I was a "wretched creature" picked up from a brothel. Everyone said I was lowborn, scheming, and eager to climb the social ladder. But only I knew that Old Madam Shen had personally chosen me to join the family, and that Shen Huaijin had married me in a proper, public ceremony. Yet he never believed me. My name was absent from the wedding, and I had no place at the ceremony. I knelt in the snow for three days and nights, only to get a cold sneer from him. "Stop dreaming." He shut me away in a side courtyard and humiliated me day after day. He believed rumors that I was having an affair with his adjutant and ordered my wrist broken. When I became pregnant with his child, he forced me to abort it, then watched me bleed heavily and collapse in the snow before turning and
