The news was brought to Xie Yuzhang by Yan Shi, who requested an audience token to enter the palace. Since Xie Yuzhang had become Empress, she could no longer ride out of the city on a whim whenever she wished to see Lin Fei. The two of them communicated mostly through Yan Shi, passing brief verbal messages or exchanging written notes.

Yan Shi said, “It happened three days ago. For the past few days, Third Master has been over there managing everything and has been very busy. It was only today that he remembered to have me come to the palace and inform Your Majesty.”

Yan Shi’s life was very comfortable, and she was still young and had not weathered much hardship — a certain ingenuousness clung to her. Though she did her best to compose her features into an appropriately solemn expression as she spoke, the faint relief in the depths of her eyes could not escape Xie Yuzhang’s notice.

Xie Yuzhang inclined her head and said, “Understood. I will go see her now.”

Yan Shi looked startled and quickly said, “Fei Niang has us to look after her, Your Majesty need not trouble yourself—”

In Yan Shi’s mind, the Empress could hardly go wandering out of the palace at will, and certainly not for the sake of such a child.

But Xie Yuzhang said, “I have my own arrangements. Lady Lin need not concern herself.”

Yan Shi was taken aback.

Just moments before, when Yan Shi had first entered Danyang Palace, the Empress had still been calling her Third Sister-in-law — a title that acknowledged her as Lin Zi’s wife, and Lin Zi as Lin Fei’s third elder brother.

When all was said and done, the bond was rooted in Lin Fei herself.

Yet why had the tone shifted so suddenly…?

Yan Shi was uneasy, but Xie Yuzhang’s maidservants had already stepped forward, adopting the manner of escorting a departing guest, and Yan Shi had no choice but to complete her curtsy and take her leave in haste.

Xie Yuzhang left the palace in plain dress.

When she arrived at the Lin family estate, she needed no announcement. She went directly to Lin Fei’s room.

She lifted the curtain and stepped inside, and found Lin Fei seated on a couch beneath the window, silently watching the paper pane.

Sunlight filtered through the window, and within the air, countless motes of dust drifted slowly. The light fell across Lin Fei’s face, making her skin appear paler than usual, drained of some color it once had.

Xie Yuzhang paused in the doorway for a moment, then called softly, “A’Fei,” and walked toward her.

Lin Fei turned her face and looked at her. “You’re here,” she said.

Her brow was perfectly still. Her gaze was perfectly still.

In that moment, Lin Fei looked exactly as she had in their past life.

But that was impossible. Xie Yuzhang told herself firmly — this life was already different. Lin Fei had loved that child. She had seen it with her own eyes — Lin Fei holding the child in her arms, a warm, genuine smile on her face.

Yet Lin Fei was so utterly still that Xie Yuzhang found she did not know how to offer comfort. All her silver tongue and eloquence was completely useless before Lin Fei. She could only sit down across from her and keep her company in silence.

After a quiet moment in the room, Lin Fei said, “Don’t worry. I’m fine.”

Xie Yuzhang looked at her steadily.

Lin Fei said, “He burned with fever for several days. The physician warned from the beginning that it was dangerous. In the end he didn’t pull through. I had already prepared myself in my heart.”

She fell silent for a moment, then slowly continued, “My elder brother has been consoling me constantly. He assumed I would be utterly heartbroken…”

It was Xie Yuzhang who now came close to heartbreak.

Because she could not bear to see Lin Fei like this — so detached. She had believed that in this life, because Lin Fei had met Gao Da Lang and borne a child she had truly chosen and wanted for herself, she would no longer be as she had been before — a living person, yet missing something somewhere inside, a person from whom the very sensation of being alive could not quite be felt.

“I truly don’t know how to explain it to my brother,” Lin Fei said. “The physician warned us it was unlikely he would survive. I had been bracing myself, and when it happened, it happened as it was always going to — so I accepted it, quite naturally… And yet, if I say that plainly, I begin to sound like some sort of monster. What kind of mother loses a child and is not devastated beyond all bearing?”

Xie Yuzhang heard these words and for a long time could not find her voice. She finally understood she had been wrong about something — she had believed that the missing piece in Lin Fei’s soul was the result of the suffering Lin Fei had endured on the steppe on her behalf.

But this life had altered Lin Fei’s fate from the very beginning, and yet she was still the same.

It had always been this way with Lin Fei. Xie Yuzhang simply had not recognized it before.

Lin Fei studied Xie Yuzhang’s eyes carefully. After a long while, she let out a slow breath of deep relief.

“Zhuzhu,” she said, “you truly understand me. I knew you would.”

Xie Yuzhang’s lips moved slightly, but in the end she only lowered her gaze in silence and asked, “What do you plan to do from here?”

Xie Yuzhang and Lin Zi had, in fact, arranged things carefully.

From the time Lin Fei had been abducted by Gao Da Lang, Lady Lin of the Earl of Guangping had continuously been ill and recuperating in the country. More than a year later, Lady Lin of the Earl of Guangping had, citing a severe illness, formally petitioned to dissolve the marriage. The Lin and Yang families had parted on amicable terms, proceeding by mutual agreement rather than by formal repudiation, and the two households had not severed contact afterward — they still visited on festivals and holidays, as though they were relatives.

People merely sighed that Yang Er Lang and Lady Lin, such an enviable couple, had not met a good end. But both the Lin and Yang families came out of it with their reputations intact — many even praised the Yang family for their decency and compassion, and families began to seek Yang sons as husbands for their daughters. Yang family sons suddenly became very much in demand.

As for the former Lady Lin of the Earl of Guangping, who had voluntarily sought the dissolution of the marriage on grounds of serious illness, she too was praised for her virtue and sense of propriety.

And so Lin Fei’s life as a Lin family daughter was still one that could go on.

Even the child had been given a careful plan by Lin Zi. Once the boy was a little older — two or three years old — he could be formally adopted into the Lin family as a way of continuing the family line.

But all the arrangements that Lin Zi and Xie Yuzhang had made were premised, first and foremost, on the belief that Lin Fei regarded the child as the anchor and purpose of the rest of her life.

And yet… it seemed they had both been wrong.

Lin Fei answered, “I’m still thinking it over. My elder brother wants me to come home, but I haven’t decided yet.”

Xie Yuzhang thought of the faint relief she had glimpsed in Yan Shi’s eyes.

Lin Fei’s actions had defied every convention and had truly betrayed Yang Huaishen’s wholehearted devotion to her. Even Li Gu had condemned her coldness. Yan Shi, as a Lin family wife and Lin Fei’s own sister-in-law, had no choice but to care for Lin Fei and help conceal the truth — but that did not mean she could accept or embrace what Lin Fei had done.

In this world, perhaps only Lin Zi and Xie Yuzhang could accept Lin Fei for what she was and genuinely, from the heart, be willing to protect her.

Because no one else had lived through what they had lived through, and so no one else could understand what they understood.

Xie Yuzhang straightened and said with quiet gravity, “A’Fei, I wish to offer you the post of Head Palace Supervisor of the Central Palace, to oversee the Six Bureaus and Twenty-Four Departments of the inner court. What do you say?”

Lin Fei looked at Xie Yuzhang steadily, then lowered her eyes in thought.

The answer she finally gave left Xie Yuzhang speechless — she declined.

“No. I don’t want to enter the palace, and I don’t want to take on this position,” she said.

Faced with Xie Yuzhang’s astonishment, she smiled faintly and said, “I know how you’re thinking.”

“Women in this world cannot escape the fate of marriage and childbearing. Those few who do not follow that path must face incomprehension and censure from all around them. Becoming a palace official is the only way a woman can separate herself from her father’s clan and her husband’s clan — the most respectable, most fitting place for a woman like me to go.”

“But, Zhuzhu,” Lin Fei said, “the palace is not a place I wish to go.”

The position Xie Yuzhang had named was the very best she could offer Lin Fei as Empress. If even this Lin Fei refused, Xie Yuzhang was at a loss — she truly did not know where Lin Fei could go or what she could do.

Lin Fei turned her head and watched the motes of dust drifting in the shaft of sunlight, then looked back at her and asked, “Zhuzhu, you have always concealed so many things about your past life and refused to tell me. I want to ask you — in that past life of yours, was I equally cold and unfeeling toward my own child?”

“In the past life, when Ashina Wuwei sent you to Jiang Jingye, you left your children without a moment’s hesitation, without the slightest reluctance, and followed me.” Xie Yuzhang closed her eyes and opened them again. “I had believed that in this life, you would not do the same…”

Lin Fei nodded slowly, a look of comprehension settling over her face. “As I thought.”

She was quiet for a long while, then said, “Over these years, I have pieced together bits and fragments from things you’ve let slip — glimpses of my past self. Zhuzhu, you must understand what it is like to look at yourself from the outside and see what you truly are, what that does to a person.”

Xie Yuzhang had been watching herself for twelve years. How could she not know?

From that vantage point, you can see with perfect clarity every weakness, every failure, every smallness within yourself. All the shadows you once could not face, all the justifications you once had for them, are thrown into a light that leaves nowhere to hide.

“Looking at my past self that way — with such unfamiliar clarity — I gradually came to understand what kind of person I truly am.” Lin Fei spoke slowly. “Zhuzhu, do you know? I am a person who has spent her whole life searching for a place to belong.“

Xie Yuzhang looked at her steadily and asked, “What would that place look like?”

Lin Fei said, “You’ve asked precisely the right question — because I don’t know myself.”

“You want me to enter the palace, yet you don’t know that the palace is not a place I look back on with any warmth. I was not happy during the time I spent in Zhaoxia Palace before.” She paused. “Back then, in my heart, I had made Zhaoxia Palace my place to belong. I threw myself into managing it, keeping busy every day. I competed with your head nurses and supervisors for things to do, trying to take charge of everything around you, wanting to look after you so completely that you could never do without me. I imagined that when you eventually left the palace to open your own household, your princess’s residence would be my place to belong.”

“It was simply that I had not foreseen the sudden turn of fate — you were to be sent to Mobei as part of a marriage alliance. You entrusted me to Er Lang, but the Yang household and Er Lang were not where I belonged. My worth in this life lay in repaying you, in fulfilling my honor as a Lin family daughter. I had decided that my place to belong was with you — and so I used starvation as a weapon to force your hand, and followed you to Mobei.”

“In my past life, my thinking must have been exactly the same. To go to Mobei and keep you company. To suffer with you, to bear pain beside you. To give this life to you and take my own sense of righteousness from it. That, too, was a kind of belonging. My past self was so cold toward her children not only because they were not born of a love between me and someone I cherished, but more so because my place to belong was not with them. Looking at my past self that way — I see it all with such painful clarity.”

“Only in this life, you gave me no such opportunity. During eight years in Mobei, I lived entirely under the shelter of your protection. I had no place to belong. And then the Lin family was restored to prominence at court, and I thought — perhaps my family could be my place to belong. But everyone hoped I would marry. In their eyes, a woman was only complete once she was married. A woman’s birth family was not her place to belong.”

“So I believed that marriage was to be my place to belong. Among those who came to seek my hand, I chose Er Lang — in truth because he was the best choice available to me. The Lin and Yang families joining together, watching over each other — I thought that was what it meant for a Lin family daughter to find her place. “

“But later I realized that my brother did not need me to do that for him. What he intended to do, he was perfectly capable of doing on his own. What he truly wanted was for me to be happy, and the responsibilities I felt I owed — he simply wanted to bear all of them himself.”

“Had it been only that, perhaps I could have lived well enough as the Lady of the Earl of Guangping — companionable toward my husband, raising his children. In truth those things were simple enough to do. But the irony is that just when I had resolved to live out my life that way, Gao Da Lang came and took me away. In the moment he abducted me, my marriage was already over. That was not my place to belong either.”

“Jumping into the heart of the Sishui River — that would have been a perfect place to belong. I would have left behind a name for faithfulness and integrity. As a Lin family daughter and a Yang family wife, I would have been remembered through the ages. My debt of gratitude to you would have been repaid in full, and I would have owed nothing more. How fitting that would have been.”

“But that foolish young man from the Gao family insisted on pulling me back. And again I had no place to belong. That young man was someone destined to die, who could only die — he was never going to be my place to belong. All my life I had been living according to what this world demands of a person — toward my benefactor, toward my family, toward my husband, I did what I was supposed to do, what was right and proper. Only when I reached that point, knowing that Gao Da Lang could never be where I belonged, did I finally break free of all of it, and allow myself one moment of recklessness.”

“The child was an unexpected blessing. Er Lang and I had been married a full year without a pregnancy — I had assumed I was not one to conceive easily. And yet somehow I had conceived with Gao Da Lang. In that moment I felt: I had been searching all this time, and here was my place to belong at last.”

“I believed the child would be my place to belong, and I loved him truly, with great joy. But it seems it was only a misunderstanding. Heaven took him from me to make me understand — I was never meant to pin the meaning of my existence on a child.”

Xie Yuzhang asked, “Then what do you want for your future? Tell me, and I will do everything in my power to help you achieve it.”

“I haven’t decided yet,” Lin Fei said. “Only I’ve been wanting to ask — in your past life, your past self eventually came to see you as her final place to belong, and yet you left her first. So what did she do, after you were gone?”

She and I had grown so accustomed to depending on each other. When I was gone, how did she go on alone?

Xie Yuzhang felt as though a thousand arrows had pierced her heart.

Because in the end, it was she who had left first. And after that, what had become of Lin Fei?

Had she gone to marry someone? Had she borne children? Had she served her parents-in-law and her husband? Had she gone on enduring Yunjing’s pointing fingers and malicious speculation, carrying the name of a Lin family daughter?

No matter which of those futures she tried to imagine, Xie Yuzhang found she could not.

Lin Fei looked at her steadily for a long while, then rose and bowed to her. “I haven’t yet decided what to do or where to go from here. But my from here is no longer something Your Majesty need concern herself with.”

Xie Yuzhang let her tears fall.

Lin Fei straightened and said, “Only I still want to ask Your Majesty to look at me for a moment — for Your Majesty is certain to see yourself in me. You and I are very much alike.”

“Only the difference between Your Majesty and me is this: I spend my life searching for a place to belong, while Your Majesty spends hers searching for freedom. And so my path grows narrower with every step, while Your Majesty’s grows ever wider.”

“Still, I find myself confused about one thing. Entering the palace to be Empress is the finest choice Your Majesty could have made in this life — power and him, both within your reach at once. Even so — has Your Majesty truly found freedom?”

Her gaze went directly to Xie Yuzhang. “I know something of the situation in the inner palace. It would be best if Your Majesty could give birth to a legitimate imperial son. If she cannot, the princes born of noble families may prove difficult to control in the future. I suspect that once His Majesty returns from this southern campaign, Your Majesty intends to advise him on selecting imperial consorts.”

Xie Yuzhang was silent for a moment, then said, “On the second day of our wedding, I had already raised it.”

Lin Fei looked surprised, then let out a quiet sigh. “Of course you had.”

“It wasn’t calculated,” Xie Yuzhang said. “At the time, something had just happened, and my heart was already in that place — so I gathered my courage and said it all at once, to spare myself from having to face it again later and suffer through it twice.”

Lin Fei said, “I thought Your Majesty would not have suffered at all.”

Xie Yuzhang said, “I am a human being.”

Lin Fei said, “In that respect, you truly are different from me. Then, Your Majesty — perhaps try living in the present moment.”

Xie Yuzhang said, “Then what of the future?”

Lin Fei said, “The present has already departed so far from what Your Majesty knew in your past life — how much more so the future. The future does not bend to Your Majesty’s will simply because she endures the present and plans against every contingency. If you are forever imprisoned by thoughts of the future, can you truly find freedom in this life?”

“Your Majesty, I have not yet decided where I will go or what I will do. But I have already decided to leave the capital. I am no longer the Lady of the Earl of Guangping, and I no longer wish to be a Lin family daughter. Even the name Lin Fei — I want to cast that aside too.”

“Your Majesty, recklessness may not always lead to good outcomes, but the feeling of it is truly something wonderful. I have never regretted it, not once.”

“Of course, that is only me. Your Majesty’s life is Your Majesty’s own to choose.”