Chapter 2

My mom froze for a moment.

No one knows a daughter better than her mother, and she'd already thought the way I'd just acted was very strange.

So she asked, a little confused.

"Jenny, what's wrong?"

"Mom knows you don't want anything to happen to Dad, and that you've never liked Grandma, but Grandma is only doing this for our own good!"

"I saw it just now too. Grandma really only gave you a light little push—you threw yourself into it. Why would you do that?"

I really wanted to tell my mom everything.

To tell her that Iris Finch had been pleased with her from the very first day she came into the house—that she thought her kind, gentle, and pretty, easy to control, a perfect match for her disabled youngest son, Rhys Norris.

That my dad falling off the cliff was real, but the letter was fake.

She knew my father was badly hurt and wouldn't be home for another two weeks, so she deliberately had someone switch the letters. Then, using the sugar-water scheme, she'd make my mother brand herself an adulteress, and force her to marry Rhys for my sake!

My mother, right up until she died,

still believed she'd been so overcome with grief that she'd lost the memory of crawling into another man's bed. Especially after my father killed himself, she lived buried in regret, like a walking corpse.

But I'm little now. If I said I'd been reborn, my mom wouldn't believe me.

There'd been a man in the village once who claimed he could see the future just to get out of working the fields. He told it so convincingly, but not a single person in the village believed him—they insisted he was possessed, and in the end they made him eat manure a few times.

If I came out and said I'd been reborn,

my mom might well think I just couldn't bear to lose my dad, so I was seeing things. And once she had that thought, nothing I said afterward would ever get through to her.

I was getting anxious, until I saw the little mouthful of sugar water still left in the broken bowl on the ground—and just like that, I had an idea.

I quietly opened the door and carried in the big yellow cat that was sunning itself by the doorway. I let it lick a few mouthfuls of the sugar water. Even though it only licked a couple of times, the cat still wobbled and passed out.

At first my mom had no idea what I was doing.

But when she saw the cat pass out, she was badly frightened.

"Don't tell me your grandma wants to send the two of us off to keep your dad company?"

I shook my head and did my best to keep a child's tone.

"Mom, this isn't poison—it's a drug that makes you fall asleep."

"After the news of Dad's death came, people kept coming to the house, so when I got hungry I had to go to the kitchen for water myself. While I was drinking, I happened to hear Grandma telling my uncle that she was going to give you this sugar water so you'd fall asleep."

My mother is kind-hearted, so of course she couldn't imagine Iris's vicious idea.

So after thinking it over, she actually decided Iris meant well.

"Your grandma really is going to a lot of trouble for me."

"She's afraid my body won't hold up if I don't eat or drink or sleep, so she wants me to get some real rest."

I shook my head over and over, so anxious the tears were about to spill out.

"No!"

"Grandma said more than that."

"She said once you drink this and fall asleep, your shoes will get broken. And she said once your shoes are broken, the people who come to mourn Dad will see your ruined shoes, and then you'll have no choice but to marry my uncle."

"She also said that once you marry my uncle, she'll send me away to go be with my dad."

"So I'm certain Dad can't be dead. If he were, how could I ever be sent to go be with him!"