After my husband consolidated the dual-branch inheritance, he took his sister-in-law and her two children to the capital to build a new life.
My daughter and I survived on wild greens we foraged ourselves, waiting for him in that freezing hovel for five long years.
The only news that ever came was that he'd inherited the Eastholm marquess title.
I carried my daughter a thousand miles to find him, and the guards at the gate beat us with wooden clubs like we were vagrants.
"Showing up at the Marquess's estate claiming to be family? You must be tired of living. Don't you know how our Lady deals with hussies who come sniffing around?"
I lay in a heap of my own blood. "...Lady?"
When I lifted my head, I could just make out Edith Henson in the distance, dressed like a noblewoman, her two children raised as the young lord and lady of the house.
Edith greeted us with a warm smile and set out a plate of pastries. They were laced with poison.
My daughter was starving. She wolfed down a piece and dropped dead on the spot.
I choked up a mouthful of black blood. As the world dimmed, I heard Edith's vicious laugh cutting through the haze.
"Narelle Donaldson, you should never have come here to disrupt our household. Finn has treated me as his wife for years. If you showed up alive, how was I supposed to go on being the Lady of this house?!"
My daughter and I died like dogs. They rolled our bodies in reed mats and dumped us in a mass grave.
After I was gone, Finn wrapped his arms around a weeping Edith and murmured comfort against her hair.
"She's dead. Let it go. Even if she'd lived, I would've handed her divorce papers and told her to stay away from our family."
The meal I'd once given a starving stranger, the vows he'd sworn under open sky, all of it erased from his memory as though it had never existed.
I died with hatred lodged so deep it followed me into the dark. When my eyes opened again, it was the very day Finn inherited the title.
I threw the wild greens from my hands, sold the house for every coin it was worth, and carried my daughter to my father's ducal estate, where I fell to my knees.
"Father, I've decided to divorce my husband."
——
In my previous life, the moment I heard Finn had become the Marquess of Eastholm, I bundled up my daughter and traveled a thousand miles to find him. Edith killed us both with poisoned pastries.
My last thought before the darkness took me was regret. Not for dying, but for severing ties with my father, the Duke of Northwall, all for the sake of marrying Finn Acevedo.
This time, the moment I opened my eyes, I sold the house, packed what little money it brought, and set out for the capital.
But I was not going to the Eastholm estate.
I told the driver to take the long way around, and the carriage rolled to a stop before the gates of the Donaldson Ducal Estate.
The driver took one look at us, my daughter and me in our threadbare rags, shuffling toward the duke's gates like a pair of beggars, and let out a snort.
"Takes all kinds. Now even beggars have the nerve to show up at the Duke's door claiming to be family."
I ignored him. I took Hildegarde James's small hand in mine, walked to the gate, and knelt.
"Father. Your daughter knows she was wrong."
My father was the Duke of Northwall, the most powerful lord on the northern frontier. My mother had been a princess of the Kingdom of Valdoria.
I was born the Duchess of Ashford, raised in silk and silver. Then one spring, on a country outing near Greenshire, I stumbled upon Finn Acevedo, the discarded second son of the James family.
His brothers had been tearing each other apart over the family inheritance, and he'd nearly been killed in the crossfire. They broke his leg and left him in a ditch.
I felt sorry for him. So I saved his life.
Then, sharing those cramped country rooms day after day, I fell in love with him.
When I swore I would marry Finn and no one else, my father was furious. His voice went cold as iron.
"If you marry that man, I no longer have a daughter."
Finn swore to the heavens he would cherish me for the rest of his life.
I stripped off my silks and jewels, put on a plain cotton dress, and became his wife.
And over the years, lulled by his sweet words repeated day after day, I withered into a gaunt, hollow-eyed village woman.
I never imagined that within five or six years, every one of his elder brothers would die, and the Eastholm estate would offer Finn the title on a single condition: accept the dual-branch inheritance, and the marquessate was his.
Once he became the Marquess, he simply slotted Edith into the role of his wife and raised her children as his own.
By the time I dragged myself to his door, Finn had long since forgotten that my daughter and I existed.
