"Bitch!"
"Spread your legs wider!"
The moment Victoria Caldwell came to, a woman's sharp, nasty voice stabbed straight into her ears.
"Who else but me can patch that little membrane of yours?"
"What a shameless tramp. Just to hook a man, you'd even fake being a virgin. Hurry up and open your legs. What, acting all chaste now?"
The noise made Victoria's head throb.
She forced her eyes open and then realized her lower half was bare. A woman in her forties or fifties was bent over in front of her, clutching needle and thread, impatience written all over her face.
The way she looked, it was like she meant to sew right into her body.
Victoria's heart jumped. She quickly pushed herself back.
The woman saw her move and got even more annoyed, her tone turning harsher.
"What are you doing now? If Helen Caldwell hadn't come begging me, I wouldn't bother with your mess. No shame at all. Your man is serving in the army, and you went and fooled around with somebody else. Once I fix you up, you can pretend you're still untouched. Nobody'll be able to tell."
Only then did Victoria fully come back to herself.
She had been reborn.
She was back on the very day from her last life, the day she came to have her hymen "repaired."
In her previous life, right after her wedding with Nathan Whitfield, before they had even shared a bed, Nathan was called back to the army.
After that, for years, she stayed with the Whitfield family doing all the work. Everybody in the village praised her as a good, dutiful daughter-in-law.
Back then, she had treated Nathan like a hero. She thought marrying him was the luckiest thing that had ever happened to her. She was willing to serve his parents, and even though he'd been gone for three years without showing his face once, she never complained.
But later, in the sorghum field, she somehow ended up sleeping with another man. She panicked and went to her cousin Helen Caldwell for help.
Helen pretended she was doing it for Victoria's own good and gave her an idea: repair the hymen.
If it was fixed, Nathan would never find out.
Victoria had been out of her mind with fear and agreed on the spot. But that woman didn't know a thing about this kind of procedure. She was just butchering her.
She sewed her up almost shut down there, and afterward the infection got so bad it was unbearable.
Not only did Victoria end up with a severe gynecological illness, she even lost the child she had accidentally conceived. Soon after that, she died.
That was when Nathan finally came back from the army.
By then, the whole village had already heard the rumors Helen spread about her fooling around with men.
Not one person stepped up to speak for her. Every single one pointed at her and called her shameless.
The Caldwell family thought she had humiliated them. They wouldn't even buy her a coffin. They just wrapped her in a broken reed mat and buried her like that, done and over with.
A few days later, Nathan came back with a woman from the army.
Victoria's soul had still been floating there, and only then did she finally see the truth. The marriage certificate she'd gotten with Nathan all those years ago had been fake from the start.
The reason he never came home in those three years was simple: he'd already married another woman near the army post, and that woman's belly was already big.
Her father-in-law and mother-in-law knew it all along.
They knew perfectly well and still kept it from her, using her like a free servant.
It was clearly the Whitfields who had wronged her, but in the end, they were the ones who shoved her face into the mud.
She watched Nathan later have a son and a daughter, and then even become an official.
That whole family lived in comfort and happiness.
The hatred inside her nearly burned her apart.
And now, somehow, once she opened her eyes, she was back on this very day.
In her last life, she had been numb all over. She truly thought she had betrayed Nathan, and guilt ate her alive.
But now that she thought about it, guilt my ass.
The marriage certificate was fake. That meant she and Nathan had never really been husband and wife. Back at the wedding, Nathan hadn't even paid a bride price. She'd been the one putting money in.
She had served those two old Whitfields for three full years for nothing. If anyone owed anyone, it was the Whitfield family owing her.
And as for her body being ruined by somebody else, that had nothing to do with the Whitfields at all.
There had never been any real marriage.
At worst, it was just a question of morals.
This time, she was going straight to the army unit and exposing every rotten thing Nathan had done. She'd make sure everybody saw what kind of man he really was.
As for the child in her belly, she had to find the real father.