Chapter 1

I was dead.

Perhaps out of pure lingering obsession, my soul remained tied to my mother, unable to stray even a single step away.

Inside the hospital room, my family gathered around my younger sister Chloe’s bed. My mother was so overwhelmed with anxiety that she was on the verge of tears.

It was jarring to see this usually calm, decisive career woman break down like this. Her expression was light-years away from the aggressive, relentless posture she had taken against me in court.

When Chloe finally opened her eyes, the heavy weight hanging over my parents lifted at last.

My mother held Chloe’s hand, tears spilling over her cheeks. “Darling, you’re finally awake! Are you feeling sick anywhere? I’ll go call the doctor right now.”

Chloe squeezed our mother’s hand and shook her head. She glanced around the room and asked softly, “Where’s Lillian? Why didn’t she come? Is she still mad at me for taking her blood?”

The second my name was uttered, my mother’s face instantly darkened. Disgust filled her eyes.

“What right does she have to be mad at you? She’s a selfish creature! Seeing her own sister suffer like this, she actually took me to court! She has dragged my reputation through the dirt!”

A dull, relentless pain throbbed in my chest. It had been my mother who sued me in court in the first place, putting all her strength and legal expertise into crushing me.

I was her daughter, not some irredeemable criminal.

Hearing this, my father, Theodore Collins, punched the wall in fury. “Call her right now! Tell her to get over here and drop to her knees to apologize to Chloe! She can’t stand to see Chloe do well. She wants everything in this family for herself. How did I end up with such a cold-blooded, ungrateful wretch of a daughter?”

My soul stood right between them. We were supposed to be a family, yet not a single person spoke up for me.

Even though I was dead, they still refused to let me go, smearing my name just as they always had.

My mother pulled out her phone and dialed my number several times, but the calls went straight through unanswered. She cursed in frustration.

“The ungrateful wretch thinks her wings have grown strong enough to throw a tantrum! If I don’t discipline her properly when we get back, she’ll be walking all over us when we’re old!”

My heart withered into ash. It wasn’t that I refused to answer her calls.

I was simply... dead.

I was three years older than Chloe. When I was little, my father accidentally spilled water on the floor, causing me to slip and bump into my mother, who was over eight months pregnant at the time.

The fall triggered premature labor.

Because Chloe had been frail ever since she was a child, my mother blamed the entire ordeal on me.

My mother used to say, “If it weren’t for you, Chloe would have grown up healthy and strong! You owe this to her!”

Overwhelmed with grievance, I used to look at my father, silently begging for help.

I had hoped my father would tell the truth, but he only snapped at me harshly instead. “What are you looking at me for? You brought this trouble on yourself, and now you want to drag someone else down with you?”

Back then, I realized my father would never help me. He would only stack more guilt onto my name.

Sure enough, my mother slapped me hard across the face. My ears rang violently, making me feel as if my eardrums were about to burst.

“You will kneel in front of Chloe today, and you won’t get up until you realize what you did wrong!”

I knelt for an entire day. I stupidly believed that if I stubbornly insisted on my innocence, I could move my mother. After all, she was a renowned, high-profile lawyer who would never wrongly accuse an innocent person.

Yet reality slapped me across the face even harder.

My mother’s sense of justice was reserved only for outsiders. It was only when she kicked me squarely in the chest that I realized how naive I had been.

Her gaze was cold and filled with revulsion.

“Chloe ended up like this because of you, yet you don’t feel a shred of remorse,” she said. “How did I raise such a disgrace?”

It ended with my mother refusing to let me eat for three days until I finally gave in.

I still remembered how she boastfully said to my father, “This is how you raise a child. Otherwise, they won’t know their place.”

To think those words came from a top legal scholar.

In truth, I should have accepted back then that my parents never loved me. Had I not held onto that tiny, desperate hope of awakening their affection, I wouldn’t have clung so tightly to them right up until the moment I died.

My thoughts were dragged back to the present as my parents continued to hurl bitter insults at me. Their words were sharp and piercing, as if I were a bitter enemy rather than their child.

My heart died completely. For the very first time, I realized that dying was truly the best outcome for me.