"Vivienne, your man’s done with you. You need to do as we say, hand the job over to Felicia, then find a decent family and remarry."
"We’ve already met the fellow. His background’s clean as can be. He doesn’t even mind that you used to be some rich capitalist girl. You just marry over there and live proper, that’s all."
"I’m not marrying. And I’m not giving up my job either."
"If he’s really that good, why don’t you let your precious Felicia marry him instead?"
The words had barely left her mouth when Vivienne Ashford froze all over.
Hadn’t she already died?
Died in Heishan Village, that godforsaken backwater...
Then how was she still able to speak?
Following the sound, she slowly turned her head. The moment she saw the man in front of her, her eyes went wide.
It was her real father, Gerald Ashford.
She wasn’t dead?
She was back in this house, the one she’d been in before they sold her off?
"You..."
Before she could finish, her head suddenly felt like it had burst open. All the misery from her last life came flooding back at once, savage and clear.
She had actually been reborn in 1975.
Reborn to those few days before her own father and mother sold her to traffickers.
In her last life, right after she was born, she and Felicia Ashford had been switched by mistake, because both women in the maternity ward had husbands with the surname Fang.
By a cruel twist of fate, Vivienne Ashford had been taken to the Fang family on the capitalist side and raised as a pampered young miss for eighteen years.
Then, when she turned eighteen, Felicia was injured in a car accident, and only then did both families realize the girls had been mixed up.
But even after that, her adoptive parents had never insisted the girls be exchanged at once. They treated both her and Felicia well, as if they had simply ended up with two daughters instead of one.
Later on, even after her adoptive parents gave away half the family fortune, people still kept their eyes on them. Someone reported them, and they were sent away.
Afraid she would get dragged down with them, her adoptive parents hurried to have Gerald Ashford and his wife take her back. Her name was entered into her biological family’s household register.
The price for that was simple enough on the surface. Aside from the portion specially kept for her and Felicia Ashford, everything left in the family estate went to Gerald Ashford. All her adoptive parents wanted was for the two girls to be properly looked after.
Gerald Ashford agreed readily enough at first, all smiles and fine words. But once he had sweet-talked Vivienne Ashford out of the money and valuables in her hands, his whole face changed.
As the days passed, he and his wife never once treated her kindly. Big jobs, small chores, every bit of work in the house got shoved onto her shoulders.
And Felicia Ashford was a perfect little white lotus, always putting on that pitiful look, as if she’d been wronged beyond reason.
In the end, Gerald Ashford and his wife would turn around and blame Vivienne instead.
Vivienne Ashford did have two biological older brothers, but what good did that do her? They had grown up with Felicia Ashford since childhood, and in their hearts, she was the only real sister they acknowledged.
As for Vivienne Ashford, they barely spared her a proper glance.
Two years earlier, when the family got a quota to send someone down to the countryside, everyone sat around talking it over again and again. In the end, they decided Vivienne should go in someone else’s place.
Vivienne Ashford refused, of course. It just so happened that Ambrose Gallagher had come back home on leave around then. She saw an opening, set up a trap, and married him.
But Ambrose Gallagher had never been happy about the marriage. On the wedding day itself, he left. Once he was gone, he stayed gone for two whole years, not even sending back a single message.
And later on, just like today, Gerald Ashford and his wife tried to persuade her to remarry. Back then, all she wanted was to win their approval, so she nodded and agreed.
Who would have thought they never meant to find her a decent husband at all? They sold her straight to human traffickers.
She ran with everything she had, fled again and again, only to be dragged back every single time.
And every time they caught her, a savage beating followed, until her whole body was covered in wounds.
Only later did she understand that Felicia Ashford had been the one stirring things up from behind the scenes the entire time.
She hated them. Hated them to the bone.
But hatred was useless. She could not escape. She was locked inside a dark, damp cellar, where if she was not being abused, she was being beaten.
It was not until the day her adoptive parents finally found her and saved her that she saw sunlight again.
Back then, she had already been at the very end of her rope.