My husband kept his first love in his heart, and I never complained.
Not until I knelt in the snow for three days and three nights, begging him to look at our daughter just once, only for him to step over me with his first love in his arms. That was when I finally understood: he didn’t love me, and he didn’t care one bit about the child I’d borne him.
Later, when enemy forces surrounded the city, I fled with my young daughter. In the ruins, he found my journal, half burned. Its pages were filled with every laugh, every frown, and every name he’d called out in his drunkenness over the past ten years.
He chased me to the border at all costs and knelt beneath the endless snowfall, begging me to turn back.
I lowered my eyes to the daughter in my arms and said softly, “Pei Yan, you’re too late.”
