"Easy... husband, that hurts."
In the dead of night, her soft, trembling voice suddenly broke the silence.
It was the first time Nathan Caldwell had ever heard Clara Caldwell call him that. His hand, which was rubbing her ankle, shook on the spot. The pressure in his fingers slipped heavier without him meaning to, and the pain made Clara’s eyes sting with tears.
"I... I’ll be gentler."
He answered in a tight, nervous voice, then quickly lowered his head again and kept rubbing the medicated wine into her ankle. He didn’t even dare look at her for long, but his hands had turned unbelievably careful.
Clara looked at his handsome profile, at the way his brows were drawn together, then at the plain mud-brick room around them, its walls pasted with bright red wedding cutouts. Her chest swelled with emotion, half thrilled, half dazed.
She truly had never imagined that after dying of cancer, she would wake up again in 1978.
And today, of all days, was the day twenty-year-old Clara had married twenty-three-year-old Nathan.
Clara had grown up spoiled and cherished, like a little princess raised in honey. She had always had her own dreams, her own plans for what life should be.
But in her previous life, on the night of her twentieth birthday party, she suddenly learned that her father, to repay a life-saving favor, had decided to marry her off to a rough country man from some remote mountain village.
She refused to become a tool for her father’s gratitude, and even less did she want to marry an uneducated, rugged man. Because of that, she made a scene at the Whitfield house for a full month. In the end, under Richie Whitfield’s repeated pleading, she still married into the Caldwell family against her will.
After the wedding, she and Nathan never had loud fights day after day, but the two of them had always lived like strangers under one roof, polite on the surface and cold to the bone. She had never once given him a warm look. Countless times she wanted a divorce, but Richie Whitfield refused every time, so it never happened.
Then, in the tenth year of their marriage, Nathan suddenly took the initiative and asked to divorce her.
Clara hadn’t understood why, but she had still felt relieved, as if a chain had finally been cut. She agreed right away, and from then on, they went their separate ways for good.
After the divorce, Clara took over the Whitfield family business and carved out her own place in the business world. On the outside, she had status, money, everything people envied. But inside, there was always an empty space she could never fill.
In 2018, after years of exhausting her body, she was diagnosed with stomach cancer.
The illness came hard and fast. With no husband, no children, she stayed in the hospital alone through treatment. During that time, only her secretary and the hired caregiver came by to see her and look after her.
It was only after she died, when her soul drifted above the hospital room, that she suddenly saw a figure both familiar and strange rush through the door and drop straight to his knees beside her bed.
The man was wearing a high-end black tailored suit. His bearing was extraordinary, impossible to ignore. But his jacket buttons were left undone, his hair was in disarray, and one look was enough to tell he had come in a blind panic.
His face was still as striking and sharp as it had been when she first met him forty years ago.
Only now, there were two more lines on his forehead, and his eyes were red.
"I'm sorry, Xiner. I came too late. I didn't take good care of you."
Nathan Caldwell gripped Clara Caldwell's hand so hard, even though it had already gone cold. His voice was rough, breaking on every word. Grief hung over him so heavily it seemed to swallow the whole man, as if the one thing he treasured most had just been torn away.
Was he... crying for her?
But didn't he not love her?
Hadn't he treated their marriage like a joke too?
Then why was her death hurting him this badly...?
Clara stared at the scene in shock, her feelings in a mess.
Her soul couldn't bear to leave. She stayed by Nathan's side, wanting to understand what was really going on.
Then she watched him take her body away. She watched him arrange a grand funeral for her. She watched him bury her ashes in the biggest cemetery in Regveil.
Later, she followed him back home and saw that his room was filled with her photographs. He even carried one with him wherever he went. At night, even in his sleep, he would call her name.
Later still, from bits of conversation between him and his friends, she finally learned the truth. Nathan had fallen for her the very first time they met, and he had loved her all the way until now.
Back then, the reason he had taken the initiative to ask for a divorce was only because he had overheard Clara telling her friend that she disliked him, that she didn't want to spend her whole life with a dull man like him.
Just to make Clara happy, no matter how unwilling he was, he still chose to let go in the end. After their divorce, he never remarried. He didn't even date anyone. He threw himself into making money and bettering himself.
He had thought that if he became rich enough, interesting enough, then maybe one day in the future, Clara might finally fall in love with him.
But sadly, before that day could come, Clara had already left this world.