Winter, 1976.
After breakfast, a bunch of old women had gathered by the village entrance, sitting in the sun and chattering away without a pause.
That spot was the village’s news post. Any little stir, any scrap of gossip, always spread from there first.
Nobody knew who started it.
"Hey, have you heard? Walter Harrington’s second girl lost her mind this morning. First thing after dawn, she flipped the breakfast table, grabbed a rolling pin, and smashed the whole house to bits."
"Molly isn’t the eldest girl now. The eldest is the one that stepmother brought in, Evelyn Harrington. Just look at the way Walter treats Evelyn—warmer than he’s ever treated Molly. Anybody who didn’t know better would think Evelyn was his own flesh and blood, and Molly was the one raised by a stepmother."
"I say she did right. Good for her, flipping that table. Good for her, smashing things too. That family’s getting what’s coming to them. We’re not blind, are we? Just look at that poor girl. A perfectly fine daughter, and they’ve worn her down into this. Didn’t the old folks always say it? Once there’s a stepmother, there’s a stepfather too. It’s only been two years, and that fair, clean little girl’s turned skinny as firewood. I’m just an outsider, and even I can’t bear to look at it."
"That child Molly’s always been a good one. Pretty face, hardworking hands, never lazy a day in her life. Just born under a hard star. Her own mother died too early to protect her, her real father’s a fool, and that stepmother’s got a vicious heart."
"That’s true enough. But after making this kind of scene, life for that girl at home’s only going to get worse. Won’t they torment her even harder now? Ah... she used to smile all day long. Now you don’t see a trace of a smile on her face."
"Come on now, Auntie Mercer, keep your voice down. If that poisonous woman hears you, she’ll come looking for trouble."
At that, Auntie Mercer slapped the shoe sole she was stitching with a sharp smack, her face full of defiance. "Let her hear. You think I’m scared of her? If she’s got the nerve to do it, why shouldn’t people talk? I’d say the same thing right in front of her face."
For a while, everybody talked over everybody else, each one speaking up for Molly Harrington.
That was a rare thing in the village.
Usually when the old women got together to chat, they’d end up arguing sooner or later. They always had to outtalk one another, had to settle who was right and who was wrong, till their faces turned red and nobody would back down.
The side that won would carry her little stool home grinning from ear to ear, so pleased she could eat an extra bowl at supper. The one that lost would stew over it all evening, saving up her strength and waiting to win back face the next day.
But this time it was different. Every last one of them stood on Molly Harrington’s side.
That alone showed how much the people in the village pitied the girl.
Molly Harrington, Walter Harrington’s second daughter.
Everything those old women at the village entrance were talking about today was about her.
At that very moment, she was sitting on the edge of the bed in her own room, her face so dark it made people shiver. She looked like some vengeful ghost clawing its way back from the underworld, with a savage chill coming off her from head to toe.
That morning at breakfast, she had turned the house upside down and finally torn things apart with her father and stepmother.
There was no going back now.
Then again, she had never planned to go back in the first place.
Outside, her father and her stepmother were still cursing and carrying on. Listening to their voices, Molly Harrington felt a sorrow rise in her chest so heavy it was hard to put into words.
That was right—Molly Harrington had been reborn.
How had she died in her last life? She had been tortured until she barely looked human, then died in a winter so bitter it felt like it could freeze the marrow out of your bones.
After she died, she did not even get a proper burial. They wrapped her in a torn straw mat and tossed her straight into the wasteland behind the mountain. They did not even bother digging her a grave.
She was only thirty-five when she died. At five foot eight, she had wasted away to barely eighty or ninety pounds, nothing left but skin stretched over bones. More than a dozen bones in her body were broken. Her whole body was covered in bruises, purple and blue, not one patch of skin unhurt. She had been beaten to death.
After she died, Walter Harrington came to the door saying he wanted justice for her. But what did he really want? Money. The other side handed him a few hundred yuan, and he took it and left, saying he would not pursue the matter anymore.
And her soul drifted back and forth between her corpse and that room where they had locked her up for three whole days. Even after death, her spirit could still feel that bone-deep pain.
She watched her own father stand there talking to the people who had ruined her life. Hatred burned inside her so fiercely she wanted to claw her way back from the underworld, drag every one of them down with her, and make them taste that same living hell.
But she could do nothing. Again and again, she could only watch helplessly as she passed right through their bodies. Three days later, she saw with her own eyes as a pack of wolves tore her corpse apart bite by bite, until only a few bones were left behind... and only then was it truly over.
Her consciousness slowly blurred. She had no idea how much time passed. Then, by her ear, she heard broken, faint sounds of prayer. She snapped her eyes open—and found herself back at this morning.
It took Molly Harrington nearly a full hour before she could finally believe that she had truly been reborn.
And of all times, she had come back to this exact moment.
This day—the one she regretted even in her dreams, the one she could not forget even in death—was the very beginning of her nightmare.
She was angry, heartbroken, and so choked up inside she could barely breathe. She cried for a long while. But after she finished crying, she actually felt lighter, as if she had finally been allowed one good breath.
Clenching her teeth, she swore to herself with cold, bitter resolve: I’m alive again. All of you who bullied me, who ruined me—just wait.
This time, no matter what, she would never swallow her anger and suffer in silence the way she had in her last life.
The people who hurt her, the pain she endured, the misery she suffered—she would pay it all back, piece by piece, without leaving out a single bit.
That useless father of hers, along with her stepmother, were two of the main culprits behind the miserable life she had lived before.
On this very day in her last life, under Violet Harrington’s coaxing and stirring, Walter Harrington had arranged a marriage for her.
The man was a middle-aged widower whose wife had died just a year earlier—a village butcher who had already buried three wives. He was also one of the chief devils who had made her last life worse than death.
Butch Langford!
Back then, she had fought like mad. No matter what anyone said, she would not marry him.
She was only seventeen, a high school graduate, still young, still with a whole life ahead of her.
Why should she be shoved at a widower in his thirties, a man who had already buried three wives? And on top of that, there had long been someone else in her heart...
But her father had already taken five hundred yuan in bride price from that family, thumping his chest and promising he would deliver her over no matter what.
She refused to the bitter end. And yet tonight, that man who called himself her father, together with her stepmother, had actually slipped something into her food and drugged her senseless...
Then, under cover of the dead of night, the two of them loaded her onto a flatbed cart and hauled her straight to that devil's house...
From that night on, her days had not been fit for a human being.
She had endured that kind of life for nineteen whole years.
At the thought of it, Molly Harrington ground her teeth so hard her jaw ached.
If she had not been caught off guard, if she had not been tricked into drinking that bowl of drugged porridge, then dragged to the widower's house and locked up with iron chains, shut inside and never allowed out, fed only a few miserable mouthfuls a day until hunger left her too weak to stand, maybe—just maybe—she might have found a chance to escape.
This morning, while eating, she had kept all that fury pressed down in her chest. She did not even dare lift her head to look at the man sitting across from her, the one everyone called her father, because she was afraid she would lose control and throw herself at him.
In this life, she would never again let herself be tied down by some so-called bond between father and daughter. Blood is thicker than water? What a joke.
When the time came to strike, she would not soften, not for a second!!
From now on, in this world, the only people left in her heart were her dead mother, her grandmother, her uncle's family... and him.
As for Walter Harrington, even if he dropped dead right in front of her, she would not so much as blink.
At the table, she kept her face blank, lifted her bowl, and spooned the porridge into her mouth one bite at a time. It was cornmeal porridge, with a few chunks of sweet potato cooked in it, and half a cabbage stir-fried on the side. That was breakfast for today.
She had gotten up early to make it for the whole family. By the time she came back to life, the meal was already sitting in the pot.
Molly Harrington remembered this breakfast too clearly. It had turned over in her mind countless times, so many that even if she wanted to forget it, she simply could not.
In her last life, this breakfast had been the final meal she ever ate.
Ever since Walter Harrington and Violet Harrington handed her over to that beast, Molly Harrington had never had what anyone could call a proper breakfast again.
And that "good father" of hers had even gone out of his way to warn them, saying she was strong and they mustn’t ever let her eat her fill...
What a joke. Sometimes Molly Harrington truly couldn’t figure out whether Walter Harrington was really her father at all.
If he was, then how could he do something so rotten, so shameless?
Then again, whether he was her real father or not didn’t matter anymore.
