Sweet Romance11 min read
A Second Life, a Lucky Carp, and the Red Ribbon Box
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I wake up to the sound of a baby’s crying and a damp, earthy smell. My throat is raw, my body thin and hollow like a dried gourd. I try to speak and only a cracked breath comes out.
“Harriet, you’re awake?” a soft voice says. It’s a voice that tugs at something deep and stubborn inside me.
“Who—” I start and stop, then the memory hits me like cold water. The hospital office, the mid-level doctor’s face, the broken things I left behind. The coughing fit. The man who came in late and said, “I’m her husband,” and held me like everything in the world still mattered.
I sit up and the tiny room spins. A small head turns and screams again. I reach out without thinking and my finger finds a tiny fist.
“He’s so small—” I whisper, and the name that rises is one I hadn’t meant to say aloud for years.
“Harriet,” the man says, voice rough and sharp with something like old kindness. “I’m here.”
The voice is not the ruined face I remembered from the last time I lay dying. It’s clean and warm and young, like early sun. Tears burn my eyes. I clutch the small child and close them both in, feeling absurd and fierce and small.
The room smells of old blankets and herbs. A woman with patched clothes moves quietly, rocking the baby. “She hasn’t much milk,” she says. “I’ll make some rice water.”
“Which day is it?” I ask, because the calendar in my chest seems to have been turned to a long-vanished year.
“June eighteenth,” she answers. “You’re two weeks postpartum, child. Rest.”
“Where is Chance?” I ask, voice cracking.
She looks at me with worry. “He went to the hills to hunt. He always goes when the house is thin. Don’t worry.”
My hand goes cold on the baby’s back. Three decades worth of memory tumble: the bad choices, the leaving, the shame, the nights I told myself I deserved less. Then the stone in my chest—the day he never returned, the stone that took his leg and my heart.
I clench my jaw so hard my teeth ache. I will not let that happen again.
“Harriet,” a mechanical voice echoes in my head like a radio from nowhere, sharp and calm. “Achievement triggered: Perfect Life Reset. Reward: Lucky Carp Blessing. Gift pack delivered.”
I swallow. The life I thought I lost has been unpicked and thrown back together like a badly repaired doll. A yellow box with a red ribbon blooms behind my eyes. When I touch it, a list spills into my head: a ten-by-ten space, three jars of wound salve, one bone-mending plaster, a childcare manual, a medicinal cookbook, plus an encyclopedia of cooking and healing into my thoughts.
“System: Congratulations. You have unlocked Master-class Culinary skill and Master-class Medical skill. Temporary buff: Luck - Carp.” The voice is deadpan. I laugh because there’s no other sound to make.
Outside, someone calls. A boy’s voice then several men’s. “She’s awake!” The door bangs.
I pull the blanket tighter around my shoulders and stand, wavering. “Please,” I say to the room, “go find him. Tell them to come now.”
The older woman nods as if I had suggested a common-sense thing. “I’ll call your brothers.”
“Thank you,” I say, and I mean it.
A little later, the yard fills with faces I know and faces I only half-recognize. Chance is carried in, bleeding, his leg swollen. At first I think I am dreaming, then I see the red and the dirt and the way his face goes slack with pain.
“Get him inside,” I say, surprising myself with how decisive I sound.
They follow. Someone brings hot water, someone a worn cloth, someone—two men—go out to fetch whatever alcohol the village keeps for cleaning wounds. I open my little gift in the space behind my skull and take from it the white jars. One jar’s powder catches the light like salt. My hands tremble as I dust it into the wound. The flesh settles. The bleeding slows. I inhale, dizzy with a strange dissonance—those gifts were never meant for me.
Chance’s eyes drift open and find me. He blinks, startled, then smiles in a way that cracks open something inside me.
“You’re awake,” he says, voice thin.
“I am,” I whisper. “Don’t move. Rest.”
He laughs, a sound that is half-embarrassed, half-relieved. “You’re crying.”
“Because I was a fool,” I tell him. “And I won’t be a fool anymore.”
He only stares and then his grin melts into awkwardness. “Harriet,” he says, and his cheeks color. “Harriet, you—”
“Don’t make a fuss. Eat something.” I shove a simple sweet potato pancake into his hand and he eats like a starved child. The way his mouth folds around the food warms me more than the soups our neighbors bring.
The days that follow are a chorus of small, urgent tasks. I learn the rhythm of this household: which corner keeps the flour, which woman in the village has more eggs that week, when to ask for help. I listen to the system as it teaches me permalinks of recipes and sutures, grams and pulses.
“System: New item added. Gold-scar salve x3. Bone-graft plaster x1. Childcare manual x1. Medicinal recipes x1. Space 10×10m allocated.”
“Space?” I whisper. The void in my pocket fills like an invisible pocket I can put things into. It is absurdly practical. I tuck the jars away, and the knowledge settles in my head like bread in a hungering person’s belly.
Chance watches me in the kitchen a lot. He’s awkward in words but steady in ways that matter. “Do you need help?” he asks, and I see him measure the distance my hand moves, trying to match it.
“No,” I say. “But come here.”
He does, and the warmth from his body pulls my fingers. We pass a private hour built of quiet: fixing a wound, learning the curve of one another’s breath, exchanging a few clumsy jokes. I call him “husband” for the first time in years and his embarrassment is adorable.
“You called me—” he starts.
“I did,” I say. “So now we begin properly.”
*
The village breathes like a living thing. I begin to stitch our life back into something better than before. The system murmurs suggestions—how to make the sweet potato filling fluff even with just a pinch of sugar; how to mix cornmeal and potato for the right texture. I use my new skills to earn people’s smiles and, more importantly, their trust.
One afternoon a woman appears at the gate with a smile like a knife. Gabriela Xu sweeps into the yard like she owns the place. “Harriet!” she calls in the friendly tone I learned to accept as danger. “I haven’t seen you in weeks. Baby’s so pretty!”
I know her—everyone does. She was the friend who used to lean over me in school and whisper gossip into the ears of judges. She is the one who once sold me out, staged that night and those awful photographs. Back then, she wore a mask of helpfulness and a heart of cold calculations. I keep my face neutral because anger is a luxury I cannot afford.
“Gabriela,” I say, and my voice is small. “You came.”
“I brought a present.” She tosses a plastic box my way, all bright and cheerful. “From town. Isn’t that nice?”
I take it, but when her hand brushes mine I feel contempt like grain under myfoot. “Thanks,” I say and go inside.
She lingers too long. “We should talk,” she purrs. “You know, after all we’ve been through—”
“After what?” I ask sharply. “You mean after you sent me away?”
The smile becomes thin. “You exaggerate. It was a long time ago.”
“Not for me,” I say. The words are steady now. “Not for Chance. Not for our child. Don’t pretend.”
She gives a little laugh. “You’re still so dramatic. We were all young.”
“You tried to ruin my life,” I say. “You were part of the plan that almost killed me mentally, maybe physically. For what? For attention? For approval?”
People might have thought I would destroy her in private—call the town to punish her or carry on with a slow, rancorous fury. My life in the past ended that way. Not this time. I decide instead to let the village decide.
“Get out,” I tell Gabriela. “Leave the child alone. Leave Chance alone.”
She bristles. “Harriet, you can’t speak to me like that. I’ll talk to your husband—”
“You will not,” I interrupt. “You used me once. Nothing from you means what it used to mean.”
She spins, face flushing with sudden fury. “You think you can ban me?”
“You left me to die once,” I say, and now I have an audience. “You lied to the people who trusted me. You took more than you ever gave.”
A slow ripple crosses the yard. The neighbor women, who had been sorting herbs on the back bench, begin to look up. Chance, who is carrying a basin of cloth, freezes mid-step. I can feel every eye like a small weight.
“What is this?” Gabriela hisses, glancing for allies. “Do you have no shame? This is slander.”
I take a breath as if I’m inhaling a forest. Then I speak, but the words I choose are not only for her. They are an unspooling of the past, of truth. “You took my invitation to the old reunion,” I say quietly. “You made sure I was drunk. You had men waiting where you told me he would be. You took pictures and sold them. You told my father lies. You told the town I would run off with another man.”
Gasps scatter like leaves. “No—” Gabriela begins.
“You brought that man to the rented spot and left me,” I go on. “You said I’d run. You told my husband to look for me in the wrong place.”
“You can’t prove—” she starts.
“Watch.” I reach into my space and bring out a small, cheap camera I’d kept from that night as if it were a shard of glass. “This film holds your messages, your receipts from the bar, a letter you wrote to the man about the plan. You wanted me to be disgraced so you could climb.”
There’s a silence so thick someone brushes it with a broom for lack of anything lighter to do. I load the little camera into the old projector Chance’s brother had brought on market day years ago. The light flickers and then slides across the white wall of the granary.
Images spool: Gabriela laughing in the bar, texts to the man, the cassette of her voice saying, “Make sure she looks bad. I’ll take her money.” The faces in the yard tighten. Her poker face cracks.
“You—” she begins, then her voice shrivels. She walks to the edge of the crowd, but the crowd comes like tide. Neighbors step forward: women who once took her cakes; men who loaned her tools; boys who she used to boss.
“You did this?” someone says. A young mother, a woman whose husband once gave me a seed sack, now points.
Gabriela’s eyes dart. “It’s a lie!” she cries.
“Do you deny these?” I ask.
She opens her mouth and closes it, the way a trapped bird beats its wings against glass. Her denial dissolves thinly into a thousand scared excuses. “I—there were reasons,” she mutters.
The circle grows. “You sold her out,” an older woman says. “You have no place in this village.” A man starts recording with a new mobile phone he’d saved for the harvest market; children shout; someone starts singing old, cruel rhymes about traitors.
Gabriela’s expression shifts: from fury to surprise, to denial, to panic. The audience shifts too—first stunned, then hungry for retribution, then cold. They’ve been waiting for a signal for a long time.
“Look at me,” I say, voice soft. “Tell them why you did it.”
She stares at me as if I’m the last rope on a cliff. “You don’t understand,” she says weakly. “It was only once.”
“You broke my life,” I say. “You made me leave. You made him watch me become small. You stole my house money with lies. Tell the truth.”
She sobs. “I was jealous,” she whispers. “They all liked you. I wanted to be the one they looked at. I—”
The confession sprays out like water. The villagers stare, then murmur, then lean in. I let it happen. I do not aim to ruin her body or break her in the dark. I want her lies undone in the light.
“Since then, where have you gone?” asks Becker Wood, Chance’s eldest brother—Beckett Wood. “How many times have you told stories to other women to win favor? How much have you taken from other people’s shame?”
Gabriela’s face crumbles into a hundred ugly little pieces. “I—I took money,” she says. “I borrowed and didn’t repay.”
“You must repay,” someone says.
And that is where the village’s justice begins. They do not have laws like the city, no court, no distant judge. They have eyes and words and work. People start listing things: a cow borrowed and lost, seed saved and eaten, a night’s bread taken and never paid. Old scores surface. She had been careless with other hearts too. Each accusation is a stone. She tries to clap hands and say it was all a mistake but the crowd’s chorus drowns her.
“She will pay back what she can,” I say, because childish vengeance is not mine. “And she will do it here, in front of everyone. She will not go to the town and brag. She will stay here, work, and take the punishment.”
“No!” she wails. “I can’t. I have a son—”
“Everyone knows who she is now,” someone says. “Who will take her into their house?”
Gabriela’s change is a theatrical spiral: first angry and haughty, then frightened and bargaining, then collapsing into pleading. She runs her hands through her hair and tries to call any ally that might help. People point fingers. Some draw back in disgust; some rush forward to record and retell the spectacle—an appetizer that will feed dinner conversations for months.
At last she crumbles on her knees. “Please,” she begs, voice broken like old pottery. “Please, I’ll do anything. I’ll work. I’ll pay.”
A dozen hands raise names of tasks: from levels of labor to public apologies. This is not only punishment but also a measurement of repair. The men vow to take befits she stole: seed, cloth, money. The women lay out what she must cook for the market and the harvest dinners. The children decide she must act the fool in the harvest play, a humiliation she will never want to repeat.
Her reactions evolve: at first bluffing, then rage, denial, bargaining, finally despair. The crowd’s reaction changes too: from shocked pity, to hard resolve, to interest, to a cold sense that justice is done. They clap and call out, some record with their phones, others nod in grave acceptance.
Finally I speak in a quiet voice: “You will stay. You will repay. You will not hide. If you try to harm anyone, you will be carried from here.” The words are simple. They are a promise.
Gabriela looks up, crushed. Her face is hollow. The crowd fades as people head back to their chores, but the scene echoes for weeks: the moment the village turned a malicious friend into a public lesson.
I do not savor her downfall. I observe it, then go to the market with Chance the next day because life is not a trial; it’s rice and making do.
*
The rest of the summer is work. We butcher the boar the men brought down in the hills. We salt the meat, smoke the ribs, keep our share. I use the jarred salve and apply it to Chance’s leg with deft hands. I stitch and rest. I boil the herbs I gathered for the baby and for the old men in town who cough and cannot sleep.
The system feeds me recipes I never could have imagined with such poor ingredients. The baked corn bread with a smear of mashed sweet potato becomes a village favorite. People line up for the morning pancakes I make and soon our little house in the lane holds the feel of something safe and prosperous.
Chance watches with amusement as I serve men who used to snicker at our poverty. “You made them early risers,” he says, pride and playfulness mixing.
“You made me one,” I reply. “You saved me once. Let me repay in small ways.”
He blushes. “Harriet, you don’t owe me—”
“I do,” I say simply. “Because I left you once. I want to make sure that never happens again.”
There are small, tender moments that build like stones: him pressing his palm to mine in the market, me leaning against his shoulder as we count coins, him bringing an extra egg home because he found it in the henhouse. He is not perfect. He is stubborn and awkward and sometimes says the wrong thing. But he is honest.
At dusk once, after a long day, I press my forehead to Chance’s and whisper, “Thank you.”
He laughs softly. “Be careful. You speak like the girl I love. My head will swell.”
“You’d better like it,” I murmur. “Because I plan to be the woman you deserve.”
He takes my hands, and for a while the house is only our breaths.
*
Weeks pass. The town life nudges in. I take my ginseng—prized and heavy—and go to the county market. A young woman in a red plaid dress is there, breath almost sharp with fear. Pauline Maeda—her name is the label on her purse—needs the root for her dying grandfather. I see in her eyes the way I looked at the old days: desperate and raw.
I sell it. I accept a leather bag of notes that will—carefully—repair the debts that hang like storms on our family.
In town people begin to whisper. “The woman who came back.” Some ask after Chance. “He’s lucky,” they say.
“We are lucky,” I answer, and I mean it.
At the clinic, I work, not for glory but for the trust of the woman at my bedside who once told me I had no place in the world. The system teaches me a special, old needle method—something rare called the “turtle-breath” technique. It allows an old man to enter a deep pause that looks like death but is in fact a rest. We dangle him there for a few hours, boil the herbal broth Pauline had me craft, and when we draw out the needle the old man returns, breathless and alive.
People gasp and then clap. An entire household of rich, self-possessed family members who came to bargain and threaten pays me with astonished gratitude. I earn more than I hoped, and with it I pay back the little debts that made the nights heavy.
Some nights I sit and write lists: what must be done, who needs bread, whose seed must be replaced. I stock our 10×10 space with jars and bandages.
Chance watches me and says, “You moved mountains.”
I laugh. “No. I cooked them into something better.”
And in this little house, on cool nights, we hold one another and talk like people who have discovered we are allowed to keep the good parts of each other.
The End
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