“Clara, your dad’s saying all this for your own good. You need to think it through. If you marry Mortimer Adams, you’ll be one of the Adams family. Your status will be different then. Who’d still dare lay a finger on you?”
“If you refuse, then just wait for the days in the cattle shed. You were raised soft since childhood. Can you really bear that kind of hardship?”
“When your mother was dying, she held my hand and kept talking about you. The only thing she couldn’t let go of was you. I promised her I’d protect you no matter what. I’ve been carrying this whole mess of the Whitfield family on my own, all so you wouldn’t suffer. Otherwise, how would I have the face to meet her after I’m dead?”
“You know perfectly well what kind of family the Adamses are. They’ve got a solid foundation. Mortimer is a steady, proper man, just a little older, that’s all. Thirty-three. But his background is spotless, and he’s got the organization behind him!”
“If you marry into that house, you’ll be the lady of it. Servants, maids, people to wait on you—more than enough. You won’t have to touch a single bit of work. You’ll still live like the pampered young miss you always were. Who’d dare show you a sour face?”
The middle-aged man’s voice seeped through the thin wooden door. Every word sounded sweet on the surface, but underneath it was poison wrapped in honey. It made Clara Whitfield’s skin crawl, and a cold shiver ran straight down her back.
She jerked upright at once, her mind in total chaos.
Wait...
Hadn’t she worked herself to death in the office?
That cubicle stuffed with files, the fluorescent lights blazing all night long, that sudden crushing tightness in her chest, that awful feeling of not being able to draw a breath...
Her temples throbbed as if needles were stabbing back and forth through them. Strange memories, one after another, came flooding into her head in a messy rush, broken and tangled, yet soaked through with a grief so heavy it was hard to name.
“Tch...”
Clara Whitfield clutched her head in both hands, brows knotted tight, forcing herself to sort through and absorb those memories bit by bit.
Several minutes later, she slowly lowered her hands. Her face was white as paper, and her heart dropped clean to the bottom—
She had transmigrated into a book.
Not just any book, either, but a period novel called Marrying the Commander in the Seventies and Being Spoiled Rotten. And she had become the cannon-fodder cousin in it, the one with the exact same name as her, the one who died early and died miserably.
And of all times to land here, she had come at the very moment everything began sliding into the abyss.
It was 1975. The Whitfield family was among the last batch of red capitalists to be purged.
The original Clara had believed every sweet lie her stepfather Herbert Stanton fed her. She had handed over the respectable job her mother left behind, then obediently married that old pervert Mortimer Adams—the one everyone praised to the skies as “honest” and “well-off.”
And after that?
Less than seven days after the original Clara was married off, word came that she had thrown herself into a well.
Her mother had been stunningly beautiful. Back when she was young, no matter how her family tried to stop her, she insisted on following an educated youth into the city. Before they were even properly married, she was already pregnant with her.
When the original Clara was three, word came that her birth father had gone out on some mission and never made it back. What he did leave behind, though, was enough money to last several lifetimes, plus this grand little Western-style house that looked rich from top to bottom.
From then on, her mother kept thinking about him day and night, and her health just kept slipping.
Later, when the girl started school, the other children laughed at her for not having a father. Her mother panicked then, and hurriedly brought Herbert Stanton in as a live-in son-in-law. She wanted nothing else from him, really—just that her daughter could at least say she had a "father" to back her up outside.
But when the original Clara turned ten, her mother let go and passed away.
Not even a month later, Herbert Stanton dropped the act for good. He packed his whole family from the old village into the Whitfield house—his parents, his brothers, the lot of them.
They tore through every chest and cupboard looking for valuables. They scraped up anything worth a coin, even stomped over the floors like they wanted to pry the whole place open, dead set on digging out the stash they believed Clara’s mother had hidden somewhere.
From that day on, the young lady of the Whitfield family became the Stanton family’s unpaid servant, called whenever they pleased, beaten and cursed whenever they liked, with nowhere to go and nobody to hear her out.
The cheerful, lively girl she used to be got worn down little by little, till all her spirit was gone. She learned to read faces, to keep her head down, to shrink back before anyone even raised a hand.
The only reason she managed to hold on until twenty was because the Stanton family still had their eyes on the last bit of profit left in her—when she married, her mother had arranged for a dowry to be given to her.
"Clara? Clara, open the door... bang, bang, bang!"