Suzhou, 1925.
The Shen family’s weaving workshop had been run for three generations. Under Shen Huaizhou, it was transformed from a government-run weaving bureau into a private business. But when he suddenly died of illness, his only daughter, Shen Zhiwei, was thrust into the spotlight.
She had only two things: a gift for weaving that let her remember anything she saw, a talent her father had hidden for her and that she could never admit to anyone; and three months. The Beiyang Government’s deadline for paying tribute silver was counting down. If she couldn’t raise the money, the authorities would seize the workshop.
Her second uncle, Shen Zhongyuan, brought her a document offering to relinquish his authority. Sign it, and he would deal with the authorities for her. Refuse…
She wrote a line on the payment notice and had it delivered to the Beiyang Office. It didn’t say, “Please grant us an extension.” It said: “The tribute silver will be paid. But the Shen family will pay no more after this.”
The day those words got around, her second uncle stood outside the window and smiled. He turned to the young man beside him and said, “She’s finally starting to make mistakes.”
That young man was Gu Muyan, her father’s trusted assistant. Her cousin, whom she had secretly relied on as a girl. On the third day after her father died, he had crouched beside her and whispered, in a voice only she could hear, “Don’t be afraid. I’m here.”
And her fiancé, Lu Jianshen, was the young master of the Suzhou Lu family, a graduate of the new-style commerce program at the Imperial University in Beijing, and the guarantor for the Shen family’s tribute silver. Every time he helped her, he came one step closer to crossing his father’s line.
The people she had to fight weren’t just Japanese trading houses trying to steal technology and traditionalists who resented a woman running the family business. She also had to face the person her family loved most.
Only at the very end would she discover the truth:
She believed she wasn’t of the Shen bloodline, and her second uncle had told her the same.
But her father’s letter said: Zhiwei is my biological daughter. Zhongyuan is not.
Everything he had fought for all this time had never belonged to him.
