Chapter 1

My mother-in-law had extreme OCD about cleanliness.

The very first day I married into the Miller family, she slammed a medical diagnosis down in front of me.

The doctor supposedly said that living in an unclean house would literally kill her.

"The floors must be scrubbed seven times. Skipping even one is like taking a knife to my throat."

"Wash the dishes ten times. If they aren’t spotless, you might as well pick out my casket."

She never lifted a finger around the house. Instead, she wandered around wearing white gloves, running her fingers along every corner, searching for a speck of dust.

The moment she found a trace of dirt, she would burst into theatrical tears in front of my husband, Mark.

"Mark, your mother won't survive this."

"Your wife wishes I were dead! Just hand her a knife—it’d be quicker than letting me rot in this filth!"

Mark would drop to his knees, begging me to indulge his mother and just be a dutiful daughter-in-law.

So for the two years of our marriage, I dragged myself out of bed at five every morning to scrub the floors and stayed up past eleven every night washing dishes.

When my fingers cracked and blistered from the water, I wrapped them in tape. When my knees bruised purple from kneeling on the tiles, I folded a towel beneath them and kept scrubbing.

Mark held me close and promised that as soon as I got pregnant, he would have his mother move out.

I clung to that hope every single day, waiting for the misery to end.

Then came the day I was scrubbing the balcony. My foot slipped on a patch of wet floor, and I plummeted over the railing.

As my consciousness faded into darkness, my mother-in-law's voice drifted down from above:

"I just wiped that floor, and she tracked dirt all over it again. I'm going to give her a piece of my mind tomorrow."

Using the last ounce of my strength, I looked up. Mark was standing by the balcony door. He looked down at my broken body for a brief second, then turned and walked back inside.

"Wait until morning to call an ambulance. It's late; we don't want to make a scene and wake the neighbors."

When I opened my eyes again, I was right back to my first day as Mark's wife.

My mother-in-law was standing over my bed, waving a dirty gray rag right in my face.

"Get up. Scrub the floors."

I reached out, snatched the rag,

and slapped it straight across her face.

Gertrude froze. The dingy rag slid down her cheek and dropped to the floor.

Her white-gloved hand remained suspended in midair, frozen like a statue.

A few seconds ticked by. Her pale face flushed red, deepened into purple, and her lips began to tremble violently.

"You... You..."

"I’m not scrubbing anything," I said, throwing back the covers and getting out of bed. "If you love clean floors so much, scrub them yourself."

I took two steps toward the door before she finally snapped out of it, letting out a shriek that nearly tore the roof off the house.

"Mark! Mark, get in here! Look at the wonderful wife you married! She just threw a filthy rag right in my face!"

Mark rushed into the room, his hair a complete mess.

Seeing Gertrude crumpled on the floor, wailing at the top of her lungs, he rushed over to scoop her up.

"Mom! What happened? What’s going on?"

Gertrude pointed at her own face, tears streaming down like a waterfall.

"Your wife hit me! She threw a dirty rag in my face!

I’ve lived sixty years, and no one has ever humiliated me like this! Never!"

She cried with such gut-wrenching agony that anyone would think I had stabbed her rather than tossed a rag.

Mark's expression darkened instantly. He turned to glare at me, his eyes blazing with fury.

"Claire, what is wrong with you? Mom woke you up with good intentions, and this is how you treat her?"

Good intentions? I let out a cold laugh.

"Good intentions? Shoving a dirty rag in my face at six in the morning on our first day of marriage and demanding I scrub the floors counts as good intentions?"

Mark's brows knitted tight.

He strode over to me, lowered his voice, and spoke as if coaxing a throwing-a-tantrum child:

"Claire, you know Mom has severe OCD about cleanliness. The doctor said her respiratory tract can't handle dust. If the house isn't spotless, her condition flares up. Can't you just suck it up for the sake of her health?"

He had said the exact same words in our past life. Just bear with it, give in, don't argue with an elder.

I had sucked it up for two agonizing years, only to end up falling to my death—while he didn't even bother to call 911.

"Her respiratory tract can't handle dust?" I looked him dead in the eye. "What about me? Do I deserve to be worked like a pack mule for her?"

His expression shifted, but he quickly slipped back into his long-suffering, guilt-tripping routine:

"Claire, I know you feel wronged, but Mom raised me all on her own. It wasn't easy.

My dad died young. She worked as an elementary school teacher for thirty years to put me through college, ruining her health in the process. All she wants now is a clean house to live in. Is that really too much to ask?

You're my wife, you're younger—what's wrong with deferring to an elder?"

Here it came again. That tired script.

In my previous life, every time he wanted me to back down, he dragged out his mother's tragic backstory.

As if every hardship she had ever endured was a debt I was obligated to repay.

"Her life being hard was her problem," I told him flatly. "I didn't cause her struggles, so why on earth should I have to pay for them?"

Mark froze, speechless.

Gertrude leaned away from the doorframe, hurried to Mark's side, and dabbed at her red-rimmed eyes.

"Mark, don't say another word. It's my fault. I shouldn't have asked her to clean."

She turned away, her shoulders trembling with quiet, delicate sobs, looking like the picture of an abused victim.

She had pulled this trick a hundred times in my past life.

Whenever Mark and I argued, she would step in and play the martyr. The more submissive she acted, the more Mark believed I was the villain tormenting her.

Sure enough, Mark's face instantly shifted.

He wrapped his arm around Gertrude, his tone softening completely. "Mom, don't say that. You did nothing wrong."

Then he turned back to me, his voice hardened into granite. "Claire, apologize to Mom."

I looked at the mother-and-son duo. One was playing the martyr; the other was playing the dutiful, righteous son.

In my past life, I had backed down repeatedly because I didn't want to make things hard on Mark, because I wanted to keep our marriage together.

Yet when I was lying broken on the pavement below, did either of them give a single damn about everything I had sacrificed?

I walked over to the closet, pulled out a fresh change of clothes, and grabbed my bag.

"You can apologize to her yourself. I'm done playing along."

Mark's eyes widened. "Where do you think you're going?"

I ignored him completely, took my purse, and walked out the door.