On a winter night eighteen years ago, the king was assassinated. The queen went into labor by the roadside and fell unconscious. When she woke, the child was gone.
Eighteen years later, a high school girl named Kanoer was working at an escape room when a stranger grabbed her wrist.
“Is that a birthmark on your hand?”
The man’s name was Raphael. He had been searching for her for ten years.
Kanoer was brought to the royal palace, where she met the young king, the brother she had never known.
He had waited eighteen years. Every day, every moment, he had waited for her to come home.
But the people in the palace looked at her strangely. Some were overcome with emotion, some stayed silent, and some only glanced at her from afar before turning and walking away.
And Raphael, the man who had brought her back, had a birthmark on his wrist identical to hers.
“I was mistaken for you, too,” he said. “Then I found out I wasn’t you.”
Kanoer began adjusting to her new life. She went to school, came home, bickered with her best friend Yan Ziqi, got chased by her math teacher for makeup exams, and rode the carriage back to the palace every evening.
Everything was getting better.
But she always felt as if she were missing something.
Why did the duchess leave after stopping by to see her? Why did Erix pause whenever he brought up the past? Why had Raphael uncovered so many things besides her in his ten years of searching?
What she didn’t know was this:
Some people had known who she was long before she did.
Some people had learned the truth long before she did.
And what she thought of as “coming home” was only the beginning of another search.
