Getting Ready: Lord Cen and His Capable Wife

Three months into her marriage to Cen Yin, Jiang Gui felt more like a guest than a wife. They treated each other with polite courtesy, and their life together was as still as a pool of water, its course seemingly set. She had once thought this was how her whole life would be.

Things began to change when her younger brother-in-law brought home his mistress and demanded a divorce, plunging the whole family into chaos. For the first time, her quiet husband asked for her opinion. From joining forces to uncover the mistress's background to resolving the uproar over a cousin's marriage to a widow, they unexpectedly developed a wordless understanding through one “family matter” after another.

He began remembering the street snacks she liked, and she began to notice the care and thoughtfulness beneath her cold-faced husband's reserve. When floods struck Jiangnan, he led from the front to defend the riverbanks, and she rushed to the disaster zone despite the danger. When his achievements in flood control earned him an appointment as a county magistrate elsewhere, she replied without hesitation, “Husband and wife should stand together, through everything.”

Their three years away from the capital became a time that belonged to the two of them alone. From standing up to local bullies to solving cases together, from her discovering she was pregnant in a strange land to their daughter, Nian Nan, being born in Jiangnan, they turned an ordinary marriage contract into a deep love neither could live without.

They returned to the capital, where he was promoted and their friends and family found their own happiness. At their daughter's first birthday banquet, he took her hand and whispered, away from the guests, “Jiang Gui, meeting you in this life is my good fortune.”

Leaning against his shoulder, she watched their daughter toddle around the courtyard and suddenly remembered what she had thought on their wedding day. At last, she understood: the life she'd once believed would be the same from beginning to end held its best days still ahead, as they walked forward hand in hand.

(Arranged marriage to true love, love that grows over time, a gentle and gradual romance, everyday family life, husband and wife facing life together, one-on-one romance, happy ending)