And once that happened, trying to swallow the whole house for themselves would be a lot harder.

Vera Hartwell had no intention of gambling on that.

So no matter what, this child could not be allowed to come into the world.

That was what Vera Hartwell was thinking, but she also knew very well that if anyone found out she had tampered with a martyr’s widow, people would tear her apart behind her back.

This had to be done in the dark, quietly, without letting a single outsider catch a whiff of it.

Vera Hartwell shot Bella Hartwell a hard glare, warning her not to keep talking. "What nonsense are you spouting out in the street? Come back with me."

"Mom, I was only asking..."

"Asking what? You’re an unmarried girl, and you spend all day poking into this kind of filthy business. Is this something you should be worrying about?"

Vera Hartwell grabbed Bella Hartwell by the arm and hauled her toward the door. Lowering her voice, she threatened, "Once we step out of here, you keep that mouth of yours shut tight. If you let even half a word slip and mess up the family’s business, just wait till your father breaks your legs."

The noisy chatter in the yard slowly faded away, and before long, the place was quiet again.

In the inner room off the main hall, Iris Hartwell lay stiff and straight on the wooden double bed. She pulled her gaze back from the window, lowered her head, and gently touched her swollen belly with trembling fingertips.

Get rid of the baby...

So that was the Hartwell family’s plan.

Then that fall in her previous life probably hadn’t been an accident at all.

To seize Victor Hartwell’s inheritance, they had deliberately made her fall, trying to get rid of the child. It was only because the pregnancy had been too far along that the baby had still been born alive, barely breathing.

So in the end, they simply tore off the mask. They took over the brick house Victor Hartwell had built with his own hands, stole her child, smeared her name, and drove her out of the family home.

But after taking the baby, they had never planned to raise her. Barely ten days old, that frail premature infant, weak as a newborn kitten, had been passed off and sent to another province in the dead of winter.

She had searched for most of her life. Only when she was old did she finally learn the truth: just days after the child was taken away, she had died on the train. The traffickers had buried her carelessly in the weeds by a riverside.

In that life, she had searched her whole life, and in the end she had found nothing.

Thank heaven justice still existed. Though she had never found her own daughter all those years, she had helped many others reunite with their lost family.

All the good she had done over those years had earned her this chance to live again!