The Child Offers a Pearl and Knocks on Your Heart

For the first time, the dark iron armor of Marquis Dingbei Xiao Chengyu was stained with sticky date paste. Su Niantang had pelted him with a pastry.

Seven years ago, he believed his deputy general's slander that “a village girl was trying to climb the social ladder” and drove her and one-month-old A Zhuo out of the city. Seven years later, the “village girl” he had cast out was crouched in a street-side pastry shop, teaching A Zhuo to knead dough. “Remember, A Zhuo: we rely on neither heaven nor earth.”

“Mother! The big brother from the marquis's manor said I look like the marquis!” A Zhuo rushed over, waving the arm Xiao Chengyu had held.

Xiao Chengyu stood at the entrance to Tangli Studio, looking at the little one's tiger teeth, identical to his own, and felt his heart ache. After three months of investigation, he had finally uncovered the truth: his deputy had switched his medicine and bribed the midwife to claim A Zhuo was not his child. And because he had mistaken Su Niantang for a stand-in for his “first love,” he had pushed away the woman who truly loved him with his own hands.

So the marquis's stable became a pastry workshop, and the general's military orders were replaced with instructions to “deliver the freshest candied dates to Tangli Studio.”

Su Niantang clutched the phoenix-shaped sugar figurine A Zhuo had given her and stared at the dark circles under Xiao Chengyu's eyes. “Marquis Xiao, when you drove me out, did you ever imagine this day would come?” He presented half a jade pendant, the half she had lost before being abducted, and his voice trembled. “I've searched for you for twenty years. I never knew... you were right in front of me.”

That night, A Zhuo lay by the window and muttered, “Father says he'll make up for seven years' worth of sugar figurines for Mother, but I think what he really wants to make up for is seven years' worth of candied hawthorns.”