After transmigrating into the book, I helped my mother reconcile with her divorced husband.

Ji Wanwan was indeed greedy for credit and had ulterior motives, but the reason he and Xie Chaoyun ended up like this was not entirely because of Ji Wanwan. Ultimately, it was because he didn't care about Xie Chaoyun, he deceived her heart, fooled her feelings, and betrayed the marriage she had given him.

Taking a deep breath, she asked the butler, "What month is Madam's birthday?"

The butler blurted out, "April 14th, only a dozen days apart from Madam Ji's birthday."

Ji Wanwan's birthday is April 26th, and every year he would meticulously prepare gifts and organize a birthday banquet for her. Xie Chaoyun had been married into the Marquis's mansion for ten years, and she had witnessed him taking care of Ji Wanwan for all ten years. She probably already knew that he had lied to her and didn't love her.

His gaze shifted slightly as he looked at the steward: "I've neglected her for ten years, yet I celebrated Ji Wanwan's tenth birthday in front of her. Why didn't she ask? With her intelligence, she should have guessed long ago that my relationship with Ji Wanwan is different. With her temper, she should have made a scene long ago. Why didn't she?"

"Because the lady deeply loves the Marquis!"

“Men and women have different attitudes toward relationships. Even if Madam guessed the relationship between the Marquis and Madam Ji, she would deceive herself until the Marquis brought her back. After all, the Marquis’s promise was real, and his marriage to Madam was real. Madam did not ask not because she dared not, but because she was afraid that the answer the Marquis gave would be the same as what she thought.”

Lu Huai tightened his grip and continued listening to the butler.

"Madam is no ordinary young lady. Over the years, she has led her caravans all over the country, but she has never ventured into Weinan. Has the Marquis ever wondered why? Weinan is not a place of tigers and wolves, and with the Marquis here, Madam could go there if she wanted to. The reason she doesn't go is not because she is afraid of delaying the Marquis's affairs, but because she is afraid of seeing the Marquis and Madam Ji together, afraid of hearing about the Marquis and Madam Ji's affairs, and afraid that she will no longer be able to deceive herself."

Lu Huai laughed, asked the steward to bring a pot of wine, and gulped it down.

She wasn't petty, nor could she not tolerate a mistress; rather, she couldn't deceive herself as before. She brought up divorce not because his relationship with Ji Wanwan had been exposed, causing her, the mistress of the Marquis's mansion, to lose face, but because she was no longer willing to deceive herself.

He threw the wine jar on the ground and said to the steward, "Dismiss them! Once the Emperor orders the seal lifted, have the servants in this mansion leave on their own. Pawn everything in Mother's room, and use the money from the pawns for their dismissal. If they really have nowhere to go, send them to a manor in a neighboring county. Don't touch Yuan'er's Fangfei Courtyard; that's Yuan'er's own."

"Is the Marquis planning to dismantle the Marquis's mansion?"

"It's not that it's broken up, it's that it can't be maintained anymore." Under the influence of alcohol, Lu Huai staggered from Chaoyun Courtyard to Fulin Courtyard.

The courtyard gate was open, and the servants, who hadn't been working, were gathered together whispering. When they saw Lu Huai, they exchanged glances and reminders, and all of them stood obediently with their heads down.

Lu Huai walked past them and into his mother's room.

The door was pushed open from the outside, but only halfway, revealing the panic and haste of the person who opened it. The room was filled with a faint incense, a calming fragrance Xie Chaoyun had prepared when she was the mistress of the house; it was the same incense he and Ji Wanwan had used in Weinan. The blankets were half-lifted, the bed still retaining the warmth of her mother's departure.

Mother, she's never coming back!

Forcing a concubine to her death and killing a servant with a flogging—the lightest sentence would be life imprisonment. If the person was mentally challenged, perhaps they wouldn't feel the pain, but his mother… He suddenly stood up and looked towards Fangfei Courtyard.

Yuan'er did it on purpose!

She was treating her mother so that she could be tried while fully conscious and spend the rest of her life in prison as the matriarch of the Marquis's household. She was venting her anger for her mother.

He hurriedly summoned the butler inside, but froze in place when the butler asked him questions.

The medicine that caused her mother's madness was bought by Ji Wanwan from the ghost market, and her mother's poisoning and subsequent mental breakdown were accidental. All of this had nothing to do with Yuan'er or Ji Wanwan. He had consented to treat her mother, and he should be happy that her condition improved. Besides, what crime has his granddaughter committed in treating her grandmother?

The concubine was forced to death by her mother, and the people buried in Fangfei Courtyard were killed by her mother. The Commandant's Office arrested her mother based on the laws of the court, which had nothing to do with Lu Zhiyuan. Moreover, she even provided relevant testimony for her mother in front of the people of the Commandant's Office.

An eight-year-old child may not be as complicated as he thinks.

The butler hesitated, wanting to say something, but seeing Lu Huai's exhaustion, he sighed softly and silently withdrew.

After leaving Fulin Courtyard, he went to the small courtyard where his father had stayed temporarily before his death. His mother resented his father and forbade the servants to clean the room, but she also kept the room as it was when his father was alive.

The half-burnt embers in the stove were shrouded in cobwebs. The bedding was thrown back, as if its owner had just gotten up. Hanging on the inside of the bed was a painting of Mother in her youth. Had Father actually loved Mother? Otherwise, why would he have married her, a concubine's daughter who had been forced into a marriage in her place? He was a marquis, and she was a lowly peasant girl. Even if he couldn't refuse the marriage, he could have allowed Mother to enter the mansion as a concubine.

Did her mother know about her father's feelings for her?

The desk was covered in cobwebs, beneath which lay several books, his own, with his name written on them in slightly childish handwriting. He brushed away the cobwebs, picked up the top book, and opened the title page to see a tattered, withered maple leaf. He stared at the leaf, unable to recall when it had been placed there.

I picked up the maple leaf and saw two words written on the back. Time had blurred the writing. I lit a lamp and carefully examined it; a long-forgotten memory washed over me.

He had met Xie Chaoyun before, back at the academy.

He began his education at the age of five and entered school at the age of seven. His father and mother thought he was doing well at the academy, but little did they know that he suffered all kinds of bullying and exclusion because of his connection with the Marquis of Pingnan's family.

The children in the academy were divided into two groups: those from poor families and those from noble families. He was somewhere in between. To the poor students, he was a young nobleman, a person of high status. To the nobles, he was a poor student who had gotten lucky by sheer luck, unworthy to be treated with respect. They poured water on his bedding, broke his writing brush, stuffed insects into his food, and, when he wasn't looking, pushed him into the academy's pond.

Xie Chaoyun saved him.

She pulled him out of the water, begged the teacher to fetch a doctor for him, and fed him medicine by the bowl in her hand. Although he was delirious with illness, he remembered the dress she was wearing, the flower embroidered on it, and how she gently coaxed and sternly scolded him when he refused to take the bitter medicine.

He was ill for three days, and when he woke up, she had already left the academy with her family.

It was Mid-Autumn Festival when he returned to the capital and encountered Ji Wanwan, who had come to seek refuge, in front of the Marquis's residence. Because of her clothes, Ji Wanwan overlapped with Xie Chaoyun in his memory, and he subconsciously recognized her as the person who saved him, protected him, and took care of him.

He overlooked one thing: Ji Wanwan couldn't swim, she wouldn't have passed through an academy on her way from her hometown to the capital, and she didn't speak the official language of the capital when she first arrived.

Xie Chaoyun was a good swimmer. Her second brother, Xie Yubai, studied at the academy and was the youngest teaching assistant there. He had to pass through the academy on his way back from the border. There was a maple tree by the pond where he fell into the water, and he had asked her name when he was ill.