Once More Love in 1995

Zhuang Manying wakes up in 1995 carrying the memory of a future nobody else in the room can see. She lets everyone around her believe she is simply her mother's daughter starting out at nineteen, when in fact she already knows which coworkers will betray her, which investments will pay off, and which man will ruin her mother's life. That knowledge is the only tool she has, and she spends it freely, correcting a factory ledger before her boss can blame her for the error, walking into a hiring committee with answers to questions not yet asked, ending a relationship with a man everyone else still calls a good match. Word spreads that she is unusually sharp for her age, and no one asks where the sharpness came from. The cost shows up in her own house. Her plan requires her to stay close to her mother's family without explaining why she understands so much about their future, and the person she ends up closest to is her uncle, a man some years older than her who keeps to himself and rarely speaks about anything before dinner is on the table. He notices that she seems to know things she has no way of knowing, and instead of asking he starts watching her more carefully. What began as a mission to move her mother off a fixed path turns into long evenings at the same table, arguments about small household matters, and a closeness neither of them planned for. She keeps working the angles she remembers from her old life, pushing a rival out of a promotion, steering her mother away from a marriage that in her memory ended badly, cutting off men who would otherwise have taken advantage of a young woman new to the workforce. Each fix changes something else she did not account for, and her uncle is there for most of it, standing closer than an uncle usually stands, saying less than he clearly knows.