"When we get off in a bit, you two stay right behind me. Once we’re in the city, keep yourselves composed. Don’t go looking like you’ve never seen the world."

The women’s federation cadre in the front seat turned halfway around. Her voice was calm, not loud, but she meant every word.

"This is New China now, a new age. You’ve come down from the mountain and returned to ordinary life, so let the old stuff stay in the past. Don’t keep living with the mind of a nun."

"At the social mixer, if you see a male comrade you like the look of, just go up and speak to him. Don’t be shy and don’t act all awkward. There’s no need to hide anything either. Just tell him your situation plainly, exactly as it is."

"If both sides think it’s a good match, I can settle it for you right there on the spot!"

"Remember this: you’re no different from any other ordinary city folk. You should eat when it’s time to eat, drink when it’s time to drink, laugh when you want to laugh, cry when you need to cry. Those are all things a person ought to have in life."

The car rolled along at an unhurried pace. Every so often the cadre turned back again and said a few more words. She talked a lot, but somehow it wasn’t annoying to listen to.

In the back seat sat two young women. Both wore dark nun’s robes, and both had shaved heads smooth and bare. One look was enough to tell they had come straight out of a convent.

One had her eyes closed and didn’t say a word. No one could tell whether she was really asleep or only pretending.

The other looked as if she had just jolted awake from a nightmare. Her eyes flew open. Lost and dazed, she first swept her gaze around the inside of the car, then finally fixed it on the endlessly talking woman comrade.

Slowly, she lifted a hand and touched her bare scalp. She felt it once, then again, and yet again, as if she had to make sure. A storm of emotion rose in her eyes at once—shock, confusion, and a wild joy she could hardly keep down.

Celeste Vance had never imagined this.

She had actually been reborn.

Back to the very day she and her junior sister left the convent together.

In her last life, the sisters in the convent had gone down the mountain one after another and returned to secular life. Those senior sisters who had taken vows halfway through life each had somewhere to go. They packed up their things and went back to their hometowns to seek out kin or old acquaintances.

Only she and her junior sister Rosemary Vance had nowhere at all to turn.

The two of them had been taken in by the convent when they were little. They knew nothing about where they had come from, nothing about their own families, and they could not even find a single relative to rely on. In the end, they had no choice but to go to the resettlement office and beg them to help think of something.

What the office offered was simple enough. They could arrange for the two girls to go down to the countryside, join a production team, and register their household in a nearby village. It was the year sixty-seven, and the movement sending educated youth up to the mountains and down to the villages was in full swing. Batch after batch of city young people slung bedrolls over their shoulders and headed for the countryside, talking about putting down roots at the grassroots and building the revolution.

She and her junior sister were eighteen and nineteen, about the same age as those young people being sent down.

For the time being, the resettlement office had no spare capacity to arrange city work or a place for them to stay. Seeing that things were heading that way, they were just about to hand the pair over to the educated youth office and send them off with the rest to settle in the villages.

Then, by sheer chance, right at that moment, the city women’s federation sent someone down to do publicity work and ran into this matter.

After hearing the full story of the two girls, that women’s federation leader thought to herself that these girls had grown up in a convent from childhood, with no parents, no family, no one to depend on. If they were really sent to the countryside, they would most likely be bullied so badly they would have no way to survive.

And with that thought, her heart softened.

So the women’s federation officer pointed them toward a different road.

The city women’s federation was putting together a youth mixer with the unions from several big factories. If the two of them were willing, they could go and try their luck. Maybe they’d meet a suitable man to marry.

If they married into the city, their household registration could be moved straight onto the husband’s side.

And once they had a city hukou, they’d get grain and oil coupons, draw their rations every month like clockwork, and wouldn’t have to go down to the countryside for rustication.

Celeste Vance had grown up scraping by in the nunnery. She was sick to death of that thin, bitter life already, let alone going off to the villages to spend the rest of her days as a dirt-poor field hand. The second she heard she might stay in the city and eat state grain, she agreed on the spot, not the least bit hesitant.

As for her junior sister, Rosemary Vance had always been timid, soft, and short on backbone. Back when the abbess was still around, she listened to whatever the abbess said. Now that the abbess was gone, she simply followed her senior sister around. Whatever Celeste said, she nodded and went along with it.

And so the two sisters, under the arrangements of the women’s federation officer, hurried into the city to attend matchmaking.

Right now, this was that critical moment: she and her junior sister were sitting on the bus into town with the federation officer. Thinking back to the twenty-odd bitter years after she married Lawrence Whitmore in her previous life, Celeste’s eyes dimmed little by little. Back then, she had compared, weighed, and picked with great care before choosing Lawrence out of that whole batch of marriage prospects. Among them, his conditions had been the best by far.

He was a driver in the transport brigade of the machinery factory, one of the proper prized workers in a major plant. He made sixty or seventy yuan a month, and every so often he could take a long-haul trip and pocket a little extra on the side. He lived in a crowded courtyard compound, and plenty of families wanted to cozy up to him.

But what happened after that? She hadn’t even been married to him for half a year when Lawrence overturned his truck on a long-distance run. He kept his life, yes, but his right leg was ruined for good. Once he couldn’t drive anymore, how could the factory keep him on? They shoved him off to the scrap depot. From then on, he never got back on his feet, not in body, not in spirit.

Meanwhile that timid, spineless little junior sister of hers, Rosemary Vance, had been matched up by the women’s federation and the neighborhood office, muddle-headed and half pushed into marrying Aldred Gallagher, the layabout from the same courtyard.

At the time, Celeste had secretly broken into a cold sweat for her. Aldred spent his days loafing around, all swagger and no substance. What kind of good life could Rosemary possibly have after marrying him? But who would’ve thought it—once that man settled down, he changed like he was a different person. He turned over a new leaf, first going to the machinery factory and working steadily as an apprentice. Before long he became a regular worker, then even landed a job as a projectionist.

After that, he just kept climbing, one step after another, until he was transferred into the inspection office as a staff officer. His rise was so fast it was practically like riding a rocket. By the time Celeste was reborn, that fellow had already climbed into a top leadership post at the district level.

Rosemary rose right along with him. In one leap she became the sort of leader’s wife that made everybody green with envy. Not only did she move into an apartment in the cadres’ family compound, she even opened her own flower shop. The flowers she raised were so popular that society ladies and rich wives lined up to buy them. Her days were lively, polished, and full of style.

The two of them had grown up in the same place since childhood. Their starting point had been exactly the same. Yet in just a little over ten years, their fates had split so far apart it was heaven and earth.

The more she thought about it, the more jealousy and bitterness surged up from the bottom of her heart. Celeste could barely hold it down. She couldn’t stop herself from turning her head to look at Rosemary, who was leaning against the seat beside her, dozing.

At this age, Rosemary still hadn’t filled out. She still looked silly and dull in that same old way. Eighteen years old already, yet there was barely any flesh on her bones. She was thin as a bean sprout, exactly like some fifteen- or sixteen-year-old little girl.

Then Celeste thought of herself. She was taller than Rosemary, prettier than Rosemary, and far sharper and smoother in both speech and conduct.

All those years in the nunnery, whether it was sitting in meditation, chanting sutras, copying scripture and practicing calligraphy, or cooking rice and sweeping floors, in what had she ever not outdone Rosemary?

But what did it matter?

In the end, after all her scheming, she still wound up with nothing.

Rosemary Vance, that silly girl, had never once planned her life properly. She never even cared who she married, just let other people decide it for her. And yet in her last life, muddling along like that, she still ended up beating Celeste and living the kind of life that made people green with envy.

Why?

Why did Rosemary get to live in comfort, eating well, dressing well, treated like she was precious, while Celeste had to claw around in the mud, trapped in a rotten life, never able to hold her head up?

In the end, wasn’t it all because she had chosen the wrong man in the first place? Since heaven had given her another shot, wasn’t that the same as handing her a chance to change her fate?

As long as she switched her marriage with Rosemary’s, then in this life she could still live in style, still become someone respectable, and she would do even better than Rosemary ever had.

By then, she would stand high above and look down at Rosemary the way one looked at an ant underfoot.

And when Rosemary was finally crushed by that miserable life, so worn down she could hardly breathe, Celeste would smile and toss her some lowly bit of work, then stand there and watch Rosemary and that whole family tear at each other and fight like dogs over a scrap of profit.

Just picturing that scene made Celeste’s heartbeat pick up. Her eyes gleamed with fierce determination.

Aldred Gallagher—she was going to have him, no matter what.