When the bowl of sweetened water was brought to her lips, Shen Qinghe detected a faint bitterness.
It was subtle, buried beneath the cloying sweetness of the brown sugar. If she had still been twenty-three, her nose probably wouldn’t have been sharp enough to notice it.
But she was already sixty-four.
She had spent half her life working in a warehouse, handling grain, cooking oil, spices, and medicines. In her later years, she had also taken countless medications. She knew exactly which bitter substances left a dry, unpleasant taste at the root of the tongue and which ones made a person’s arms and legs go weak after swallowing. Even with her eyes closed, she could never forget those sensations.
“Go on, drink it.”
Ma Guifen pushed the white enamel mug decorated with red flowers a little closer, smiling until three layers of wrinkles gathered at the corners of her eyes.
“It’s customary for a new bride to drink something sweet before leaving home. May you and Chengliang live happily together from now on. The wedding party outside has been waiting for ages.”
Firecrackers exploded beyond the paper-covered window.
Crack! Pop! Bang!
Shreds of red firecracker paper were swept through the crack beneath the door by the wind, scattering at Shen Qinghe’s feet.
She lowered her head and looked at her hands.
Her fingers were slender, and there was a faint reddish stain near her fingernails from handling the red paper. There were no age spots, no blue-purple bruises left by injections, and no cuts from knocking against the bed rails in a hospital room.
She looked further down.
Blue cotton trousers, black square-toed cloth shoes. Her mother had sewn the soles herself while she was still alive. On the inside of the right shoe, one stitch had accidentally been made with gray thread instead.
She had remembered that single misplaced stitch for forty-one years.
Shen Qinghe’s breathing stopped for a moment.
This wasn’t a hospital.
There was no glaring white light overhead, nor the smell of disinfectant in her nostrils. The dampness had caused several gray patches to appear on the plaster walls of the eastern room. A faded New Year poster of a chubby baby was pasted onto the wardrobe, while a red candle that Ma Guifen had been too reluctant to burn sat on the windowsill.
This was the Zhao family home.
May 1, 1983.
The morning of her wedding to Zhao Chengliang.
It was also the day in her previous life when she had been drugged with a bowl of sweetened water, dressed in Zhao Xing’er’s wedding clothes, and sent to the woodshed of Cao Yougen’s house.
Back then, she hadn’t regained consciousness until late in the evening. The door had been locked from the outside. Cao Yougen was drinking in the courtyard, his tongue thick with alcohol as he declared that the Zhao family had accepted eight hundred yuan from him. Once she had been delivered to his home, she belonged to him.
She had tried to escape through the window and broken her right leg in the fall.
Zhao Chengliang had rushed over the following day, holding her and crying. He said his mother had simply been confused and that he hadn’t known anything about it. He claimed he didn’t care that her reputation had been ruined or that she had become lame. As long as she was willing to return, their marriage would still stand.
At the time, she had thought those were the hands reaching out to save her.
Only later did she realize that those same hands had first pushed her into the mud, then waited for her to grab hold of them with gratitude.
“Qinghe?” Ma Guifen’s smile faded slightly. “What are you thinking about?”
The enamel mug moved another inch closer.
Shen Qinghe stared at the undissolved brown sugar floating on the surface. Suddenly, the forty-one years of her previous life felt like an old warehouse pressing down on her chest.
Every sack of grievance had been neatly stacked inside. She had thought the doors had long since been sealed shut.
Yet now, with just a hint of bitterness reaching her nose, the warehouse doors came crashing open.
She didn’t cry.
Tears were the least valuable form of evidence.
Keeping her head lowered, Shen Qinghe quietly surveyed everything in the room that might be useful.
The window latch had been secured from the outside. Two wooden trunks containing her dowry were piled beneath the window. The door wasn’t locked, but shadows kept moving back and forth outside it.
There was a pair of scissors in the sewing basket beside the bed and a rolling pin propped against the table leg.
If she really had to force her way out, she might manage it. But what then?
The Zhao family only needed to claim that the bride had suffered some kind of mental episode just before leaving for the wedding. A few male relatives could easily pin her down and force the same bowl of water down her throat.
There were at least twenty people in the courtyard.
Some were close to the Zhao family. Others had once been friends with her late mother. Some simply enjoyed watching a spectacle but would never take responsibility when things went wrong.
When she had been young, she hadn’t understood people well enough to distinguish between them. But after living to the age of sixty-four, she remembered most of them.
Old Madam Sun would be coming over today to deliver a pair of shoes. The village barefoot doctor would be heading to the eastern end of the village at noon to change someone’s dressing. The commune’s bookkeeper was Cao Yougen’s brother-in-law.
These people weren’t reinforcements.
But if she could get them standing in the right places, they could become witnesses.
She memorized the positions of the scissors, the door, and the window before looking back at the bowl of sweetened water.
Being given another chance didn’t mean Heaven had handed her victory.
It simply meant she had been returned to a day when the accounts could still be examined before it was too late.
“Mother,” she said.
Her voice sounded so young that even she found it unfamiliar.
“Is the edge of my bridal veil coming undone? I felt something poking me when I touched it just now.”
Ma Guifen froze. Instinctively, she glanced at the red bridal veil on the table.
“Where? Which part is coming undone? Last night, Xing’er—”
She stopped halfway through her sentence.
Turning around, she placed the enamel mug on the corner of the table and unfolded the bridal veil to inspect it.
There was another identical mug on the table.
That one had been prepared for Zhao Chengliang and contained warm water.
Both mugs were defective items sold at the supply and marketing cooperative two years earlier. On one, the floral design was slightly off-center. On the other, a sesame-seed-sized chip had broken off the rim.
Shen Qinghe hadn’t noticed these details in her previous life.
Later, when she worked in warehousing, hundreds of thousands of items passed through her hands. Checking packaging and identifying production batches had become second nature.
With just one glance, she had memorized the location of the chipped spot.
With her back turned to Shen Qinghe, Ma Guifen was still muttering, “There’s nothing wrong with it. How could a thread have come loose…”
Shen Qinghe reached out and switched the two mugs.
She didn’t move quickly.
Moving too fast would make them clink against the table.
She placed the drugged mug on the side closer to the bed, then moved the warm water back in front of herself, even making sure the handles faced exactly as they had before.
Finally, she lightly ran her little finger along the rim of the original mug.
A little sticky sweetened liquid clung to it.
She didn’t wipe it off. Instead, she slipped her hand into her sleeve.
“There’s nothing wrong with it!” Ma Guifen tossed the bridal veil aside. “It’s your wedding day. Don’t go frightening yourself for no reason. Hurry up and drink!”
Shen Qinghe picked up the warm water. The rim touched her lips, but she didn’t swallow.
Someone outside shouted playfully, “Isn’t the groom coming in to hurry things along? At this rate, the sun will be past the roof beam before they leave!”
A burst of laughter followed.
Zhao Chengliang put on an affectionate tone from outside the door.
“Mother, don’t rush Qinghe. She’s shy. I don’t mind waiting a little longer.”
How considerate.
In her previous life, that same gentle, unhurried voice had coaxed her into handing over her wages, persuaded her to take the blame for Zhao Xing’er’s stolen goods, and convinced her to give up her daughter’s medicine money to pay for her younger brother’s wedding banquet.
On the night her daughter had the highest fever, he had spoken in exactly the same way.
“We’re all family. Let’s take care of the important celebration for those who are healthy and full of life first. As for the child’s illness, we can put it off for a little while. Maybe she’ll get better on her own.”
Shen Qinghe’s fingertips dug into her palm.
The coolness of the sweetened liquid clinging to her finger inside her sleeve brought her back to the present.
She couldn’t rush things.
She didn’t have the company she had built in her previous life. She had no fleet of loading trucks or workers who had been with her for more than a decade.
All she had now was an eastern room with its door closed, an enamel mug contaminated with drugs, and forty-one years of memories that no one would believe.
If she wanted to overturn the table, she first had to secure the evidence.
Shen Qinghe tilted her head back and drank a little less than half the mug of warm water.
Ma Guifen’s shoulders visibly relaxed.
“That’s more like it.”
She reached for the red bridal veil.
“Getting married is like being reborn for a woman. Once you enter the Zhao family’s household, from now on, you’ll…”
“Auntie!”
A sudden shout from outside the courtyard gate drowned out the firecrackers.
“The Cao family’s wedding sedan has arrived to fetch Xing’er! They’ve sent word that the eight hundred yuan bride price has already been paid in full. If they don’t see the bride today, they’re going straight to the commune to report it to the authorities!”
The room fell silent.
Ma Guifen’s hand froze in midair, still clutching the bridal veil.
Immediately afterward, another burst of suona music came from the western entrance of the village.
Two wedding processions, one approaching from the east and the other from the west, collided right outside the Zhao family’s courtyard walls.
Shen Qinghe slowly set down the enamel mug.
Its bottom touched the tabletop.
A very soft sound.
Like an old ledger finally being opened to its first page.