After I Quit Being the Cold-Blooded Jinx, Family Regrets Madly

When the runaway truck came barreling toward Ivy Edwards, my adopted sister, my brother didn't hesitate for a second before rushing in to save her.

In my last life, I threw my arms around his legs and clung on, refusing to let him throw his life away.

The result was that Ivy took the full hit. Every bone shattered. She would never hold a scalpel again.

After a week in the ICU, she quietly pulled out her own tubes.

Mom and Dad called me cold-blooded, and they beat me until both my ears went deaf.

My brother went on smoothly to become the finest surgeon at State General Hospital,

but when a car accident left me hanging by a thread, he stood there and watched me die on his operating table.

"This is what you owe Ivy. You deserve to go to hell and answer to her for it."

Before I died, the digital clock on the wall ticked over to midnight. I had only just turned twenty-five.

When I opened my eyes again, I heard that familiar screech of brakes.

Ivy was so terrified she screamed and couldn't move her feet, and my brother took off running straight at it.

I froze for half a second, then squeezed my eyes shut, crouched to the ground, and clamped my hands hard over my ears.

The sting in my eardrums hadn't faded yet

when the concrete underfoot shook like an earthquake with the pounding of frantic footsteps.

Every friend and relative there for Ivy's graduation party ran toward the spot.

I unclenched my hands and stood, looking past the dark crush of heads, and saw my brother lying on the lawn a few meters off,

a spread of crimson soaking through his white shirt, both hands twisted at a grotesque angle.

Ivy sat collapsed not far away, utterly wrecked, her lips trembling beyond control.

Aside from a few light scrapes, she was completely unharmed.

Someone in the crowd shouted, "Oh my God! There's been an accident!"

Only then did my mother come back to herself. The camera in her hands hit the ground with a thud,

the ten-thousand-dollar lens she'd bought just to photograph Ivy smashed to pieces.

She shoved through the crowd, screaming, throwing herself down, not even noticing her knees scraping bloody on the coarse concrete.

Her trembling fingers reached toward Roger Edwards's face, wanting to touch him and not daring to,

her pale lips opening twice before she tore the sound out of her throat:

"Rog Roger my son!"

In my last life, my mother had knelt on the ground just like this, helpless, wailing at the heavens, her tears crashing into the grass as if her life depended on it.

Only the name in her mouth was Ivy's.

Back then my brother had been the one I dragged down at any cost, and he'd walked away fine.

But Ivy had been thrown several meters by that truck.

The doctors said every bone in her body was shattered, that she would never hold a scalpel again in this life.

She lay in the ICU for seven days, then, in the gap while a nurse changed her dressings, quietly pulled out her tubes.

When my mother found out, she cried until her eyes nearly gave out,

and together with my father she cursed me for being cold-blooded and beat me until both my ears went deaf.

The last words I heard in my last life were the two of them jabbing fingers at my forehead:

"Why weren't you the one who got hit? You cold-blooded jinx!"

Jinx.

That was the nickname the kidnapper couple in the mountains, my foster parents, had given me.

I never thought that back in the Edwards house, my own flesh-and-blood parents would call me the same thing.

Roger was the cruelest.

After he graduated from Baltimore Medical University, he did become the youngest surgeon at State General Hospital, just as everyone expected.

But when I was in that car accident and wheeled into his operating room,

he called off the anesthesiologist, his face dark, and signed to me:

"This is what you owe Ivy. You deserve to go to hell and answer to her for it."

He set down the scalpel and watched, eyes open, while I bled out and died on the operating table.

When the line on the monitor went flat, the digital clock on the wall had just ticked over to midnight,

and I had only just turned twenty-five.

Right up until I died, I never knew what I'd done wrong.

All I'd wanted was for Roger not to go rushing off to his death.

In their eyes, that made me cold-blooded. That made me a jinx.

More and more onlookers were gathering at the scene.

Cold sweat soaked through me, and I didn't dare go near.

It was a long time before my heartbeat slowly crawled back out of the blank the crash had left behind.

I opened my numb, tingling palm, and with a shaking hand I dug my phone out of my pocket and dialed 911.

"911? There's been an accident at the Southgate Garden Hotel. The injured man is male, twenty-five years old."

After hanging up, I made my way through the panicked crowd and crouched down beside my mother.

She looked up at me, her eyes horribly red, her lips still trembling.

My gaze slid over Ivy, ashen-faced and shaking all over,

and settled on my mother's tear-streaked face. I said quietly,

"Mom, don't worry. The ambulance is coming."

My voice was so steady it sounded foreign even to me.

Didn't the Edwards family say I was a cold-blooded jinx?

Then in this life, I'll show them exactly how cold-blooded I can be.

The red light over the operating room stayed on for five hours before it went dark.

My mother sat on the bench in the hallway, her nails digging into her palms.

My father stood in the smoking area, lighting one cigarette off the last.

A nurse came by twice to remind him. He said fine, fine, fine, then turned and brought the cigarette back to his lips.

I read the room and stayed at the other end of the bench, not crowding in to add to their misery.

When the operating room doors swung open, the three of us pressed forward at once.

The lead surgeon pulled down his mask, a thin sheen of sweat on his forehead.

"His life is out of danger, but both hands are shattered. The nerve damage is severe. After amputation, he'll have to learn to live using his feet."

"Amputation? His feet?"

My mother staggered, her voice thin and drifting.

"My son just started at State General. He's supposed to be holding a scalpel for the rest of his life..."

The doctor glanced at her, his tone flat. "Save his life first. Everything else can wait."

Her legs gave out, and my father caught her.

She sagged against his shoulder, her lips trembling,

crying so hard no sound came, only a thin hiss of air in her throat.

I stood off to the side and watched it happen.

In my last life, she leaned against my father's shoulder just like this.

"Ivy just graduated. She wanted to be a doctor too, like her brother..."

That time she cried until she was dehydrated. I held out a bottle of water, and she knocked it out of my hand.

The water soaked me, the cold seeping from my chest all the way into my bones.

"Spare me the act! If you hadn't stopped your brother, how would Ivy have ended up like this?!"

Back then, the Edwards family had only found me three years earlier.

I still thought that if I were good enough, obedient enough, one day they would see me.

Later I learned some things can't be earned by being good.

When Roger was wheeled out, the anesthesia hadn't fully worn off.

His eyes were half open, his lips moving, his voice a slurred mumble.

After I went deaf in my last life, I taught myself to read lips.

Almost the instant he spoke, I knew what he was saying.

Roger was asking, "Ivy... is she okay?"

My mother lunged over, pressed her ear to his mouth, and listened a long while before she made it out.

She froze for a beat, then answered half a beat late.

"She's fine, she's fine. Don't talk. Just rest and get better."

That look of tenderness, as if every extra word out of Roger's mouth would cost him years of his life.

But from the moment I came back to the Edwards family,

in everyone's eyes,

the fewer words I said, the more years they'd get to live.

Ivy was different. Pretty face, sweet mouth.

As if all she had to do was smile a little more and it would keep them young forever.

Maybe it was hearing that Ivy was fine that finally let my brother slip into sleep.

He never once thought to ask whether his own hands could still feel anything.

Ivy was driven over by a relative.

By the time she arrived, Roger was already in the ward.

She stood at the bend in the hallway, her pink gown still smudged with dirt from where she'd fallen on the lawn.

When my mother saw her, her step hitched,

and the light in her eyes turned cold enough to chill your skin.

Ivy kept her head down, not daring to look at my mother, picking at her nails until they nearly came off.

I waved her over. "Ivy, come on. My brother's awake."

As she walked over, a few relatives in the hallway were murmuring among themselves.

"That Roger, he really loves Ivy like his own sister. Look at the state he's in, and the first thing out of his mouth was worrying about her."

"Isn't that something. Threw away his whole life to save her."

"The Edwards couple are so lucky, to have a brother and sister this close."

Their words praised how close Roger and Ivy were,

but listen a little harder and it was all barbed.

Ivy bit her lip until it bled, her eyes rimmed red, and quickened her steps.

She pushed open the ward door and walked in, and saw Roger lying there with tubes in him,

his face paler than the wall, tears dropping one after another.

"Roger..."

She threw herself to the bedside, wanting to touch his hands but not daring to, just clutching the sheet and crying.

Roger seemed to sense something. He slowly opened his eyes,

turned his head toward her with effort, and tugged the corner of his mouth, probably meaning to smile.

His voice was so hoarse it was almost gone. "Don't cry. Your makeup will run, and then you won't look nice."

My mother stood at the head of the bed, watching, her expression hard to read.

She used to eat this up.

One cry from Ivy and her heart melted; one pout and she'd give her anything.

But the one lying in that bed now wasn't Ivy.

It was her own son.

My father came in carrying two bowls of porridge.

He glanced first at Roger on the bed, then at Ivy,

and finally handed one bowl to my mother and set the other in my hands.

"You've been running around all day. Eat something."

His voice was flat, giving nothing away.

But as I looked down at the bowl, my hand started to shake.

After I was brought back to the Edwards house, my father was the one who spoke to me least.

A single day of talking to Ivy added up to more than a whole month with me.

In my last life, after Ivy's accident, he didn't say one word to me for two full weeks.

Then the first thing he said, standing beside my mother, was to call me cold-blooded, and he beat me until I lost hearing in both ears.

The chicken and rice porridge was still hot, and I sipped it in small mouthfuls,

tears dropping into the bowl, swallowed down with the porridge.

Ivy cried herself out, then straightened up and wiped her face.

She turned and saw me by the window with the porridge, and came over with a complicated look to sit beside me.

"Iris, thank you for today. You called 911 in time."

"It was nothing." I set the bowl down and turned to her. "Don't carry it. Roger chose to save you himself. No one blames you."

Her eyes reddened again. "But I heard everything the relatives said."

"Don't listen to them." I reached over and patted the back of her hand.

She looked at me, her lips moving, her eyes redder still.

And looking at those tear-reddened eyes, what I was thinking about was something else.

In my last life, when my parents beat me, she was there too.

She was lying in the hospital bed, still wrapped in bandages,

watching my father knock me to the floor with a slap, watching my mother drag me by the hair and slam my head against the wall.

All it would have taken was one look from her to make my parents stop.

But she didn't say a word.

And she didn't lift a hand to stop them.

That was when I understood.

There was a bond between the Edwardses that I could never break into.

The moment anything went wrong, I, the outsider, was always the first one held to account.

But this life, I hadn't done anything.

The one it happened to was Roger, the only son of three Edwards generations.

The family that had huddled together now seemed to be pulling apart.

Once the porridge was done, Roger's anesthesia wore off completely and he began crying out in pain.

Ivy started to go call a doctor, but my mother gently blocked her.

She turned to me. "Iris, go get the doctor."

Ivy's eyes were red, glinting in the light,

and she said softly, "Mom"

My mother acted as if she hadn't heard, walking straight to my brother's bed, wiping her tears as she tucked the corner of his blanket.

But the next second, Roger passed out again from the pain.

This time, he slept for three full days.

It was only after Roger woke that he truly grasped what those amputated hands meant.

That morning, a nurse came to change the dressings.

When the bandages came off, he looked down.

Then his whole body went as if nailed to the bed, staring at the raw wound of his amputation without moving.

He moved his arms in disbelief, and got fresh blood welling up from the wound.

His voice was dry, his lips trembling wildly, as though something had struck him in the throat.

"Nurse, my hands where did they go?"

The nurse didn't answer, keeping her head down as she wound the bandage.

Roger's voice shot up all at once, the veins standing out on his neck.

"I'm asking you! What happened to my hands?"

The piercing sound reached my mother out in the hallway.

She rushed in from outside and pressed down on Roger's shoulders,

her eyes filling with tears in an instant.

"Roger, don't get worked up, the doctor says the wound still needs to heal, don't rush"

"How am I supposed to not rush?"

Roger stared hard at the stumps wrapped up tight in bandages, roaring in refusal to accept it.

"Mom, I'm a surgeon. These hands were supposed to feed me for the rest of my life!"

He tried to lift his arm to pound the bed, but his hands couldn't even make a fist.

The pain from the wounds bent him double, and his face went white in an instant.

My mother wept, her heart breaking, her shoulders jerking with each sob.

Ivy stood in the doorway of the ward, holding a thermos of soup.

Her lips moved, and she started to push the door open.

My father came up behind her, took the thermos from her hands, his face going colder.

"Don't go in yet."

In all my memory, my father had never once refused Ivy.

He had certainly never turned a cold face on her.

In the Edwards house, Ivy was the lucky little charm cupped in everyone's palm.

But now the charm had been thrown into the mud.

Ivy's gaze faltered, and she nodded, a single tear falling from her reddened eyes.

She leaned against the corridor wall, head down, picking at the hem of her clothes over and over with her nails.

I stood by the window on the other side of the ward and watched all of it.

My phone buzzed. A message from my brother's department head.

Roger Edwards's surgery schedule at State General has been canceled, and the department is arranging a replacement. Tell him to rest and heal, and not to worry about anything else.

I stared at the message for a few seconds, then screenshotted it and sent it to my mother and father, separately.

In my last life, Roger's hands were perfectly whole, and he'd climbed from resident to attending, becoming State General's youngest surgical specialist before he even turned thirty.

He made the local news, hailed as the 'genius surgical prodigy.'

My father had that clipping framed and hung it dead center on the living room wall.

Every time I came home, I looked up and saw it.

Roger really did save a lot of people. He also really did watch me die on the operating table without lifting a finger.

When my parents saw the message I'd sent, the knuckles gripping their phones went a terrible white,

and unable to bear it any longer, both of them walked out of the ward wiping their eyes.

Half an hour later, Roger finally went quiet.

A nurse came to tell us the attending was starting rounds.

The moment my brother saw the intern trailing behind the doctor, his whole body seemed to freeze into ice.

John Whitney had been my brother's sworn rival in college.

He'd lost to Roger by several points in every skills competition.

Before all this, my brother wouldn't have spared him a glance.

But now John stood there in a white coat, upright like any normal man,

while my brother lay in bed, needing help with even the most basic things.

John's step slowed, and he let out a soft laugh.

His eyes settled on those two empty, hanging sleeves, and the gloating in them was impossible to hide.

"Long time no see, Roger."

My brother instinctively tried to hide his hands under the blanket.

But he'd forgotten he didn't have hands anymore. He couldn't even make the motion of hiding them.

John gave a sigh of fake regret.

"Such a shame. You were the genius of our department, hands steady as a machine. Who'd have thought you'd have trouble even feeding yourself now. Don't lose heart, though. Learn to live using your feet instead of your hands, and you might still make something of the second half of your life."

My brother's throat bobbed once.

He wanted to clench a fist, but below his shoulders there was nothing.

His fingers had once been so steady. Suturing, knotting, dissecting, every cut like it had been measured with a ruler.

Now even a clenched fist was a luxury.

"Shut your mouth!"

Ivy rushed out from the corner and planted herself in front of the bed.

"You're nothing but a man my brother beat every time. What right do you have to stand here running your mouth?"

Her voice shook with anger, like she was about to lunge and hit him.

My brother quickly slid a foot out from under the blanket, caught the hem of her clothes between his toes, and tugged it down.

Ivy looked down at it.

Just one glance, and her brows drew together, her lips pressing thin,

and her whole body instinctively shifted half a step away.

The flinch of disgust was over in an instant, but my brother caught it.

Like he'd been struck by lightning, his face went impossibly white,

and his blank gaze moved from Ivy's face to his own foot.

Then he slowly tucked the foot back under the blanket and forced his back straight.

"Everyone out."

"Roger, you haven't washed your face yet," Ivy stammered.

"Out!"

Like a string pulled too tight had suddenly snapped.

Roger kicked hard and flung the blanket back.

It slid off the foot of the bed, exposing those two empty sleeves.

They lay flat and slack at his sides, cuffs swaying faintly in the air.

Ivy took a step back and opened her mouth, wanting to say something more.

But my brother had already closed his eyes.

His chest heaved violently, his jaw clenched tight.

From his cheekbones to his ears his whole face was a bloodless gray-white.

Footsteps shuffled off toward the door one by one.

Ivy was still standing there.

"You go too."

My brother didn't open his eyes. His shoulders were trembling.

The empty right sleeve trembled with them, tapping against the edge of the bed again and again in the draft.

He leaned back against the pillow with his eyes shut, a film of cold sweat on his forehead.

My mother hurried to wipe it with a towel, her hands shaking the whole time, never once looking at Ivy.

"Stay away from the hospital these next few days."

Ivy's step froze. Then she covered her mouth and ran out.

I went after her and handed her a tissue.

She was crying so hard she could barely catch her breath.

"Even Mom said that. She used to love me most of all"

I looked at her.

Of course I knew my mother had loved her most.

I also knew my mother loved her because Roger loved her.

And I knew something more.

The Edwards family's way of closing ranks and shutting a person out cut deeper than anything.

But all of this was only just beginning.