Bias

When I met Ethan Stone, his family had just gone bankrupt. He had fallen hard and was at his lowest point. I stayed with him for eight years and helped him rebuild everything. We were finally about to get married. On our engagement day, I was kidnapped by his greatest rival. When I came back safely, he held his secretary in his arms and looked at me with disgust. “Jane, you’re no longer pure.” I felt my heart sink. I let him go and chose to fall into the arms of his rival.

I have been reborn 999 times, all to save my husband from the woman he can never forget. Each time, he hides the truth from me, only to be tricked by her into entering that room destined to go up in flames. He always dies in the fiery explosion. Nearly a thousand lifetimes pass, and I never once complain, even though loving him tears me apart. However, this time, I have made up my mind. I won't save him. This time, I will watch him die with my own eyes.

I supported Ethan Mitchell and loved him for eight whole years. I thought I concealed my feelings well, but little did I know that after Ethan became a business magnate, the first thing he did was send me to a ladies’ finishing academy. He looked at me coldly, his arms wrapped around his fiancée. "When you've rid yourself of those filthy thoughts, then you can come out." A year later, I finally forgot him completely. However, Ethan came to regret everything.

Before the flight takes off, my fiance, the pilot, boards the plane with a suitcase. He says it's a gift from his childhood sweetheart and warns me not to touch it. I can't shake the uneasy feeling creeping into my heart, so I sneak inside. To my shock, I find high-risk contraband hidden in the luggage. I report it immediately and use my commendation to cover for Edward's mistake and save his career. However, his precious childhood sweetheart is arrested, detained, and sentenced. He doesn't say a word after the incident. However, during another flight, he cuts the cord to my parachute. "Jade, I know you're jealous of Cindy! You sabotaged her during her flight attendant training and framed her afterward! Do you think this will make me love you? Dream on! I would never marry a petty woman like you!" I plunge from ten thousand meters above the ground, leaving nothing but blood and broken bones behind. When I open my eyes again, I see Cindy sending Edward off, and he's carrying the same suitcase. I quietly step back and decide I won't save him this time.

With a bag of vegetables gifted by the previous tenant in hand, I was on my way to collect rent from the third household when I unexpectedly ran into someone at the entrance of the community. The man frowned, his eyes fixed on the vegetables I carried, as though he couldn't fathom how I had ended up like this after leaving him. Following his gaze, I instinctively shifted the vegetables behind my back. My eyes dropped to the muddy water on the pavement, and I never would have imagined bumping into my ex-boyfriend—the one who had grown up with a silver spoon—in this aging neighborhood. He noticed my movement, and for a moment, something flickered in his expression: a mix of pity and recognition. "Since you've already learned your lesson," he said, "come back with me." At his words, I instinctively stepped back half a pace. "Who said I'm going back with you?" My rejection seemed to sting, darkening his face. "I know you're still blaming me for giving Rachel a child," he muttered, "but it's been three years. Isn't it time to stop? As long as you come back, we can be the same as before." Three years, huh? How quickly time had passed. Thinking of my little girl at home, still babbling her first words, I couldn't help but smile and shake my head. "Let's leave it at that. Go home and live your life with Rachel. My daughter's waiting for me to go back and make her food."

Joseph Larkin, my husband, who has been missing for seven years, suddenly comes back. Not only does he bring another woman back, but he is also asking me for a divorce. Joseph says, "Mabel risked her life to save me. That's why I have to marry her to repay her. If you know what's good for you, you'll tell everyone we're already divorced." Looking at his haughty expression, I calmly say, "But I've already married someone else." Joseph laughs disdainfully. "Who are you trying to fool? Everyone knows you only have eyes for me."

My mother despised me because I was the unintended consequence of a one-night stand. She poured all her love and attention into her students, treating them as if they were her own flesh and blood. One day, when her favourite pupil confessed his feelings for me, she flew into a rage. She slapped me hard across the face and called me a whore. Years later, as Alzheimer's clouded her mind, she forgot I even existed, yet still remembered every single one of her precious students. The irony was that not one of them ever came to visit her in the nursing home. They all loathed her just as much as I did.

On the very night Finn Chapman's first love got divorced, he threw the ninety-ninth divorce agreement at me. "Lisa's heart is broken. She can't move on. I have to take care of her," he said. Even our seven-year-old son tried to persuade me. "You should just agree to the divorce and leave," he told me. "Let Lisa move in. We don't need a maid like you anymore." Both father and son were certain I'd scream, cry, beg them not to throw me out. But I didn't. I simply nodded, quietly signed my name on the divorce papers, and left. Ten years later, my son became the top scorer on the SATs. During an interview, a reporter asked him, "What has motivated you to study so hard all these years?" He went silent for a moment. Then, in front of everyone, his eyes turned red. "Because I wanted to tell my mom," he said, voice trembling, "I've grown up now. Will you come back? Please don't leave me again."

My newlywed husband forces me, a late-stage liver cancer patient, to drink hard liquor just to please his secretary. When the secretary later stages a setup, pretending to take a knife for him, she loses too much blood. In a panic, he demands that I give her a blood transfusion. I name my price—ten million dollars. He sneers. "Your blood really is worth its weight in gold, huh?" Of course it is. A liver cancer patient's blood doesn't come cheap. Later, when his precious secretary crashes into my car, he mocks me again. "You caused the accident on purpose, didn't you? Stop pretending—you just want more money. Wendy Yaeger, you disgust me." I'm done. All I want now is to get that divorce certificate before I die, but he looks down at me with disdain. "Don't use such pathetic tricks to get my attention. You're not even qualified to negotiate with me." Fine. Once I'm dead, the marriage will end on its own.

The day Adrian Knight clinched a contract with our biggest client, I "accidentally" tipped a bottle of ink across the paperwork, voiding it on the spot. Because of that single blot, the project landed in Alex Lewis’s lap, and he won Chairman Henry Carter’s favor almost overnight, moving into the Carter mansion as their future son-in-law and watching his net worth rocket into eight figures. Adrian never blamed me. He just laughed that he’d never been executive material anyway and happily brought me home as his bride. Everyone whispered that, if not for my meddling, Adrian would already be sitting in the Carter family’s executive suite instead of scraping by in an ordinary life with me. Only I knew the truth: stopping him from signing that contract had saved his life. When Adrian learned I was pregnant, he locked me in the basement, fingers digging into my throat. "If it hadn’t been for you," he snarled, "I’d be Henry Carter’s son-in-law by now. You’re the reason I lost Rachel, the princess of the Carter family." That’s when I realized he’d been nursing this grudge for years. After he killed me, I woke up, reborn on the very day Adrian first reached for that fatal contract. This time, I’ll make sure Adrian Knight gets exactly what he wants.