Chapter 5

The day the contract expired, the sky was clear and bright.

As agreed, I restored everything to the way it had been before I arrived. The mansion was spotless, and all her belongings were sorted and put away in their proper places.

I set the key card and the car keys on the coffee table and pulled along my empty suitcase—it had been full when I came, but it was empty when I left, because in those three years I had hardly bought a single thing of my own.

The final payment of five hundred thousand came through exactly five minutes before I left, right on time.

Not one word of goodbye.

I walked out of that lavish cage that had trapped me for three years, breathed in the free air outside, and felt lighter than I ever had.

I boarded the old, slow long-distance train home. The clacking of the wheels sounded like a funeral dirge for the years behind me.

Watching the scenery rush backward past the window, I turned over my future in my mind. With this money, I'd buy my parents a small house in the county town back home, open a little shop, and live a steady, peaceful life.

Not bad at all.

But every plan I had was smashed to pieces the moment I pushed open the door—by my mother's kick.

"You worthless brat! What girl did you do wrong? She's come all the way to our house looking for you!"

The scolding left me completely lost, baffled. For three years I'd lived more chaste than a monk—where would a "girl" have come from?

"Mom, what are you talking about? Who's here?" I asked, frowning, steadying myself against my sore shin where she'd kicked me.

"Go in and see for yourself!" My mother's face was red with anger as she pointed into the yard.

Full of doubt, I pushed open the courtyard gate.

In the yard, my father was sitting with a woman on a little folding stool, rubbing his hands uneasily, not knowing what to say.

The woman was dressed in an expensive Chanel suit, with Jimmy Choo heels on her feet, completely out of place in our yellow-earth courtyard.

Hearing the noise, she slowly turned her head.

That icy face I'd looked at for three years, carved into my very bones, now carried a trace of barely perceptible panic and helplessness.

I was completely stunned, frozen where I stood as if struck by lightning.