Chapter 1

I knew my husband loved someone else.

For seventeen years, I lived in a wheelchair. He never shed a tear.

But when news came that the other woman had died, he sobbed until he shook. He even prepared his will.

He left me none of our shared property. Everything went to her child.

Then he lifted me in his arms, climbed over our thirtieth-floor balcony, and jumped.

As the wind roared in my ears, I heard him say:

“I'm sorry. She was the only woman I ever loved.”

I didn’t even have time to hate him.

When I opened my eyes again, sunlight made me squint.

Cicadas shrilled around me.

I looked down at my legs.

They could move.

The calendar read July 1974.

That summer.

The summer I’d saved him.

Why should I save him this time?

**Part 1**

Hot.

Stifling heat, as though I’d been shut inside a steamer.

I bolted upright in bed, my back drenched. Peeling my sticky skin from the bamboo mat sent a sharp sting through me.

Pain?

I froze.

I hadn’t felt pain for seventeen years.

How could someone with no sensation below the waist feel it?

I looked down at my body.

Young. Strong.

My legs lay neatly on the bed. My toes moved.

I pinched my thigh hard enough to make myself gasp.

“Xu Heng! Lazy girl! The sun’s on your backside, and you’re still in bed? Your father wants you to fetch water from the river!”

An old voice came through the door.

Grandfather.

He’d been dead for more than thirty years.

It was as though someone had poured ice water over my head. Memory flooded back.

My name was Xu Heng. I was twenty-two.

Midsummer, 1974.

I was still in my home village. I hadn’t gone to work at the county machinery factory.

I hadn’t met—

Song Yao.

The name drove into my heart like a blade.

In my first life, that very summer, I’d been fetching water when I saw him fall into the river.

I jumped in to save him.

He’d swallowed a bellyful of water. I dragged him ashore, coughing, and the first thing he said when he opened his eyes was, “Your hands are so warm.”

Later, he told me the clearest memory of his life was that pair of warm hands catching him as he drowned.

I believed him for more than twenty years.

Until he put the will before me.

Until he carried me over the thirtieth-floor railing.

Until I heard, through the wind, that she was the only woman he’d ever loved.

“Xu Heng! Are you deaf?” Grandfather shouted again.

“Coming.”

My own young voice sounded strange to me.

I put on cloth shoes and went outside.

Grandfather stood in the courtyard sorting yardlong beans. He glanced at me.

“You look awful. Sleep badly?”

“I had a nightmare.”

“About what?”

I paused. “I dreamed I died.”

The beans fell from his hand.

“Bite your tongue! Such unlucky talk first thing in the morning! Fetch the water. Your father’s waiting to wash clothes.”

I said nothing more. Taking up the carrying pole, I left the courtyard.

The road was muddy. Dense fields lined both sides, and the heat carried the earthy smell of soil.

I walked slowly.

I was remembering.

Today was July fourteenth.

Three days from now, July seventeenth, around two in the afternoon, Song Yao would fall from the eastern stone bridge into the Baisha River.

He would be washing clothes, step on a mossy stone, and slip.

I’d been drawing water downstream. Seeing someone struggling, I dropped my pole and plunged in.

One rescue had buried my entire life.

I’d thought it was fate.

He’d called it fate too.

But his fate hadn’t been me.

It had been another woman.

Jiang Weiping.

His ideal love. His enduring regret. The splinter lodged in his heart that he could never remove.

They’d been high-school classmates. He’d loved her since he was sixteen.

She went to university in the provincial capital, and they lost touch. Later, she married. He married me.

I thought he’d let her go.

He never had.

In our third year of marriage, I was injured at the machinery factory.

A steel beam fell, crushing two vertebrae.

From then on, the rest of my life was fixed to a wheelchair.

Song Yao didn’t leave.

Everyone praised him as a good man who never abandoned his wife.

Only I knew he hadn’t stayed for love.

Leaving would have ruined his reputation.

He endured seventeen years of that marriage.

Every day, without fail, he turned me, washed me, and fed me.

But he never smiled.

Whenever I reached for his hand, he found an excuse to pull away.

I called, “Yaoyao,” and he answered without looking at me.

I thought he was tired.

Then Jiang Weiping died.

Terminal liver cancer. No one beside her at the end.

When the news reached him that afternoon, he was chopping vegetables.

The knife stopped.

Then he crouched on the floor, covered his mouth, and sobbed until his whole body convulsed.

I would never forget that sound.

As though someone had torn his heart from his living chest.

In seventeen years of cooking for me, he’d never made a sound like it.

Not once.

He wiped his tears, brought out the meal, and acted as though nothing had happened.

When I asked what was wrong, he said, “Nothing. The onions stung my eyes.”

We were having stewed potatoes. There were no onions.

After that, he changed.

He became quieter, but it wasn’t his old silence.

It was the calm of someone who had decided.

He began sorting things.

Box after box. Clothes folded squarely. Savings books gathered together. Property deeds placed in a document folder.

I thought we were moving.

Then he laid a notarized will before me.

“I’m leaving all the property and savings in our names to Jiang Weiping’s son.”

He said it so calmly.

Blood rushed to my head.

“What did you say?”

“She’s gone. He’s only twelve. There’s no one to care for him.” He lowered his head. “Don’t worry. I’ll look after you until the very end.”

I stared at him for a long time.

“Song Yao, that’s our money.”

“I know.”

“I’ve been paralyzed seventeen years. That money is my workplace-injury compensation.”

“I know.”

The same answer.

“What gives you the right?”

After a silence, he raised his eyes.

I would never forget that look. Not in one life. Not in two.

There was nothing in it.

No guilt, no hesitation, no wish to explain.

He might have been looking at furniture.

A mute piece of furniture he’d painstakingly maintained for seventeen years.

The next day, he wheeled me onto the balcony for some sun.

The wind was strong on the thirtieth floor.

He put his arms around me from behind.

For the first time in seventeen years, he embraced me without being asked.

Before I could speak, he lifted me.

Then he went over the railing with me.

The fall lasted about four seconds.

His jacket whipped into my face. I smelled soap on him, and a trace of sunlight.

He spoke into my ear.

“I’m sorry, Xu Heng. She was the only woman I ever loved.”

Four seconds.

Enough to look back over my entire life.

Then nothing.

And after that: cicadas. A bamboo mat. Sweat. Grandfather’s voice. The summer of 1974.

I reached the river.

The Baisha flowed softly. It wasn’t deep, but a whirlpool in the middle trapped anyone who fell into it.

Three days from now, Song Yao would fall there.

I crouched and lowered my bucket.

Cold water flowed between my fingers.

I closed my eyes.

Last time, I’d jumped.

This time?

The bucket filled and overflowed, wetting my trouser cuffs.

I stood.

The pole weighed heavily on my shoulders.

Still lighter than my first life.

Back then, I hadn’t carried water. I’d carried a man who didn’t love me.

All my life.

Not this time.

**Part 2**

Three days.

I lived those three days more clearly than I’d lived my first life.

Back then, I’d drifted through work and sleep, thinking only of saving enough to move to the county town.

Now I began making plans.

It was 1974. I had no money, but I had fifty years of memories.

I knew when grain prices would rise, when policies would change, which industries would flourish.

More useful than any magical advantage.

But there was no hurry.

For now, one thing mattered: don’t jump into that river again.

July fifteenth.

I fetched water as usual.

At the village entrance, I met Bigmouth Zhao.

Our matchmaker had a mouth wide enough to fit a fist. Wherever she went, gossip followed.

“Xu Heng, your father asked me to find you a husband. Any requirements?”

“No.”

I kept walking with my pole.

“There’s a handsome young man in Liuwan, the next village. Song Yao—”

I stopped.

“I don’t know him. I’m not interested.”

She stared.

“You haven’t met him. How can you decide?”

“Not interested.”

I left.

She muttered behind me for ages. I didn’t turn.

In my first life, she’d been the first to mention him too.

But that had been after I saved him.

“You saved that young man’s life, Xu Heng! Isn’t that a match made in heaven?”

My father approved. His parents agreed.

Everyone thought it was a lovely story: a beauty saving a hero, a perfect pair.

Only Song Yao never expressed an opinion.

I’d thought he was shy.

Now I knew he wasn’t.

He didn’t want it.

But in those days, half the village had seen a young man dragged from the river, soaked through, cradled in a woman’s arms.

If he didn’t marry her, what could he do?

His reputation would be gone.

So he married me.

A woman he didn’t love.

And resented it all his life.

I didn’t blame him for the resentment.

But I wouldn’t take that blade a second time.

July sixteenth.

One day until he fell into the river.