Leila finally reached out and turned to the first page. The opening sentence contained only thirteen characters.
[I never truly remembered my mother.]
The next several dozen pages were about a child without a mother.
The traces his mother had left behind were a collection of clothes in the Duke of Liang's residence that no one would willingly put away, a few faded photographs, and the voices that suddenly grew quieter whenever his father fell silent for too long. The court ladies, wet nurses, and older female relatives in the household had all cared for him, but they had cared for the Lin heir, the future Duke of Liang, and the Imperial Consort promised in the late emperor's marriage pact. None of them could replace the woman who should have needed no reason at all to hold him.
He had learned very early to recognize a distinction: the tenderness others gave him usually came with his status attached. His mother should not have needed that.
The book read: [Someone who grows up without a mother often never stops looking for her. He merely hides that search under other names: teacher, older sister, princess, nation, motherland, history, or someone willing to ask whether it hurts before anything else when he is injured.]
By the time Leila read this, her brow had already furrowed.
The sentence felt more like a medical case history deliberately left undisguised. What followed about his father was entirely different.
There was almost no warmth in Lin Cuo's memories of his father. The book did not directly name the killer. It offered only a single sentence:
[When a nation cannot tell you why your father died, it has already begun teaching you that truth must be guaranteed by power.]
After that came the brief, laughable artistic ambitions of