At forty, Lin Shuyu finally seemed to have the “good life” everyone envied.
Her husband's building-materials business kept growing. She bought a house in the city, and their children came to live with her. But that same year, she happened to see a label on her husband's phone: “That woman in the countryside.”
That casual little label shattered every lie she'd told herself about their twenty-year marriage.
When she opened her eyes again, glaring sunlight streamed through a drafty wooden window.
From next door came an auntie's loud voice: “Shuyu, don't cry. A girl is precious too. Raise her well, and she'll still call you Mom!”
In her arms was her newborn daughter, impossibly soft: the second child who, in her previous life, had been left with her parents when Lin Shuyu went to the city to work with her husband, and who eventually grew estranged from her.
Beside her lay the five hundred yuan her husband had just left behind, crumpled beside a train ticket to the south.
Holding the daughter she'd lost and regained, Lin Shuyu couldn't stop her tears.
To hell with working in the city, and to hell with being a dutiful wife and mother.
This time, she wasn't leaving.
Here in the lively little town of the 1990s, she would use the hands that had only ever done housework to seize the opportunities of the times and build a future for herself and her daughters that didn't depend on anyone else.
