"Go on. Your blessing is waiting for you."
The next day, I walked away on my own, alive at last.
Yet a year later, while traveling up north, I saw her again. She was begging on the street.
Her face was slashed, her limbs broken. She was freezing to death on the sidewalk.
She grabbed my hand, sobbing, her voice shaking with cold and misery. "Blessing my ass. That bastard only treated me like a breeding machine. He said his lover was born infertile. He stole my kid, didn't give me a penny, and threw me back up north to beg."
The moment she finished speaking, she died.
When I opened my eyes again, in my third life, I was back on the night Samuel had been drugged.
As I stared at the doors of the other sixteen mistresses, the first love and I shared the same dreadful thought:
'Which one of us is the woman who can't have children?'
——
Inside the room, Samuel was groaning nonstop like a tomcat in heat. No matter how loudly he called, Rhian and I clung to the doorknob as if guarding our virtue in some over-the-top melodrama.
It wasn't until Evelyn heard the commotion that she marched over, dragging all sixteen other mistresses with her.