On the day Su Wantang married Shen Lichen, the red candles burned down, but he never lifted her veil. He spent the entire night sitting before the portrait of his deceased first love, leaving her alone in the bridal chamber.
Throughout their three-year marriage, she had taken a blade for him, saved his life, and borne false accusations on his behalf. He hated her to the bone, calling her vicious and unscrupulous. She never once tried to defend herself. She simply kept half of an old jade pendant beneath her pillow, the token he had given her by hand when they were young. He had long since mistaken someone else for its owner.
Poisoned by the Qingming herb, she would not live to see her twenty-fifth birthday. With the three years she had left, she performed a forbidden blood-exchange ritual to cure the deadly poison his enemy had inflicted on him. He knew nothing of the truth. On the very day she knelt in the snow and begged him to take a concubine, he tore up the divorce letter in front of the entire household and said, “A poison-tongued woman like you doesn’t even deserve a divorce letter.”
Su Wantang never lived to see the crabapple blossoms bloom.
She died on the eve of the Start of Spring, a farewell letter beneath her body. It ended with just one line: “I never betrayed you.”
Shen Lichen went mad.
He tore the entire Marquis’s estate apart, digging three feet into the ground. He found the prayer plaque she had kept for ten years, the “Hundred Sons and Grandchildren” bed canopy she had spent three years embroidering, three letters she had never sent, and the divorce letter he had torn to pieces and she had sewn back together with red thread.
Holding the urn containing her ashes, he knelt before her memorial for three days and nights without saying a word.
On the fourth day, he suddenly spoke, his voice as hoarse as a broken gong. “Tangtang, I’m taking you home.”
No one answered. Every crabapple blossom in the courtyard withered overnight.
