Choosing By Heart

CHOOSING BY HEART

A Novel by May Chan
Contemporary Women’s Fiction | 83,000 words
Complete Manuscript | Currently Seeking Representation
Author’s Note: The following represents approximately 30% of the complete manuscript.

Before You Read

I'm sharing the first 30% of my completed novel here and would love to hear from readers.

Please read it as you would any book by an unknown author.

Thank you for giving my story a chance.

When you reach the end, I'd simply like to know: Would you want to keep reading?

Thank you for giving my story a chance.

Chapter 1 – Going in Circles

Chek Lap Kok Airport, Hong Kong

Winter sunlight poured through the towering glass panels, casting dappled light across the cold floor. Suitcases trundled in slow, endless loops along the conveyor belts, their dull rumble swallowed by the vastness of the terminal.

Time drifted quietly here, in an airport that never slept.

Si Chen stood alone at her carousel, gaze vacant, her suitcase had gone around more times than she could say before she finally lifted it free. She stayed there anyway, fingers wrapped tight around the handle, feet refusing to move.

The train to A City? Or the ferry to T City?

In each city, one of the two men who mattered most to her waited.

Life was like this luggage on the circling belt, she thought. If you never reached out and claimed what was yours, it would just keep circling—round and round, never arriving anywhere. The weight of that thought pressed down on her chest. Every choice branched into a hundred possibilities, a hundred unknowns she couldn't see past.

If the choice would not come to her, she would hand it to someone else.

Her thumb hovered over the screen. She drew a slow breath, then sent the same message to both of them:

I've landed in Hong Kong.

The replies came back almost instantly, one after the other.

I'm in Shanghai for work.

I'll come meet you at the pier.

Si Chen stared at the screen for a moment, then let out a quiet, wry smile. It was like thrashing in deep water for so long that when a life ring finally landed beside you, it didn't matter who had thrown it. You just grabbed on.

She typed back quickly:

Don't. Don't let me see you at the pier.

Then she picked up her suitcase and walked toward the exit without looking back.

The first chill of early winter swept in from Victoria Harbour, carrying with it the faint, briny scent of the sea.

Dusk was settling in. The neon signs flickered to life one by one—dazzling, and somehow, faintly lonesome.

Si Chen made her way slowly along the Avenue of Stars, her heavy suitcase trailing behind her. Their relationship these past two years had been just like that suitcase: too much effort to drag along, too much to simply abandon.

Her eyes drifted across the harbour to the Ferris wheel, its lights turning in their slow, patient arc. She stopped, watching its endless cycle—rising and falling, only to return again, over and over.

But the ferry ticket was already in her hand. Whatever lay ahead, there was no turning back now.

She took a long breath, tightened her grip on the handle, and stepped forward, heavy, but resolute, into the crowd boarding the ferry.

On the ferry, she took a window seat and looked back at the glittering lights of Central. Her gaze shifted, settling on the Ferris wheel as it turned beneath the harbour lights. Like time itself, it moved in endless circles—carrying her back, over and over, to a past that would never return to her.

There had been a time when they'd sat on this same ferry together, their hands linked, talking about everything they were going to do and become. They'd pointed at the towers lining the harbour and told each other that someday, they'd work inside one of them.

Do you know why the harbour lights are so bright? she had asked him once.

He hadn't answered right away. He'd just looked out at all that light.

Because behind every single one of those windows, she'd said with a laugh, there's someone pulling an all-nighter.

They smiled at each other. Back then, they had believed it: work hard enough, and everything else would follow.

Time, in the end, changes everything.

Two years ago, one argument—the only real one they'd ever had—and neither of them would give an inch. They'd faced each other like strangers. Since that night, the cracks had spread in silence, etching themselves into their hearts.

T City

The crystal chandelier in the entryway glowed warm and bright, as though welcoming its mistress home.

She hadn't stepped through this door in over a year. Si Chen paused for a second, trying to remember which way the key turned. Her fluffy slippers had been left on the rack beside the door, set out neatly, just where she liked them. She hadn't even finished stepping out of her shoes before she called out:

"Si Yuan! I'm starving!"

"On it!"

A tall, bright-eyed boy leaned out from the kitchen doorway, the corner of his mouth already lifted in a grin. He gave her an OK sign and ducked back inside.

"Fish ball noodles. Ten minutes. Go wash your hands."

The broth in the bowl was something she would never have touched before. But after more than a year of bland Western food, her standards had hit a new low—and somehow, sitting down to this simple, steaming bowl felt like coming home all over again.

Si Yuan cooked the way he did everything: too much of it. The portion was easily twice what she'd normally eat. By the time she was done, she was so full it put her in a mood, and her mouth couldn't help but grumble.

"Two months apart," she muttered, watching him scroll on his phone, "and I still can't compete with that thing? Don't you miss me at all?"

"Nobody interesting. Just killing time." He typed something, hit send, and then—without warning—launched himself at her, landing softly against her shoulder like the world's most affectionate golden retriever.

"I've missed you like crazy, my dear Si Chen. Give me a kiss. Or better yet, stay in my room tonight."

Her heart gave a small jolt. She shoved him off and bolted for her bedroom, pausing in the doorway to strike a coy pose and blow him a kiss.

"The holidays stretch long ahead of us," she said, affecting a lofty tone. " No need to rush."

Si Yuan glanced at his buzzing phone, a slow, wicked smile spreading across his face. He typed a few words, then switched the phone off entirely. Then he wandered out to the balcony, stretched his arms wide, and breathed in the sharp winter air.

The stars were faint tonight. The moon was full and bright.

Tomorrow would be a fine day.

Shanghai, Lujiazui

Outside the hotel conference room, the century-old facades of the Bund and the soaring glass towers of Pudong reflected each other across the river, both blazing under the night lights—a dreamlike blaze of prosperity.

A man stood at the floor-to-ceiling window, suit immaculate, expression unreadable.

The view didn't register.

His phone buzzed. He opened it in an instant, jaw tightening as he read, his grip on the phone tightening involuntarily.

He didn't know how long he stood there before a voice broke through.

"Mr. Yu, they're wrapping up inside."

"I know."

"You barely touched dinner. I could set something aside—"

"No need."

The impatience in his voice was unmistakable, cutting off whatever came next. He turned, crossed the room, and pushed through the glass door to the terrace.

Outside, the cold hit him immediately—the raw, bone-deep cold of a Shanghai winter, brutal against the warmth and lingering fragrance he'd just left behind. The lights of the Bund stretched on, indifferent and magnificent. Only the wind seemed capable of clearing his head, of steadying him for the negotiations ahead.

He opened his phone again. Read those few lines that still carried their warmth one more time, something complicated moving across his face.

Made it home.

Good. Let her eat, rest. She needs to get over the time difference.

Done eating. Even burned incense to the ancestors.

Make sure she sleeps well.

Oh, she'll sleep well—with me.

Don't you dare.

The wind off the terrace sharpened. Yu Hao didn’t move. Not even an inch.

Chapter 2 – Old Friends

On the top floor of T City's oldest five-star hotel, the dim sum restaurant was packed as always.

Si Chen had her heart set on a window table, even if it meant waiting over an hour. Si Yuan couldn't fathom why, so she handed him her credit card and sent him off to the mall next door. With those long-craved traditional dim sum so close, she felt the occasion deserved a few photos for her social feed.

The window looked out over the old iron lift-bridge, still operational after all these years A few hawkers gathered at its foot, selling roasted sweet potatoes and small trinkets. But with malls multiplying across the city and online shopping pulling customers away from the old quarter, only the occasional out-of-town visitor still came by for a photo op.

A hundred-year-old pedestrian street. A sixty-year-old bridge. A hotel that had been standing for over forty years.

And the two of them, together for ten years, if you counted from the day they'd first met by that bridge.

It had been an early summer evening, the after-work crowd streaming past in a hurry. Everyone was rushing—except him. By the time Si Chen ran breathlessly to the bridge, Yu Hao was already there, a few flyers in hand, clearly having been there for quite some time.

He had looked almost surprised to see her. It had only been an offhand matchmaking attempt by her store manager, after all.

"Yu Hao, you don't have a girlfriend yet, do you? Si Chen's a lovely girl, why not get to know each other?"

"Yu Hao's hardworking and reliable, always on time with deliveries, never complains about lugging heavy stock around."

"Si Chen's a good girl—bright and pretty!"

"She's off at six. Why don't you two meet at the bridge at half past?"

They only understood later why both had shown up: neither of them could bring themselves to break a promise.

They crossed the bridge together and wandered the bustling pedestrian street, Eason Chan's Ten Years—the same song, it seemed, from every open doorway

Now, a decade later, Si Chen sat by that glass window at the top of the hotel, gazing down at the bridge and the street below, both quieter than they used to be.

She thought: if ten years ago, neither of them had shown up…

She would never have known him.

And he would never have been hers.

What stranger would she be standing beside instead?

So what about the next ten years?

Would they end up strangers?

"Chen!"

She looked up, startled. The man before her spoke with unhurried composure, a handsome face, a faint smile at the corners of his lips. His well-cut suit had already drawn a few glances from nearby tables.

"Kaiwen? …Small world."

"I had a client staying here, my driver just took him back. I came up hoping to grab a bite, but it looks like…quite the wait."

"It is…"

"Mind if I join you?"

Before she could weigh her answer, Kaiwen had already settled into the seat across from her with easy confidence, idly toying with the cutlery in front of him, and refilled her teacup without missing a beat.

What could she say, really?

"Of course not,"she said, suppressing that small flicker of unease. She offered a smile. "It really has been a long time, hasn't it."

Yes. Far too long.

She reached for the cup of fragrant chrysanthemum pu'er tea, but the freshly poured tea was still too hot to touch.

This composed, polished man was nothing like the boy she remembered. Time might not change a person entirely, she thought, but it had a way of softening old feelings—leaving him feeling at once familiar and like a stranger she was meeting for the first time.

Words were slow in coming. Fortunately, the first round of dim sum arrived just then, filling the silence. It was Kaiwen who finally spoke.

"Sunny mentioned she ran into you in A City, a couple of years back. And Ms Daisy's coming back to Yinghua next Saturday, she specifically asked to see that troublemaker she used to teach."

The name moved Si Chen deeply. Ms Daisy, the American teacher who had loved her and wanted to pull her hair out in equal measure. The memory that stood out most was the day the woman had finally run out of patience and, through gritted teeth, managed only: "Chen, you are a real troublemaker!"

And her younger self had just spread her hands, the picture of unbothered innocence: what could you possibly do about it?

Looking back now, she could feel the heat rising to her cheeks.

"I really was insufferable back then," she said quietly, almost to herself.

Kaiwen held her gaze for a long moment, something unreadable moving behind his eyes. When he spoke, his voice was gentle.

"She'll be thrilled to see you. She always said the naughty ones were the sharp ones."

A small smile found its way to her lips. Across the table sat the boy who had been her partner in every scheme and misdemeanour she could remember—and just like that, she was back in it: being sentenced to the school library in third grade, pilfering food at the charity fair, fabricating arguments at the debate competition, engineering a "minor" disaster in science class. Kaiwen had been there for all of it.

Those years had gone so fast. And they had been so good.

"What's your number these days?"

He picked up his phone, his gaze not leaving her face—steady, deliberate, the kind of look that left her no room to refuse. She gave in and read out the digits in a low voice. Her phone buzzed on the table almost immediately. Kaiwen picked it up without hesitation, his fingers moving with the ease of someone who knew exactly what he was doing. A few seconds later, a new contact had appeared in her address book.

What she couldn't work out was how he knew her passcode was 123456, though she'd never bothered to change it—laziness, mostly.

The whole thing had happened so smoothly she hadn't even thought to object. By the time she caught up, his expression settled into something more serious.

"How have you been?"

The question came too quickly. She wasn't quite ready for it.

"Fine… I've been abroad a lot these past two years."

"Wasn't your dream to see the world without spending a dime?"

"The dream was perfect. The jet lag, absolutely brutal."

Kaiwen laughed—a real one, caught off guard. Same sharp wit, same quick tongue. If anything, time had only refined her looks, adding a quiet maturity to her features. The loose curls, the bright eyes, a new kind of ease in the way she carried herself. And she hadn't changed where it counted: if there was something she didn't want to talk about, she could talk circles around you until you forgot you'd ever asked.

This time, he wasn't going to let it slide. He hadn't come here for pleasantries. There was a wall of unspoken things between them, and today he was going to break through it.

"Are you actually doing well?"

Five words. They landed squarely on her chest, heavy as stone.

She met his eyes for a moment, then looked away. She lifted her tea, cooled by now, and took a small, careful sip, but couldn't quite bring herself to look back up.

"Mum, I'm back!"

Si Yuan came bounding in, flushed and grinning, a brand-new DSLR camera tucked under his arm. To Si Chen, he was nothing short of a lifesaver. Then her eyes landed on the camera, and her relief curdled instantly—there went this month's credit card bill.

Across the table, the change in Kaiwen was immediate. He went rigid, the colour shifting in his face. He was on his feet in an instant, stare locked on Si Yuan, jaw tight.

"Chen?"

No time to think. Just act.

"This… this is my son. Si Yuan."

She smoothed her hair back and willed herself into some semblance of calm.

"Si Yuan, this is an old classmate of mine, Su Kaiwen."

"Hi, Uncle Kaiwen!"

Kaiwen didn't stay much longer. He made some vague excuse and left.

He'd got what he came for. Pushing further would only close a door he'd spent years trying to reopen—he understood that clearly enough.

But the questions gnawed at him. Sunny had passed along her number ages ago; every WeChat request he'd sent had disappeared without a trace. It was only this morning, when Sunny had forwarded a photo from her social feed, that he'd been able to track her down. If he'd missed today, she might have vanished completely. Just like she had at that trade fair in Guangzhou five years ago, when she'd given him a work number, exchanged a few polite words, and then quietly disappeared from the company not long after.

Ten years ago, how could he have been so foolish? Letting her drift away, handing her over to someone else without a fight. If he could go back, he would never have let his family pack him off abroad. He would never have lost his grip on things.

The hesitation and quiet sadness he'd caught in her eyes—however well she'd tried to hide it—had told him everything he needed to know: she wasn't as fine as she was letting on.

And that boy—that roguish-looking teenager—who on earth was he?

Her son. Please. She wasn't even thirty. Where would a teenager have come from? He wasn't buying it for a second.

Meanwhile—

"What took you so long?"

"What, did I ruin the mood?"

"…Seems like it."

Si Yuan watched his mother brush him off, her attention already zeroing in on the still-steaming basket of har gow that had just landed on the table. He could only shake his head, half amused and half exasperated.

The truth was, he'd been back for a while. He'd spotted that "uncle" hovering nearby, watching her from a distance with the look of someone working up the nerve—standing there, quietly, for longer than was strictly dignified, before finally making his move.

A shot like that? No way he was missing it. He'd raised the brand-new camera, found the shot, and pressed the shutter. That telephoto lens had just paid for itself.

And as for today's performance as the perfectly timed, scene-stealing third wheel—

He'd absolutely nailed it.

Surely that earned him something.

Chapter 3 – Reunion

If not for Si Yuan's constant needling, Si Chen would never have come here.

It had started casually enough, him mentioning, with studied innocence, that a certain someone was so hard up he'd been wearing socks with holes in them. Then came the pointed look, and the firm reminder that this, apparently, fell squarely within her area of responsibility. When she thought about it, he had a point. It really had been a long time since she'd sorted out his wardrobe. Since dropping things off at his place directly was out of the question, the next best option was his office.

"Hi there, I have a delivery for Mr Yu Hao, clothes he ordered from our store. Could you make sure he gets these?"

She'd been navigating tricky situations like this for years—it was practically second nature. Mask up, parcel handed over, a flight-attendant smile fixed in place—bright, professional, and designed to close conversations. She was almost out the door.

Then she spotted Xiao Yang through the glass—a woman jabbing a folder in her direction, laying into her with the kind of sharpness that only came with years of practice.

Three things registered, almost simultaneously.

One: that was her person. She wouldn't dream of speaking to her like that herself—so no one else had the right to either.

Two: that woman's delivery was crisp and pointed, delivered with a performer's conviction, the kind of authority that takes years to build. You didn't get that sharp without practice.

Three: the rest of the office had gone completely still. Every face wore the look of someone walking on eggshells—and Si Chen felt a small, unexpected pang of sympathy.

Then came the parting shot, dropped with the casual authority of someone who'd already decided the matter: "From now on, anything for Mr Yu goes through me first."

Si Chen's brow lifted. A slow, cool smile crossed her face.

Big talk.

She exhaled through her nose, turned, and walked away.

In the lift, she typed a message to Xiao Yang: "12 p.m., coffee shop downstairs."

By the time they sat down, Xiao Yang's eyes were already threatening to spill over.

"Chen…"

There it was—she'd been wronged. Badly. She didn't need to ask. The words came tumbling out, weeks' worth of it, all at once.

"That woman… the marketing manager, barely been here a year, came over from Shanghai with Mr Yu… she's good at her job, I'll give her that, but she walks around like she owns the place. I'd just come back from maternity leave, was doing my reports the same as always, and suddenly every single document for Mr Yu has to go through her so-called 'review' first…"

Si Chen listened, already sorting through the key points in her head.

Li Xiaoyang. Her most dependable right hand, back in the day—thorough, steady, the kind of person who never made enemies on purpose. By the time Si Chen left four years ago, Xiao Yang could have run the foreign trade operation in her sleep. Three years ago, it was Si Chen who had personally placed Xiao Yang with Yu Hao, steering her into a finance role.

"There's one more thing, Chen." Xiao Yang dropped her voice, choosing her words carefully. "I think… she has feelings for Mr Yu."

Si Chen's expression didn't flicker. The corner of her mouth lifted, barely.

"I know."

That answer—and the complete absence of alarm behind it—was enough to put Xiao Yang at ease. Anything less would have been an insult to the years they'd stood shoulder to shoulder. It was the kind of calm that only came from knowing exactly where you stood.

Si Chen smiled and steered things where she needed them to go.

"So—what's the general verdict on the boss's lady?"

"Mr Yu is extremely self-disciplined and never lets anything about his personal life slip, nobody knows anything, really. Most people know he has a teenage son; Si Yuan's been interning here over the holidays. He doesn't go out much after work, just goes straight home. There was one time, though—the cashier Ms Weng forgot to get his signature for payroll and went to his apartment. She said a woman answered the door. Mid-forties, she guessed. Looked like she was from the countryside, plainly dressed, no education to speak of, no sense of style. That's all it took for the rumours to start."

"Perfect."

She had everything she needed.

Si Chen slid a bag of baby products and supplements across the table, steering the conversation toward the baby. Of course, it didn't work.

"Chen… if there's anything else you want to know—"

"There is. Your work email. Login and password."

Soon afterward, Si Chen turned the key in the familiar lock and exhaled slowly.

The moment the door swung open, something she hadn't expected hit her all at once—and something between amusement and resignation crossed her face. Everything was exactly as she'd left it. The same layout, the same palette, the same Eiffel Tower print leaning against the wall at its usual angle—not a degree off.

She couldn't help a wry smile. Two years ago she might have called this tasteful. Now, standing in it again, all that black and white and grey just felt tired now, worn out.

Why was she even here? Just for a few clothes, perfume, and facial cleanser? She couldn't entirely explain it, even to herself.

The shelves were bare. A handful of shirts hung in the wardrobe, almost startlingly sparse.

In the corner, a bottle of perfume was nearly empty. He'd never been one for wearing it; she used to leave the cap off and tuck it into the wardrobe so the scent would work its way into his clothes. He'd never said a word against it.

The bathroom was immaculate. She noticed the cleanser—the one Si Yuan had brought back from Europe last year. It had been watered down; he'd been stretching it out. No wonder Si Yuan had specifically asked her to bring a new one.

Had time really carried them this far, this quietly?

She dropped onto the sofa, staring at the grey walls, an itch she couldn't name, a need to do something—anything.

This place needed something fresh.

Three hours later, she was back from IKEA, replacing the old pieces one by one, cushion covers, throws, small ornaments, until the whole space felt different.

She stopped at the Eiffel Tower print. By rights, Van Gogh's Almond Blossom would have broken through all that oppressive black and white far better, the blues and whites would work beautifully with everything she'd just brought in.

The housekeeper arrived mid-transformation, took one look at the sea of blue-green, and her face fell immediately. Had Mr Yu approved any of this? Especially the painting, he'd left very specific instructions about keeping it at exactly that angle.

That painting. She had set it down against the wall by accident, years ago, hadn't even got around to hanging it. And he'd been maintaining its exact position ever since, as if it were a sacred relic?

The man's compulsions were truly beyond saving.

But if he wanted to make that his problem, fine. If it didn't make sense, she wasn't going to try.

The light was fading. Her eyelids were getting heavy. He was away all week—which meant the bed was entirely hers.

When the lights came on, Yu Hao stopped short in the doorway.

For a moment, he was convinced he had the wrong door.

The whole space had been rearranged—colour where there had only been monochrome, softness where everything had once been stark. Only the Eiffel Tower print, still leaning where it always had been, told him this was still his home.

She'd been here. It had to be her.

Nobody else could have done this.

He sat down heavily on the sofa, sinking into cushions that were new to him. His eyes moved slowly around the room. Every corner bore her mark. His clients had gone to the trouble of booking him into a hotel by West Lake, thinking the view might help him unwind. And yet here was the only view that actually did anything for him. This was his alone, worth driving back through the night for, no matter the hour.

Work filled his days. This—whatever she'd left behind—was what he came home to at night. It was the only thing that eased the longing he carried with him, endless and unrelenting.

Si Yuan's early Christmas present, the boy had said. He loved it. That boy could come and collect his reward whenever he pleased.

Warmth rose in his chest first, then something heavier, harder to name. She'd come. She'd been here. But was she still angry? The question settled in him and stayed, a tightness with nowhere to go.

He rubbed at the space between his brows, then crossed to the drinks cabinet and poured the last of the plum wine—barely half a glass. The cold came straight at him, and he let it sink deep into his bones, then raised the glass and drank.

The clock on her phone read 1:47 a.m., Beijing time.

Si Chen didn't know how long she'd been asleep, or how many times she'd surfaced and gone under again. She just knew she wanted to keep sleeping. Seven hours' time difference—hardly anything—and somehow her body still hadn't sorted itself out.

The sleeping pills were in her bag. She knew that. But getting up felt like an unreasonable amount of effort, and she kept telling herself that if she just lay there a little longer, sleep might come back on its own.

Fine. She was lazy. Too lazy to even fetch a glass of water.

Eventually, she couldn't hold out any longer. She padded barefoot to the kitchen, pulled the water bottle from the fridge, washed the pill down. The cold hit her throat and she shuddered.

She was turning back toward the bedroom when the balcony door swung open.

A rush of freezing air.

She went completely still.

"Yu Si Yuan, you absolute liar!"

Yu Hao was just as caught off guard. But he recovered faster—reaching back to pull the balcony door shut behind him. Then his eyes were on her, scanning her up and down, brow furrowed.

"Why are you dressed like that? Where are your shoes? You'll freeze."

Si Chen had nothing. She lowered her head without a word, and retreated to her corner of the sofa. Yu Hao was already moving—he picked up a jacket from nearby and draped it over her shoulders, and leaned down slightly, his voice lowering.

"What did you just take?"

"Sleeping pills… jet lag still hasn't sorted itself out."

Her voice came out small, like a child who knew she'd done something wrong. He looked at her for a moment—the particular look of someone deciding not to say the obvious thing—then got up and went to the kitchen. He filled a glass with water, put it in the microwave, and brought it back warm. Si Chen wrapped both hands around it and felt the heat work its way through her palms.

"I thought you were away."

"Something came up. Came back early."

Silence settled between them—not uncomfortable, just still.

Her eyes drifted to the wall, to the Almond Blossom print. She thought about his obsession with the Eiffel Tower canvas. A small, smug smile crept onto her lips.

"Not bad, right? I spent half a day on this."

"I love it."

He said it simply, without hesitation, and lowered himself onto the sofa beside her. They both looked at the Eiffel Tower print, still leaning against the wall where it had always been. Neither said anything for a while.

Then he exhaled softly and ran his hand gently over her hair.

"Don't take too many of those pills. Get some sleep."

Before she could respond, he'd already lifted her carefully and carried her back to the bedroom. He set her down, pulled the duvet over her, and folded her against him.

She didn't pull away.

The pills were doing their work. Her eyes fell shut, and she let herself go—breathing him in, that familiar mix of cigarette smoke and wine, and beneath it all, the faint trace of her own perfume lingering on him.

Chapter 4 – Campus

Two email inboxes sat open on her screen. Which one deserved her attention first?

Christmas holidays were about to begin overseas—leave it any longer and everyone would vanish for two weeks. Once she'd made up her mind, she threw herself straight into the flood of emails. Years of being thrown in the deep end had honed her to a speed that still caught her off guard sometimes; she could handle two threads at once without missing a beat.

"Si Yuan, water please."

She needed fuel. The wave of mixed Chinese-English correspondence ahead was going to take all she had—even if none of this strictly required her to step in.

Half an hour later, she was leaning against Si Yuan's shoulder with a thermos of warm honey water, showing off her theory.

"They say handwriting reveals character—I'd say emails reveal a person's entire calibre."

"How so?"

"Volume tells you how much someone actually handles. The subject line tells you whether they can summarise. The greeting and tone tell you how they treat people. The body shows their thinking. And the way they write back tells you everything about the state of that relationship."

"Your verdict?"

"Low ability, high arrogance. Honestly, unbelievable."

She had a full lecture still to deliver when her phone rang at the worst possible moment.

Kaiwen. The key point: tomorrow at ten, Yinghua—Ms Daisy had asked for her specifically.

She could have found a way around Kaiwen's enthusiasm, but not Ms Daisy getting on the pone herself. She did, however, manage to decline the offer of a lift. The school was just on the other side of the wall, practically. She kept that to herself.

Si Yuan watched her hang up with a look that knew too much. "Works out well," he said. "My Ms Nancy's been wanting to talk through my subject choices with someone."

A double ambush. So that was how it was. No wonder she'd lost all appetite for email philosophy. As for tomorrow—whatever happened, happened.

The moment she stepped through the school gates, her so-called attendant, Yu Si Yuan, snatched her phone and vanished in a blur. Nearly an hour passed. Still nothing.

A third wheel might have helped, she realised now. Alone, she was—there was no other word for it—mortified.

After a warm embrace with Ms Daisy, the teacher launched into a fond retelling of Si Chen's greatest hits. Si Yuan's absence was perhaps a blessing—some of their "legendary youth" might have genuinely unsettled him. Within half an hour, Ms Daisy was swept off by former colleagues, and Kaiwen steered Si Chen toward their old haunt beside the library.

His gaze—too direct, too intent—made her fidget. After a few exchanges, he must have sensed it, because he changed course.

"Honestly, I prefer your Chinese name. Si Chen."

"Why?" she asked.

"Because the first time we met, you introduced yourself as 'Si Chen.' Not 'Season.'"

"Fair point, Su Kaiwen." She smiled.

"What a shame you left for abroad in your first year of senior high."

Si Chen nudged a pebble along the flowerbed with her shoe. Not possible, she thought, though she said nothing.

The year Kaiwen left for abroad was the year things at home began to unravel. Her father's illness had worsened. The international school fees became impossible—they'd only scraped through the second half of Year Nine on scholarship relief. As the eldest, she and her mother had sat down together and talked about betting everything on treatment. She was still proud of what they decided, because that was when she'd learned what it actually meant to stand alongside someone through the worst. Kaiwen would never know any of it.

"Why didn't you stay on here for sixth form?" he asked.

Something moved in her chest, but she kept her voice light.

"No one left to help me clean up the mess, was there."

This time she didn't stick her tongue out, or look up with that triumphant grin. She kept her eyes on the pebbles and let the moment pass.

At Yinghua, she could have coasted and still walked away with straight As. Switching to the domestic system, she'd worked herself down to the bone just to scrape into a halfway decent regular high school. The gap between international and local curricula turned out to be a different universe: standing to answer in class, textbooks stacked into walls, test papers you could weigh by the kilo, and something called the gaokao that pressed down on every waking breath. She failed everything from the first test onward—every subject except English. Then in the second term of Year Eleven, her father died. She turned down the relatives' offers and took the weight of the household onto herself.

Was it just an excuse to escape the gaokao? That question had nagged at her for years, a proper chicken-and-egg riddle with no clean answer. She had never regretted it. That chapter had taught her what it meant to bear responsibility.

Like the smooth stone under her shoe—worn round by years of rain and weather.

"Kaiwen," she said quietly. "I grew up."

Yes. She had. She'd had no choice, and she'd known it.

Kaiwen's breath caught. His hand tightened suddenly in her hair, then something reined him in. He withdrew slowly, and only then noticed his hand had curled into a fist.

"Let's walk a bit," he said.

Si Yuan scrolled back through the shots on his camera, turning over his operation from an hour ago.

He had spliced last week's reunion shots with today's follow-up into three photos and sent them over. The caption had to hit just the right note:

Childhood sweethearts, their old school, their old memories—reunited at last.

Then he'd 'accidentally' left her phone in the locker and left it to ring away to its heart's content.

The angle from the second floor was perfect. Winter light came in warm and soft. The subjects were cooperating beautifully, as if they'd rehearsed it. Almost too perfect to look at directly, he forwarded a copy straight to the leading man.

He retrieved one of the phones from the locker and typed:

"Your wall's being dug out. Three feet deep already."

The call came immediately.

"Why weren't you picking up?"

"Left my phone at home. Just brought hers over." without a hint of guilt.

"And yours?"

"Do we really need to have the 'where's your phone' conversation right now?"

"You're not stopping this?"

"I tried. I sent her to A City. You're the one who didn't hold onto her."

Heavy breathing on the other end.

"Keep things under control. Thirty minutes."

"Understood."

A City to T City took over an hour even without traffic. Thirty minutes? Si Yuan shook his head, half admiring, half disbelieving, pocketed the phone, and went to take up his appointed role as third wheel—to wedge himself between the childhood sweethearts and do whatever damage he could.

Plays never go entirely according to plan. The moment the boyhood friend said, "So this is your stepson, then," the script went sideways.

And then—with Si Yuan right there—the man had the nerve to pull the oldest move in the book. "A bit windy today," he murmured, coat already lifted, ready to settle it around her shoulders. He hadn't been wearing it all afternoon. He'd been carrying it. For exactly this moment.

Too slow.

A different coat came down heavily across her shoulders, and she was pulled back into a familiar, iron-sure hold. The voice behind it was low and edged with anger, every word placed with precision.

"Exactly how are you looking after Mum?"

The words were addressed to the third wheel. The eyes were fixed on Kaiwen. The arms held Si Chen—firmly, entirely, no room for argument. The entrance was seamless.

What exactly did I do wrong?—Si Yuan, internally.

What are you doing here?— Si Chen, startled.

So you finally showed up.—Kaiwen, one brow raised.

My territory. Nobody trespasses.—Yu Hao, brooking no objection.

Territorial claim: successful.

What followed was, against all odds, almost civilised. "Friendly" introductions were exchanged, "Warm" conversation followed. They paid a joint visit to Ms Daisy. They even ended up in the canteen together for lunch.

Everything stayed calm—until the boyhood friend placed a second large prawn on Si Chen's plate.

"Careful, your neck might start itching later. Don't scratch it raw—I haven't got any cream on me."

The smile was impeccable. The concern was almost convincing.

The strike, however, was surgical.

Three points, driven home in a single sentence:

One: she's allergic to seafood. You didn't know that.

Two: I've applied the cream for her before. You didn't know that either.

Three: when I was putting that cream on her, you were probably still nowhere in the picture.

The leading man's chopsticks stilled in mid-air. Something shifted in his face. The air seemed to freeze along with it.

Si Chen dropped her gaze, thoroughly caught out, torn between swallowing the prawn and putting it back.

Head nearly in her plate—mortified by past indiscretions, or simply devastated at the thought of never eating prawns in peace again?

Just as Si Yuan drew breath to cut in and change the subject, the leading man's hand moved, settling against her neck and cheek, his voice low, controlled, and leaving no room for doubt.

"I've spoiled her, I'm afraid. We'll have a look when we get home."

Your move, then.

Three points, returned with interest:

One: small things are already in hand.

Two: family matters are not your business.

Three: the past may have been yours—but today and tomorrow are mine.

Si Yuan could only concede. The speed. The precision. The sheer efficiency—his own skills had a long way to go.

The finishing blow landed without warning: "My son has been a poor student, his teacher has had to worry on his behalf. We owe him a proper apology in person. Please excuse us."

Not a crack left to get through.

And yet the boyhood friend was no lightweight. He left with easy grace, and managed a parting line that gave nothing away. "This was short notice. We'll make time properly, next time."

Masters at work: still water on the surface, a storm underneath.

This round was over.

The match was not.

To be continued.

Chapter 5 – Facing It

After washing up, Si Chen stood staring at the woman in the mirror—someone who still hadn't quite come back to herself. Her wet hair only added to the dishevelment.

What unsettled her was her own calm—facing all of this today, and still feeling nothing she couldn't manage. It didn't seem right.

Since they'd got home, he had stayed out on the balcony smoking. Si Yuan, quick as ever to read the room, had made himself scarce the moment he sensed the atmosphere, retreating to his room to "revise."

It shouldn't have been this quiet. Even dinner had passed without a word between them.

Maybe he didn't care after all. Her chest felt hollow. Was she still hoping for something from him?

The thought brought back a memory she hadn't reached for in years. For some reason she could no longer remember, they'd been in the middle of a cold war, walking side by side along a crowded street without speaking. A woman on an electric bike came from behind and hit Si Chen's calf. Frightened—the brakes had probably failed—she didn't apologise. Instead she turned on Si Chen and shouted: watch where you're going.

Yu Hao had been crouching down to check the bruise. His fist tightened. He stood up, said nothing, and walked straight toward the bike, kicked it once, hard, then seized it and hurled it aside. It wasn't the pain that frightened Si Chen. It was the fury that had been there all along, suddenly breaking through. Through his teeth, he turned and snarled: "And who's not watching where they're going now?" Every inch of him was ready to go further.

She lunged forward and grabbed his hand, holding on tight."Don't. Please. I'm scared. I want to go home."

That was the first time she'd truly seen what lay hidden beneath his composure.

The door eased open. In the mirror, their eyes met.

Surprise crossed Yu Hao's face, then displeasure—the helpless kind, the kind he was holding himself back from showing. She could read it at a glance.

He came closer, switched on the hairdryer with one hand, and with the other lifted a damp lock of her hair. The roar of warm air flooded the room, slicing through the dead quiet. When it stopped, his voice came through, low, carrying reproach, and something that refused to be swallowed down.

"You never mentioned him."

So he'd been sitting on it all day. She'd half expected him to let it go. Si Chen pulled herself up at once, ready for it.

"I did mention him. He sent a set of bone china from the States—we picked it up from the post office together, remember?"

Yu Hao went still. The hand on her shoulder tightened. "That so-called best friend," he said through his teeth. "The cups you could never bring yourself to use."

Once she was in this mood, nothing on earth could intimidate her. She turned to face him directly, meeting his eyes without flinching.

"That's right."

If a storm was coming, let it come properly. She had no time for a cold drizzle. She squared her shoulders, chin up, with the look of someone saying: your move.

She was in full battle mode now, with a quiet certainty that this was going to be a bad one.

His eyes caught the faint red marks at her throat and stopped there. For a moment, he seemed to lose himself. His gaze remained fixed on that small patch of skin as he lifted a hand and touched it, at first lightly, then with gathering force, as though he could wipe away a mark that had no right to exist.

She moved to push him off. His arm came around her waist and locked her in place. She stepped back and found there was nowhere to go. His mouth found hers, tentative at first, then hardening into something that was almost possession. The heat spread from that single point of contact and moved through her, and she couldn't stop the small tremor that followed.

Everything came loose.

This was not the storm she'd been bracing for.

He was like a wild thing that had been caged past its limit, and she was the prey he had already decided was his. His words came broken, low against her ear—halting, but each one absolute.

"You're… mine… you're mine…"

His anger hadn't gone anywhere. It had been pressed down until there was nowhere left for it to go—and then it had surged back up and taken everything with it.

The door swung open without warning. Si Yuan's face was entirely composed.

He glanced at the clock in the corner of his screen. Past one in the morning. Had it got that late already? He'd barely made a dent in the game.

He'd known this was coming. He pulled off his headset—and the opening line landed squarely.

"Is that what revision looks like."

"I was avoiding things I shouldn't hear. Domestic conflict causes lasting psychological damage to teenagers, you know."

One look at the man's expression told him this wasn't the moment for jokes. He shifted into evidence-briefing mode immediately.

"Premeditated—clearly. Came prepared. First he gets close, then he stirs up the old feelings. Next move will be a full offensive."

"And where were you?"

Oh, come on. This lands on me now? Your wife nearly runs off—that's a marital problem. I'm just here for the show.

"Me? I played the third wheel flawlessly. Didn't even call him 'uncle' a second time—he wrote me off as a 'stepson' and that was that. And remember, German tank Andres and French romantic Julien both counted me as a bonus. Buy one, get one free."

The situation was serious. The man looked wrecked. Time to put something back in him.

"The good news is, so far every attempt has failed. Flies don't land on uncracked eggs. These past few years I've practically made a career of swatting them away."

He stood there rigid, looking genuinely bleak. Time to inject some fighting spirit, Si Yuan decided.

"Fortunately, at this point? All feeling on his side, none on hers—for now."

The man let out a long breath. Something in his face eased. Si Yuan wasted no time, sidling up to him with his most shameless grin.

"You have to admit, I've worked incredibly hard. That photo last week—if I'd had a zoom lens I wouldn't have had to keep running back and forth just to get the focus right."

"No."

Si Yuan pulled a face and retreated. The mannerism was so familiar it gave the man pause. Whose temper was that, exactly.

Old memories surfaced—all those schemes that had left him half furious and half trying not to laugh.

Why not… savour them again, through the boy.

"Two."

The reaction was more than he'd bargained for. Si Yuan lit up like he'd won the lottery, launched himself forward, and planted kisses all over his face. He had her in him entirely, right down to the last impish spark.

"Alright. Bed. Breakfast ready by ten."

Nothing in this life came free. Breakfast would be the price. For the sake of that lens, he could manage.

Then a thought flashed through his mind and refused to stay down. A City to T City—over an hour, even without traffic. How had he arrived so much earlier than that?

The answer came, perfectly flat:

"High-speed rail."

For once, Si Chen slept well. The duvet stayed warm—not like those mornings when the cold crept in before dawn. The reason, well. There was a source of heat beside her. She kept her eyes shut and stayed still, pretending to sleep to avoid the awkwardness.

"Did you sleep well?" the heat source murmured.

No. Every single part of her ached.

She said nothing, kept her eyes shut, and played dead. He shifted closer, gathered her curled-up body into his arms, his breath warm against the top of her head, lips moving at her neck, stubble grazing her skin and raising a trail of shivers.

There had been a time when she opened her eyes and found his calm face looking back, and it had felt like the most natural thing in the world. She'd never stopped to question why. Ten years, and they'd never once spent more than a fortnight continuously together. She'd thought that was just how it was.

Now she was restless and irritable, with no way to settle it. All she wanted was out.

Two years. He couldn't admit fault—not once? Was she supposed to drag over a stool and build him a step down herself? Why on earth should she.

The pressure in her chest built. She reached for the duvet. He must have felt it—his arms tightened, pulling her in as though letting go meant losing her for good.

"Bathroom."

See? He had to let go.

She seized the moment, threw back the covers, and locked herself in the bathroom. When she was done, she went straight to the living room.

Breakfast passed in silence. Si Yuan, reading the atmosphere, simply took lunch upon himself as well. Noodles, again.

She regretted not teaching him more. She'd only ever thought: if he can make noodles, he won't go hungry. What she hadn't counted on was him becoming a specialist. fish ball noodle soup, dry-tossed noodles, pan-fried noodles—beyond noodles, a complete blank.

She'd been hoping the day would pass without incident—until Si Yuan dropped it, as casually as a stone into still water:

"Grandma's coming for dinner."

The headache arrived immediately. The fridge held a few slices of luncheon meat and some spinach. That was nowhere near sufficient for the empress dowager's standards. The three of them inhaled the rest of lunch and headed out.

They were almost out the door when Si Yuan's head appeared in front of her, scanning her up and down like a human detector.

"Your neck is really red," he said, voice full of exaggerated concern. "Want some cream?"

Si Chen sucked in a breath. She wanted to smack him. She wanted to deal with the actual culprit. She wanted the floor to open up and take her.

At least someone had a conscience. He slipped away to the bedroom and returned with a scarf, wrapping it around her neck to cover the damage.

Chapter 6 – Wilfulness

Once upon a time, she and the man now in the driver's seat had been like those couples outside the window—huddled together on a motorbike, pushing through the cold, heading for the same wet market.

It wasn't that she had anything against supermarkets, with their neat displays and better-looking produce, nor that the slightly lower prices meant anything to her. What she missed was that particular noise and bustle, the market's raw, lived-in energy. It took her back to the years when they'd had almost nothing, and hadn't thought twice about sharing what little there was.

She had been the one who once agonised over a few cents at the vegetable stall, who had sweetened her voice to coax fifty fen off a kilo of apples, who walked the entire market twice over just to find the freshest fish for a pot of soup. He, in turn, had learned what was in season and what wasn't, how to tell fresh meat from old, how to pick vegetables free of pesticides. For the girl she'd been before twenty—the one who'd grown up with everything done for her—none of this had ever seemed like a life she'd live.

Walking through the market now, the produce assembled itself in her mind into a proper dinner:

Crisp celery tossed with marinated beef over high heat—fragrant and searing.

Chicken and potato slow-cooked in curry and coconut milk, a faint Southeast Asian warmth.

Sea bass from the brackish estuary, fattest at this time of year, steamed until the flesh came apart in clean flakes.

October hairy crabs, heavy with roe, steamed from cold water to seal in the sweetness and keep every leg in place.

Post-harvest choy sum, sweetened by the autumn winds, needing nothing more than salted boiling water to bring out their sweetness.

South China Sea squid, flash-cooked, served with soy and mustard—made for a glass of something cold.

Hakka glutinous rice balls steeped in wine lees, finished with osmanthus honey—the sweet note that closed every meal properly.

And the soup, which mattered most of all.

She used to rely on those ready-made herb packets from the supermarket. Now she went to the dry goods shop herself and chose the ingredients by hand, matching them to the season and to whoever was at the table.

When had she last had a day like this? All she had to do was talk the vendors down on price, while behind her, someone else carried everything and settled the bill. Every inch the queen making her rounds, flanked by two reasonably good-looking men—one a composed, quietly attractive older man, the other a bright-faced boy with easy charm. The combination turned heads all the way through, housewives pausing mid-errand to look twice. Add a pair of sunglasses and the whole thing would have been red-carpet ready.

They came home loaded. The kitchen immediately became a different kind of battlefield.

Both men were practically parched by the time they got through the door, so she started a pot of pork rib and herb broth first—cooling and restorative. Nobody knew how demanding her mother's palate was better than her own daughter: if the soup hadn't been going for at least two hours, it had no business on the table.

As for her cooking—it used to baffle her, this talent she hadn't asked for and couldn't quite explain. Then she remembered something her mother had always said: the ones who really know how to eat will always know how to cook.

He went to collect her mother at five, while Si Chen was still in the kitchen. By rights, her mother should have walked straight in and started cataloguing everything that was wrong—the state of the flat, the arrangement of the furniture, all of it leading to the same conclusion: that Si Chen had failed as mistress of the house. Instead she was remarkably composed, chatting warmly with him, letting Si Yuan coax her into laughter with his usual tricks.

She knew how much these two could eat. But did they have to eat as though they hadn't had a proper meal in half a lifetime? The table—six dishes, one soup, one dessert, generously portioned—was gone in what felt like minutes.

Her mother set her chopsticks down slowly and sighed. Si Chen's stomach dropped. Nothing good had ever followed that sigh.

Sure enough, there was no warm-up. She went straight in.

"What kind of household are you running? everyone eating like they've just crawled out of a famine! Si Yuan's still growing—how is he supposed to get tall with no proper nourishment? Yu Hao works himself half to death, smokes and drinks, and can't even get a decent bowl of soup. And you—you disappeared for over a year! France, Germany, Japan—have I left anywhere out?"

"Singapore! Malaysia! Thailand!" Si Yuan threw in helpfully, hand half-raised like a student with the answer.

"You think you're still single? Just pack up and go whenever the mood strikes? Look at yourself—all skin and bones, yellow in the face, looking half like a ghost. And you're still talking about going off again?"

She'd clearly been saving it up. The relief on her face when she'd finished was visible.

"India!" Si Yuan added, as though completing a geography quiz.

You little troublemaker, *Si Chen thought. *Stop adding fuel. I've never treated you badly.

Her mother was drawing breath for the next round—"How long this time, you—"

"Mum." Yu Hao's voice came in, calm and well-timed. "A friend from Guangxi brought me a bottle of medicinal wine—supposed to be good for the blood. Chen, would you grab it and pour Mum a glass to try?"

Smooth. Well-timed. The fire redirected before it could catch. He knew exactly what he was doing. Still—Mum, your daughter can only take so much. Two more sentences and I would have broken down.

The storm blew itself out. The rest of the evening passed without further incident, more or less.

She had clearly come looking for trouble. She hadn't even brought a change of clothes—just announced, as though it were already decided, that she was staying the night.

Si Chen had been quietly planning to hand Yu Hao a pillow and redirect him to the study. That plan was now unthinkable. Instead she picked up her own pillow and went to squeeze into her mother's bed, claiming she'd been missing her mother and wanted a lullaby to fall asleep to. A flimsy excuse—but no one pushed back on it.

It was a mistake. She knew it almost immediately. Her mother had barely finished with her at the dinner table before starting up again the moment they were lying down—this time without the performance, and straight from the heart.

"You got through the hard years together. And now that things are easier, you still haven't found peace. Once you've made up your mind, there's no moving you—I know that. But think about it: after all this time, what more do you want from him? He's already giving way to you at every turn?"

"It's not only me," Si Chen muttered. "I have my grievances too."

Her mother sighed, voice quieter now. "You know how much pride that man has. He's already bending over backwards for you—more than you give him credit for. Know when to stop, while things are still good."

He never could have expected her to come back with a pillow. If he had, he wouldn't still be standing at the window with a glass in his hand, brow furrowed. When she appeared in the doorway, he startled visibly, set the glass down quickly, and crossed the room to meet her.

"What happened?"

She didn't know where to start. The feeling she'd been holding back all day broke through at once, and the tears came before she could stop them. He took the pillow from her, drew her in, and held her, one hand patting her back in slow, steady strokes, letting her cry quietly.

After a long while, she managed something coherent: "My mum doesn't want me anymore."

"That couldn't be further from the truth."

"She said I'm water that's already been poured out. She doesn't want to take it back."

What could he say to that? He did what he could—held her close, kept his voice low.

"That's not true. It's all right. Just rest. Just sleep."

They lay down in the quiet. Her back against his chest, his breathing slow and warm behind her, steadying her by degrees. She didn't turn over. She knew what would happen if she did—those eyes, and everything in them. She wasn't ready for that yet.

Her mother's words were still with her:

"A year ago I was going to call you back myself. Do you know what he said? 'Mum, it's her dream. I won't stand in the way.'"

She understood perfectly why her mother had shown up today with all her noise and her overnight bag and her lectures.

It all came down to one thing:

If this all came apart—who else in the world would put up with her wilfulness?

Chapter 7 – Hurt

Strong feelings always come with a price.

She woke the next morning with a throat that felt like sandpaper. No need to look anything up—she knew the routine by heart. Fever within two days, cough once it broke. The last thing she wanted was a second person to know about it. Specifically: him.

And yet Yu Hao appeared with medicine already in hand. It was as though he'd had her wired up the entire time, leaving her nowhere to hide.

Her mother, who had declared herself a permanent fixture the night before, had apparently revised her position on the "water already poured" front and swept off with Si Yuan without a backward glance—ostensibly to fatten the boy up properly, as any devoted grandmother would.

Which left the two of them on the sofa, side by side. Si Chen cut a sideways glance at Yu Hao, who was staring at the actor on screen with complete absorption. Four days. He was still here. Was he not planning to leave?

This was the man who had taken a day off—exactly half a day—to register their marriage. The man who had never once arrived late or left early, who treated work as the fixed centre of everything. And now here he was, throwing out the rulebook without explanation.

For the past four days he had been a constant shadow. Wherever she went, he followed. Laundry, cooking, the clinic, the pills, the small daily kindnesses; he had missed nothing. She was starting to wonder if she was actually dying, how else to explain him hovering over her like this. Every extra glance felt like a bonus.

Right on schedule, the phone rang. She didn't need to think about it, that would be the woman from the office, calling in with the devotion of someone who believed the world stopped turning without him, or at the very least, that she needed to keep orbiting him until he noticed.

The drama hero on screen chose this moment to gaze soulfully in Yu Hao's general direction. Si Chen felt her stomach turn. She suspected he did too.

The phone rang again. Something had to give. She slapped her hand down over it and fixed him with a look—mouth tilted, challenge clear: go on, then. Let's see.

He barely glanced over, then returned to the television without reaching for the phone. Her irritation spiked. So now he'd added selective deafness to his repertoire. Predictably, the woman didn't give up—inside two minutes, the second call came through.

Well. If fate put the target right in front of her, she wasn't going to miss.

She slid to answer and got in the first shot before the other end had a chance to speak.

"Who's this? Hao's in the shower, he can't take your call right now."

Her voice thick with a genuine fever rasp, pitched deliberately lower still, with just a suggestion of something that had no business being on a respectable person's tongue.

A beat of stunned silence on the other end.

"Who… who is this?"

"Me? Oh—don't tell me you're his wife."

"I—I need to speak to Mr Yu Hao—"

"Is it urgent? Hold on just a moment—"

She darted to the kitchen, cranked the tap up full, and delivered the rest.

"Hao says he's not taking anyone's calls for a few days. Wife's calls only. He also says—" she let the pause land— "his time's very valuable."

Her conscience caught up with her—she did have some standards, after all, and there was always the chance something at the company actually needed sorting, partly to watch him handle the wreckage.

She handed the phone to Yu Hao, he solved it in one move. Power off.

Everything catches up with you eventually.

Half an hour later, her own phone rang, from Kaiwen.

So he ignored his own calls but paid close attention to hers. After a few rings she looked across at Yu Hao and made a small, pointed gesture: after you. Fair's fair.

He answered without hesitation and went straight into damage control.

"She can't take calls right now."

"I'll pass the message on."

"You're reading too much into it."

Si Chen watched his face tighten by degrees, brow pulling in, his tone sliding from neutral to something cooler. Then, without warning: "He wants to talk to you directly." And the phone was in her hand.

So even this, she had to sort out herself.

"Hi, Kaiwen."

"I heard you weren't taking calls—what's going on?"

"A cold. Barely got a voice."

"Is it bad? Do you want me to come by?"

"No—I'm in A City. I'll find you when I'm back."

She ended it quickly, afraid one more sentence would give something away. On the momentum of the exchange, she felt she'd completely lost that round. He got up and went to pack.

She'd had a send-off line ready. Then she looked over and stopped cold. He was packing her things as well. She crossed the room and blocked him.

"Why are you touching my stuff?"

"We're going back to A City."

"Why?"

"Because that's what we said. A City."

"You're still skipping work, aren't you?"

"I've got plenty of leave."

To his credit, he knew when to back off—before she could truly explode, he was back at work on the second day in A City. He left one condition: she wasn't to leave A City.

Just as well. Much longer without showing his face at the office, and even Xiao Yang would have started texting to ask if the company was going under.

"No," she replied lightly. "We're getting ready to go public."

When things felt stuck, she went out for some air.

The mall was saturated with Christmas cheer. A three-metre tree in the atrium blazed with lights and ornaments, pulling in clusters of people with their cameras. Every counter displayed its holiday limited editions, packaged with careful festivity. At the entrance, a Santa beamed with professional warmth at everyone who passed.

She'd chosen the café window seat deliberately. After sending him a message, she sat alone and looked across at the department store opposite. In the display window, a mannequin stood in her favourite brand of work suit.

Back then, money had been tight. They'd bought a small two-bedroom on the outskirts of T City and scrambled every month to cover the mortgage and the fit-out costs. Every time they walked the high street, they passed this shop. She would stop and stare at the outfit in the window, then turn to Yu Hao and say:

"One day I'll wear that and go everywhere—every corner of this country, and then the world."

A goal is a strange thing. It's a lighthouse—it shows you which way to point, and it keeps you moving. But somewhere along the road toward it, you lose other things without even noticing.

She had never actually bought anything from that brand, not once, though she'd been able to afford it for years. She couldn't explain why.

They had known, once, exactly what they were doing: keep moving, plan well, earn more. One flat paid off, then another. Circuits traced across China. Stamps collected in passports. And somewhere in the process, they drifted further and further apart.

She felt lost. No, both of them were.

She couldn't have said when it started, or where.

She had known for a long time: everything Yu Hao did was, in truth, for her. He accumulated wealth to give her ground solid enough to stand on, to prove to her—and perhaps to himself—that her choice had been the right one. He gave her the widest possible freedom, going along with whatever she wanted, however she wanted it. He took care of her, indulge her, hold her as the thing he valued most. He dispelled her bad moods and give her a sense of safety that never ran out.

So much love. Surely that deserved gratitude.

To others, Yu Hao was steady and thorough—a man built for significant things. To her, he was simply the one who stayed. Quiet, constant, always there.

His impeccable manners came from habit—from the practice of keeping a certain distance from people. His refusal to stop before a goal was met came from something closer to fear: because, deep down, he couldn't afford to lose. She had seen the coldness in him, and ached over the weight he carried in silence. She had seen through the bravado.

There were moments when he seemed genuinely startled that she understood what he wanted more clearly than he did himself.

And now he was standing behind her. Had been, for a while.

She knew. She was letting him know she knew.

"You're here."

"Mm. Shall we eat out?"

She didn't answer. He hadn't really expected her to. He sat down and looked at the shop window before finally speaking—the words coming out carefully, like something he'd been rehearsing and still hadn't got quite right.

"That… India. It's chaotic. For a woman traveling alone, it's not safe."

She turned and looked at his face—the discomfort written clearly across it—and said, quietly:

"Why can't you just say it straight? Tell me not to go."

This paper wall between them. She was going to break through it today, one way or another.

He didn't falter the way she'd expected. He let out a long breath—the slow exhale of someone setting something down—and said:

"It's your dream."

"I thought so too, once."

She was tired.

She didn't want to go.

She wanted to stay. Right here. Just like this.

Chapter 8 – Waiting

Waiting, it turned out, was an almost unbearable thing.

She had kept the home fires burning for over eight years.

He had barely made it through two and was already close to losing his mind.

How had she done it? All those years—how had she endured?

Six months after they met, Yu Hao was reassigned and stepped onto a road that would keep him away for a long time. The title on his business card moved from supervisor to manager to regional head, then from one branch to the next. The cities changed. The salary climbed.

In the first three years, he still rushed to catch the Friday afternoon train home.

By the fourth, posted further away, he made it back once or twice a month.

By the sixth, between the start-up and the constant travel, he came home only for the major holidays.

But no matter how long he'd been gone—when the door opened, the flat was always spotless. Dinner was always on the table. The soup was already going on the hob.

"Welcome home."

He had taken it for granted, in those years, that someone would always be there—a person, a light, always waiting for his return.

He had never once stopped to think what, in all that waiting, she had actually received.

A birthday he wasn't there to celebrate.

A coat he never put around her shoulders when the cold came.

Medicine he never brought when she fell ill.

Worries he never helped carry when anxiety pressed down on her.

And the child who passed through their lives like a shooting star—he hadn't even been there to sign his name on the hospital form.

"Where are you?"

Where had he been?

In the Beijing head office, discussing some hollow, showy marketing slogan.

"The doctor says I need to be admitted for bed rest."

He had told himself, with genuine naivety: she's in the hospital now. She'll be fine.

"There's no heartbeat anymore… they say they'll need to operate."

Even if he'd been trying to hold himself together, how could he have said what he said—miscarriages are common. Lots of women go through this.

Lots of women do—but she was his wife.

By the time he reached the hospital, she was lying on a temporary bed in the corridor, white as paper, eyes fixed on nothing. The doctor said what doctors say in those moments: you're young. There will be other chances.

Something in her broke right then. She curled under the blanket and wept—a raw, animal sound, the kind that doesn't sound like crying so much as the world ending.

Years later, he could still hear it.

In the days that followed, she didn't blame him. She lay curled against him and murmured, in a voice barely above a whisper:

"I had a little brother once. He only lived a few months."

"He was so small. He looked so much like my father."

"This was our child…"

She must have been devastated beyond anything she let him see.

On paper, it was a weak embryo complicated by stress. But Yu Hao knew the truth of it: it was a warning from heaven. He had failed at the most basic duties of a husband. Of a father.

Back then he had genuinely believed that if he gave her enough—a solid foundation, financial security, the freedom to live without bowing to anyone—everything else would follow.

How shallow that was.

An excuse, nothing more.

Yu Hao had never expected to meet someone like a princess.

A girl who carried an innate kind of grace even in difficult times—not the kind that could be taught or bought, just something she was born with. She had a sharpness of eye, a quickness of mind, a taste and an instinct that set her apart from everyone in the room. Even when her family's fortunes fell, her composure and confidence never did.

Perhaps because she was so exceptional, he had often felt not quite enough. Not worthy of her, not strong enough to truly hold his own beside someone like that.

On their first trip to Hong Kong, she led him through Lan Kwai Fong, switching into English with strangers as easily as changing lanes. She walked into a bespoke tailor in Central and had a suit measured for him without a flicker of hesitation. She ate her way through back alleys and side streets and could name every star on the Avenue of Stars without thinking.

At one company gala he brought her as his guest. She was elegant, funny, effortlessly at ease with clients and colleagues alike, and the envy in the room was visible. He was the opposite—quiet by habit, someone who kept people at a careful distance, known as the man who only knew how to work, a machine with no patience for empty socialising. She had brought colour into a world that had been grey.

Sometimes he felt like a country boy being led by the hand into a grand garden he would never have dared enter on his own. She would look at him and say, with that calm certainty of hers: "I believe you'll make a world of your own."

She had lifted his life to a height he hadn't known to want.

He had grown up in a remote village. He'd never understood how a well-fitted suit could change the way a man held himself, how a plain dish could become something remarkable with the right presentation, how a single painting on a wall could shift the entire feeling of a room.

She had shown him what he was capable of.

So he worked harder, moved faster, determined to give his girl the best of everything, as quickly as possible.

But she had never been chasing wealth. She had never needed him to conquer anything. All she had ever wanted was a quiet, ordinary happiness.

He, however, couldn't stop. Something that went by the name of pride drove him like a creature with no off switch. It couldn't rest, and it wouldn't let him rest either.

That pride curdled into obsession, and the obsession into a kind of tunnel vision. He poured himself into work, into building and accumulating, telling himself it was all for her—so she could live better, do whatever she wanted, never have to compromise for money.

Some years back, he had resigned and started his own company. The early months were brutal beyond words. Then things found their footing, the path ahead grew clearer. And then, just a year later—a quality scandal hit the foreign brand he represented. Returns came flooding in. Claims arrived daily. Cash flow seized up. Salaries went unpaid.

Even then, he clenched his jaw and said nothing to her.

But she found out anyway.

Without a word to him, she sold two flats and a plot of land and transferred the money into the company account. The accountant assumed he had authorised it. Salaries were paid. Refunds went out. He only found out when he went through the accounts himself.

The fury that came over him had no bottom.

The first flat had been their home. She had never let it, never changed a thing, preserving exactly the way she had decorated it at twenty. The land was where she had planned to build something—she'd had it all mapped out in her head. She shouldn't have had to do any of it. He had, in those first hours of rage, half resolved to file for divorce and leave her everything that remained.

She had never truly understood what pride cost him.

And so, in that flat, they had their only real fight. Anger and hurt, each refusing to give an inch:

"Why didn't you tell me first?"

"I didn't think I needed to."

"You sold things I bought for you without a word?"

"Would you have said yes?"

"Do you think I'm useless?"

"That's got nothing to do with it."

"I would rather have let the company fail than have you do this."

"You have no idea what I actually want."

He had no answer to that.

He had never once asked.

The remote control shattered against the wall. It did nothing to cover what was collapsing inside him.

In every argument before this one, no matter how heated, it had never lasted more than a day. She would soften first—tease out a truce, coax an apology, quietly build him a way down from wherever his pride had taken him.

This time, she was genuinely done. She walked out with tears in her eyes, the door slamming behind her. The next day came the news: she'd been posted abroad.

He hadn't tried to stop her. He couldn't find a single reason that would have held.

Her world was too bright, too wide. He had no right to keep her inside the small, still box of a life he had drawn around himself.

It was the year after the miscarriage when a six-year-old boy stumbled into their lives.

On a busy street, the boy snatched the phone from Si Chen's hand and ran. Yu Hao caught him and marched him to the police station like a stray cat. The child sat back, crossed one leg over the other with the ease of someone who'd done this before, and waited to be returned to the orphanage.

Back home, Si Chen didn't say a word about the outcome that barely counted as a punishment. She went still for a long time, then slowly leaned against him and murmured:

"Hao. Do you know—his face is shaped like yours. Especially the brows."

"His eyes and his temper are exactly what I was like as a child."

"Our child… maybe our child would have looked just like that."

"Let's adopt him. Would you?"

He couldn't say no.

He had never been attached to bloodlines. The doctors had said everything was fine after the miscarriage—but what if the next pregnancy ended the same way? And the thought of her alone in that empty flat, with too much quiet and too much time to think—a child would be better than that.

Thank God for Si Yuan, who had kept her company through all those years.

The old fractures had finally given way, and the cold war that followed might have been the end of them entirely—if not for the boy who had been threading himself between them the whole time.

She was still here.

Somewhere behind a closed door, still angry at him. But here.

Today she had said she was tired. That she didn't want to go anymore.

Didn't want to go.

Perhaps that meant she was willing to stay.

In this home.

With him.

Chapter 9 – Rome

If you weren't born in Rome, you earn every step of the road on your own.

The man currently reviewing sales figures with him was one of the lucky ones: born in Rome.

Jiang Tianming. Second generation, old money. A little over a year ago he'd shown up at Yu Hao's door wanting to "prove himself." The company was in a rough patch at the time; the terms he offered were reasonable; Yu Hao let him in as a minority shareholder. What could he do—the man had money to spare and wasn't asking for much equity. With his family's holdings, this little operation and its paltry returns probably didn't even register. He stayed out of the day-to-day anyway—turned up mid-year and year-end to sign things, put in a few appearances, work a room at company dinners.

Deep pockets, minimal interference. Honestly, ideal.

Then last night, out of nowhere: a message. Shareholder meeting at nine. Review the numbers. Yu Hao's first instinct—was the Jiang family going under? He'd stayed up scrolling through news on their conglomerate, checking the stock price. Solid as ever.

"Heard you've been… taking some time off lately?"

Yu Hao's brows drew together. A quiet "Mm." He kept his eyes on the screen, hands moving, pulling up sales data and preparing to screen-share for his one and only shareholder.

When he finally looked up, he found Jiang Tianming watching him with what appeared to be genuine concern.

"These days, medicine can handle almost anything. I know a few doctors, professors—top people. Want me to—"

"No. I'm not ill."

Jiang Tianming exhaled and sank back into his chair, visibly relieved. Then something flickered across his face—he tilted his head, stroked his chin, and let a grin spread.

"Though I also heard you've been having a bit of a… lucky streak? Some girl from a club? Must have some serious skills?"

…What on earth.

Before Yu Hao could get a word in, Jiang Tianming had wheeled his chair over and adopted the tone of a man about to deliver brotherly wisdom.

"Look, I get it. Can't say there's nothing to be sore about. What man doesn't prefer someone younger, no kids, right? But… These things happen. No judgement."

How many versions of this story were floating around out there?

Jiang Tianming kept talking, one hand patting Yu Hao's shoulder. But Yu Hao's attention had already drifted elsewhere—back to that night two years ago.

Pieces of the remote control scattered across the living room floor.

He'd sat on the cold tiles, not knowing how long. The shriek of a phone alarm had finally cut through the silence.

The dinner was still on the table—her cooking, all his favourites. She had been looking forward to it, just one meal together, after so long apart. And he had come through the door like a wild thing that had lost control of itself.

Hungry. Genuinely, hollowly hungry, the kind that comes from somewhere deeper than hunger, the kind that hollows a person out. He went straight for the food, eating cold rice and meat standing over the table, as if anything made by her hands could fill the hollow that had opened in his chest.

He had stayed in that flat for two days. Curled in a corner, going nowhere.

Then he'd dragged himself back to Shanghai and threw himself into work. Only work, relentless and all-consuming, gave the shell of him any trace of a reason to exist.

Not long after, her message arrived: she'd been offered a secondment to the European headquarters. Approved.

Si Yuan had said she needed time to herself. Maybe that was better for everyone.

Every time Yu Hao came back to A City and pushed open the door, the hunger rose like a tide—reflexive now, almost a physical response. No home-cooked meals, but there was still the wine. She had always known he needed a drink to take the edge off; the flat was always stocked with fruit wines and medicinal liquors she had made herself. Each visit he'd open one, pour a small glass, and let that faint trace of fragrance help him endure the loneliness of the small hours.

Then the bottles ran dry. Even the last few plums at the bottom of the jar were gone.

She still wasn't home.

"I'm not trying to stick my nose in your private life," Jiang Tianming said, the teasing still there but with something steadier underneath. "I just don't want it spilling into the business."

Yu Hao was not, by nature, someone who could do two things at once. But years in the game had taught him certain skills—chief among them, how to look like he was paying attention. What did strike him as odd, though: Jiang Tianming, the polished heir, sitting here gossiping? Then again, rumours had their uses. They deflected other kinds of attention. Not worth the energy to correct.

He knew this play. The moment Jiang Tianming paused, Yu Hao stepped in and steered everything back to solid ground.

"This year's Double Twelve: overall e-commerce revenue was down seven percent year-on-year. Short-video commerce, though, grew a hundred and seventy-three percent. Net result—revenue and profit are both up thirteen percent on last year."

Business on the table. Jiang Tianming straightened up and did what shareholders are supposed to do.

"And offline?"

Something she used to say came back to him: Don't just listen to what people say. Watch what they choose not to say.

Jiang Tianming and Si Chen had been trained in that particular kind of thinking from an early age. No point trying to be clever with people who were already two moves ahead.

"Hypermarket channel is down forty-two percent," Yu Hao said straight, no hedging.

One eyebrow up. Arms crossed. Go on, then.

"With current consumer habits and market conditions, brick-and-mortar is a position to hold, not to double down on. More investment won't move the needle."

Jiang Tianming took the laptop and skimmed through the data quickly, cross-checking as he went. Yu Hao had always had a quiet respect for people born in Rome—everyone else was clawing to get in, and you don't survive there without something real behind you.

"Who says rich kids are useless? They just let you think they are." Her words. And by her own logic, with everything Si Chen had going for her, she should have gone so much further.

He'd spent a long time wondering how she always cut straight to the heart of things—whether he had been genuinely slow, or had simply never thought to ask—until Si Yuan started Year Five at Yinghua. He saw the timetable: a subject called Logic. So that's where they teach it, perhaps.

"Alright. I'm satisfied."

Sign-off from Shareholder Number Two. Yu Hao moved to wrap up the meeting, but Jiang Tianming put out a hand.

"I heard your—not the old one—your wife is back?"

"Mm."

Yu Hao already knew who'd told him. The boy, obviously. He could picture the exchange—Jiang Tianming and Si Yuan on the phone, going in circles:

"Kid, you and Old Yu—"

"Not biological."

"Your mum—"

"In Germany."

Half a sentence at a time, then nothing. Yu Hao shook his head at the memory. The child could smuggle an entire meaning into three words. Clearly Logic class had left zero impression.

Even Jiang Tianming knew where the line was. Family was family. You didn't push past a certain point.

Though Jiang Tianming, naturally, had his own calculations. When he'd first come looking to invest, it was because he'd seen what Yu Hao was capable of. His thinking at the time: if the company failed, chalk it up as a bad bet, then bring Yu Hao into the family conglomerate as a professional manager. Theirs was a sprawling empire, complicated from within, with countless eyes fixed hungrily on the prize. Yu Hao would deliver results and block arrows. That had been the plan.

Then the plan became obsolete. The man hadn't just pulled the company out of the mud—he'd multiplied revenue several times over. Plans change when the numbers do. Money earned here was still money. Better, perhaps, to stay a shareholder, sit back, and watch the returns compound. For entertainment, he could show up and make things deliberately difficult in meetings—always more fun to be the one asking questions than answering them.

He changed the subject.

"School holidays—your boy back?"

"Yes."

"Still doing the Germany exchange?"

"He's back now."

"God, I've missed that kid."

Yu Hao had already dropped his head back into the numbers. Full focus. Jiang Tianming, reading the room, let the conversation go. No point interrupting a machine when it's printing money.

Oh right—the actual business of the day: the people.

Their division of labour had always been clean. Strategy, execution, market development—Yu Hao's. Culture, morale, welfare—Jiang Tianming's. Translation: food, fun, and payday.

The company lived by wolf culture: aggressive, quick to move, quick to strike. But even wolves need to be fed. Keep the pay competitive, keep the benefits real.

Yesterday, the first day back: the stick. He'd transferred the marketing manager everyone called "the Abbess" back to the Shanghai office—no ceremony, just done. Today: the sugar. Lunch on the company, afternoon off.

The click of the door latch pulled Yu Hao back to the surface.

"Want someone gone? Look busy enough and even the gods won't dare interrupt." She'd used that line on him early in their marriage—picked up a pile of exam papers the moment dinner was done, just to get out of the washing up.

She'd been back nearly two weeks. The frost hadn't shifted. He didn't know what move to make.

In this particular standoff, only their peacemaker—their good son—had any chance of getting between them.

He was genuinely afraid that one day she'd reach her limit and disappear again, without a word.

Outside, Jiang Tianming's voice rose over the office: lunch on the company, relaxed afternoon for everyone. A cheer went up. Yu Hao never joined those. He knew perfectly well that with his face—stern as a temple guardian—nobody could loosen up with him in the room.

They'd eaten out nearly every night lately. The first few days back she'd gone at it with a kind of determination—working through cuisines like she had a list. The last two days, though, her appetite had dropped off. He checked his watch. Not even ten.

He stood up. Time to go and collect the boy.

With Si Yuan home, she would cook.

Chapter 10 – The Room

On the outskirts of T City, where the hills met the lake at the Lingnan estuary, a cluster of villas sat back from the world.

Yu Hao parked in the lot, tilted his head back and drained the last of his Red Bull in one go. He sat for a moment, composed himself, then got out and walked toward the red-brick house.

Among the sleek modern villas surrounding it, this one stood apart immediately—its old Southeast Asian character impossible to miss. Along the porch ran an arcade in the old shophouse style—shelter from sun and rain, and something more besides. He unlatched the garden gate; a stone fountain murmured somewhere nearby; shrubs and flowering plants crowded in thick and green on all sides.

In one corner of the garden, a low hedge enclosed a small pavilion—her private corner, for tea and tending to her plants. In the garage, a red four-ring coupe sat under a coat of dust. Three years ago, when he'd replaced Si Chen's car with a Mini Cooper, this one had gone to her younger sister. The wheels hadn't moved since. The windscreen had long since gone grey. The new owner was still overseas, and showed no sign of coming back for it.

At the door, he followed the house rule: shoes off before entering. Barefoot, he stepped inside.

The interior carried the same unhurried warmth it always had—Southeast Asian in feeling, with a high-ceilinged foyer, arched wooden windows, and sheer white curtains that diffused the light into something soft. Rattan furniture in reddish brown, broad-leafed plants in generous pots, a bronze ceiling fan turning slowly overhead. Southen winters were damp and cold in a way that got into the bones; the underfloor heating in this older house—installed at his insistence, years ago—was still doing its job.

A fragrance met him in the hallway. Rich without being sharp. Not the punch of curry but something mellower, the scent she always described with a certain fondness: coconut rice. Coconut milk, pandan leaf, garlic, and the faintest suggestion of chilli, the smell she had mentioned more than once, always with a particular warmth.

He followed it to the kitchen, calling softly toward the figure inside.

"Ma—"

A woman in a plain white dress, black hair falling long and glossy, paused mid-stir. She turned, and her eyes lit with warmth.

"You're here!"

"I brought some ginseng." He held up the bag, perhaps a beat too keen.

"Stay for dinner. I'll just add a couple more dishes."

"You really don't have to—"

She waved this off and pointed at the trays of meat and vegetables already stacked beside the hob. The expression on her face settled the matter. This was her kitchen. Opinions from outside were not invited.

"Where's Si Yuan?"

"In his mother's room."

Halfway up the carved wooden spiral staircase, Hao heard it—the unmistakable sounds of a game in full battle, rising and falling. At his grandmother's, the boy apparently saw no reason for headphones. The door was pushed to but not shut, and the noise came through freely.

She had lived in this room for twenty years. Even so, Hao knocked—quietly, knowing the teenager inside, eyes locked on the screen, fingers flying across the controller, would almost certainly not hear it.

The boy glanced over briefly, then went straight back. His thumbs didn't slow.

The room was nothing like the spotless, neatly ordered space he remembered. The bed was piled with things. The wardrobe doors hung open, both compartments visible.

One side had shelves built into the upper half, packed with books in Chinese and English, spines worn and crowded; the lower half held a writing desk. An old calendar sat open on the surface—a decade out of date—several dates ringed in different coloured ink, annotated in a hurried mix of Chinese and English. Exam dates, most likely.

The other side of the wardrobe had a storage basket missing from its row, relocated to the floor below. Trophies, certificates, and crystal ornaments were scattered across the second shelf, several of them displaced to the bed. The third shelf had become an improvised dressing table—a small mirror, a jewellery box, a tangle of clothes. Messy in the way that only a room someone actually lives in can be.

He had been here no more than a handful of times. The neatness he'd seen on those visits must have been a version put on for company. This—the controlled disorder of someone's real life—rang truer.

His gaze settled on a blue school yearbook lying open on the desk. The page showed a grid of class photos and names, and in the corner, the warm face of a foreign teacher. In the corner of the grid, her face stood out anyway: those wide, lively eyes, a messy ponytail, a smile that didn't know how to be small.

Without quite deciding to, he reached out. His fingertip rested on the photo—on that once-familiar grin.

He turned the page. Student Achievements. One photograph drew the eye immediately: a boy and a girl in Yinghua uniforms, both laughing, confetti falling around them, a trophy raised between their hands. The same trophy that sat gleaming on the shelf across the room. In the photo they were luminous—young and radiant, as if the whole world were cheering them on.

The boy's gaze was steady and bright—the look of someone for whom victory had never been in doubt.

A surge of jealousy, sharp and immediate. He snapped the yearbook shut.

Beside it lay a clear plastic folder, its contents faintly visible through the milky cover—several sheets of paper, the kind with neat columns. Grade reports, by the look of them.

Some inexplicable pull won out, he eased the folder open.

An international high school transcript. Six A's, lined up without apology. Before the surprise of that had finished landing, the date in the upper right corner stopped him cold—autumn, ten years ago.

The year they met.

He turned to the next sheet. A-Levels: three A's. Dated early spring, nine years ago.

When they had just become official.

His fingers moved again. An offer letter from a foreign university slid out from the folder and fell. He picked it up. The enrollment date held him where he stood—six months before their wedding.

Below that, a line of smaller print: Scholarship: 50%.

Yu Hao stood very still. The paper creased slightly where his fingers had tightened. Something was pressing down on his chest—admiration, and something that ached alongside it, and beneath that, a thread of anger he couldn't quite trace to its source.

The buried fragments came back, one by one.

That evening—he'd gone upstairs to call her for dinner and found her standing in front of the half-open wardrobe, utterly still, staring at it with a look of confusion she hadn't managed to hide. When she heard him, she'd come back to herself with a start and quickly pushed the wardrobe door shut.

That had been the day he came to the house to ask for her hand.

Chapter 11 – First Meeting

He'd only gone up to call Si Yuan down for dinner. Instead, the boy reached back without looking, caught him by the arm, and pulled him—still not quite back to himself—downstairs to the table.

The food was hot, the table full. Yu Hao ate his rice the usual way, bowl in one hand, chopsticks in the other, while Si Yuan and his grandmother worked through their coconut rice with small dishes and spoons, scooping slowly, unhurried. They always said that was the only way to really taste it—the Southeast Asian way.

Alongside the rice: curry beef, stir-fried pork with chillies, fish in pickled broth, Hakka stuffed tofu, a plate of greens.

Her mother was one of those people who made graciousness look entirely natural, in the way she kept her home, in the way she received people. Day to day the family ate simply, but whenever her son-in-law came, she put together a proper Hakka spread and added a dish or two with a gentle heat, a small, wordless way of saying she had thought of him. From the very first time Si Chen had brought him here, she had never once shown him a difficult face. Even through the years of cold silences between him and her daughter, she had never spoken a harsh word to him—just the same steady warmth, visit after visit. That composure, that unspoken grace, left him with a feeling he couldn't quite resolve: gratitude, or something closer to guilt.

After the wedding he'd sent her a monthly allowance without fail, and covered her younger daughter's overseas tuition year after year. They had refused, more than once. He had done it anyway, quietly, without making anything of it. Si Yuan had told him once that his grandmother had a sizable trust fund from her family abroad—enough that money was not a concern. But to Yu Hao, being the only adult man in this family, shouldering it was simply the right thing to do.

She had never looked down on him for coming from nothing. She had treated him, from the start, as her own. His wife used to say, half joking, half complaining about it: "You're clearly her real child. She never picks on you—only ever on me."

Just then, she reached over and set a piece of stuffed tofu in his bowl. He came back to himself and said quietly, "Thank you, Ma."

The heaviness in his chest didn't lift. The food was good; he couldn't taste any of it. She was perceptive; she would have noticed he wasn't himself the moment she looked at him. And she might be the only person he could actually say it to.

He hesitated, then finally said:

"Ma… Nine years ago, Chen got into university. She never once mentioned it to me."

The spoon in her hand paused. A breath left her—barely a sound.

"Yes."

A silence. Then a faint smile found its way to the corners of her eyes—barely there, but there.

"She said… sitting the self-study exams here would do just as well."

After seeing Si Yuan downstairs, Yu Hao didn't stay. He drove straight to the office.

The building that was usually lit and busy around the clock was empty tonight—quiet in a way that felt unfamiliar. Outside the window, the last orange light of the sunset was giving way to dark blue. Yu Hao sat at his desk, staring at the screen he hadn't turned on, not entirely sure why he'd come.

That evening again—the one from memory.

She had been running toward him through the crowd, through the blaze of late-afternoon light, an elegant blue-and-white dress, a playful ponytail, a neat little black bag bouncing at her side. That clear, bright smile stopped him where he stood.

The crowd pressed in from every direction. He'd gone straight into it, reached through, found her hand and held on, drawing her in behind him as they pushed through together. They crossed the iron bridge and came out into the quieter stretch by the river.

She caught her breath. Glanced at her wrist. Let out a small, soft exhale: "Just made it."

Then her eyes dropped to their hands—his still wrapped around hers. She shifted, almost imperceptibly. The signal registered; he let go immediately, heat climbing the back of his neck. The colour in her cheeks—was that from running, or from something softer she couldn't quite name?

They walked on. A brief silence fell between them. Yu Hao hesitated, afraid the atmosphere might turn awkward, not sure where to find a way in. Those bright eyes of hers landed on the crumpled flyers in his other hand, and she smiled—a brief, apologetic smile.

"Sorry for making you wait so long."

"No—not at all." He shook his head quickly, flustered. Without quite meaning to, he moved a little closer, letting his height shelter her from the last of the sun.

They wandered the commercial street. She stopped at stalls selling small handmade things, crouching down to look properly; she stood for a while in front of an artist sketching portraits, watching the faces come alive on the paper. he didn't have much experience with this sort of thing, but he knew enough to know what he ought to do—ask if she liked something, offer to buy it. But each time he was ready, she'd already moved lightly on to the next stall.

She mentioned a congee shop nearby, a century-old place with a good name. They went. She said it was her first time, but when the menus came she talked through the dishes like someone who knew them well—this was the signature, this was worth trying. Yu Hao had never cared much about food; he nodded along without strong opinions. Then the dishes arrived, and everything she'd pointed to was exactly as good as she'd said.

When she excused herself to the bathroom, he made for the counter. The bill was already settled. She'd moved faster than him, and came back smiling: "Thank you for coming with me today."

Later he insisted on dessert—a small shop she'd mentioned in passing, known for its red bean soup. She didn't argue, just nodded and fell into step beside him as they turned into a narrow lane strung with soft light.

The warmth of that early summer evening worked its way into him. But eventually he had to see her to her stop. The bus was coming in. And in that last moment, it suddenly struck him that if he let her board and said nothing, there might not be a next time.

He asked for her number, half afraid she might hesitate.

That night, the first message:

"Home safe?"

"Yes. Today was really lovely—thank you."

"Let's do this again sometime."

"Yes, let's stay in touch."

And so it started, back and forth, a message at a time. Not many—he preferred seeing her in person.

He found reasons to be near the convenience store where she worked. The store manager, perpetually short-staffed, was always glad to see him show up to help move stock. Not that there was much conversation—those evenings had a particular quiet to them, as if that night at the bridge had been just a passing thing, already almost behind them. He'd wait outside until her shift was done, then walk half a step behind—always half a step, always the right distance—until she was on the bus.

Summer nights, stars out, a light wind.

It was, in that particular way, almost too good to be real.

He had thought, back then: she was a regular girl, working a regular part-time job, probably in high school. And he was two years into his first real job after college, a junior sales rep in FMCG—nothing much to speak of, but not out of her league either. They felt matched.

Sometimes he'd suggest a film; sometimes she'd pull him toward a gallery or an exhibition he'd never have found on his own. The outings were occasional, not planned, but each one stayed with him. The feeling between them grew the way these things do when nobody is forcing them—slowly, without announcing itself.

There was a stretch when she looked worn. Pale, head down, something sitting on her that she wasn't saying. He started to wonder if he'd been too much—if she'd grown tired of him. Then one evening she texted and asked if he'd come to the river. He'd gone half-ready to hear her end it.

Instead, she told him: exams coming, pressure building past what she knew how to carry.

"Don't worry. We'll take it one day at a time. I'm not going anywhere."

He put his arms around her carefully. After a moment, the crying she'd been holding back finally came—quiet and contained, but real.

In the days that followed, she studied and worked and kept both going at once. He couldn't do much. He could be there. She started sending messages at odd hours—seven in the morning, four in the afternoon, two in the morning with a photo of the moon and a single line: "The night is so beautiful." He picked up every one the moment it arrived, terrified of being a second too slow.

By autumn, the results came. She mentioned them once, lightly: "Not bad."

They went to the night market to celebrate. He held her hand all evening and didn't let go.

He had thought it was just another exam. Only today did he understand what it had actually been—an international qualification, entirely in English, sat against students from across the world.

She had scored full marks across the board.

She had never been an ordinary girl.

He simply hadn't known it yet.

Chapter 12 – A Promise

Yu Hao had always been someone who planned ahead.

Between the savings from his university part-time jobs and a few years of steady income, he had quietly accumulated enough to entertain a thought that once would have seemed out of reach: buying a home. She was a T City native; he was still an outsider. A house might give the two of them something solid to stand on.

He tried, carefully: "Should we… find some time to look at places together?"

She said nothing.

Maybe he'd been too rash, the words out before he'd thought them through, with no groundwork laid. Or maybe there was something on her mind she wasn't ready to say. He felt the shift in the air immediately and talked his way out of it, covering the stumble with a self-deprecating laugh:

"Your taste is probably much better than mine anyway."

The subject was dropped, and never came back up.

About a week later, she invited him to her home.

He already knew the broad outline of her family. Her father had died of illness some years earlier. Her mother was an overseas Chinese who had come back from Southeast Asia as a young woman, and carried the traces of that world with her—in the food she made, in the rhythms of her household. There was a younger sister, six years her junior.

Walking into the villa district, he understood immediately that he'd underestimated things.

Wide, tree-lined avenues. Carefully kept lawns. A row of villas, each one distinct, each one quietly announcing the kind of people who lived there. He tightened his grip on the bags of gifts—a full month's salary, in weight and in worry—and felt them do nothing for his confidence.

She was already waiting at the gate. When she saw him, she gave a brief nod, a light smile, and turned to lead him toward the red-brick house.

At the door stood a woman in an elegant white dress—her mother. Beside her, a girl of eleven or twelve in a pink frock, head tilted, was looking him over with the unedited curiosity of a child who hadn't yet learned to pretend otherwise. Something about that unguarded scrutiny made his spine stiffen without meaning to.

Manners. Whatever else, don't lose your manners.

He drew a breath, pressed the nerves down, and bowed. and bowed: "Good morning, Auntie."

It took more courage than he could have accounted for to step across that marble threshold, which wasn't even particularly high.

Inside, he stopped again. Everyone had removed their shoes at the door and moved through the house in bare feet, easy and unhurried. Should he follow? Keep his on? He was still working it out when a pair of clean black slippers appeared in front of him—her mother, already there, calm and smiling.

"We like to go barefoot inside—it keeps things cooler. Please don't mind us."

His forehead, though, was already beaded with sweat. He was still gripping the gifts, had completely forgotten to present them, and stumbled his way inside. Behind him, the younger sister laughed—the honest, uncontainable laugh of someone who found him entirely amusing.

A thread of sandalwood drifted through the air. Si Chen handed him a small white handkerchief to wipe his face, then guided him toward the sitting room. The younger sister reappeared a moment later with a glass of sour plum drink, its colour a deep, translucent red.

"It's still quite close out there, even for autumn. This should help."

Her mother's voice was warm, her hands gesturing with a natural ease that made the invitation feel like an old habit. Yu Hao accepted the glass, took a sip, and felt the cold tart sweetness work its way down his throat and take some of the tension with it.

With the worst of his nerves settled, he finally noticed the room. A low arrangement of white flowers on the low table. Shelves of books in Chinese and English, neatly kept but clearly read. That persistent sandalwood fragrance. All of it spoke a language he hadn't grown up with.

"The food will be a little while yet—please, sit and rest."

Her mother smiling warmly, with a composure that left no room for argument, she turned and went to the kitchen.

Sensing his discomfort, Si Chen pulled her sister over and set up a game of Ludo on the coffee table. Yu Hao moved his pieces when it was his turn; his attention had drifted to the window.

Inside, everything was composed and considered. Outside, the garden was still recovering from the typhoon—branches down, pots overturned, the stone fountain basin tipped sideways. The grapevines that climbed the garage wall had come down entirely, lying in a heap.

"Yesterday's typhoon was something," she said lightly. "Even that stone basin went over."

A family of women. What could they do but note it?

He looked at the fallen fountain stone and saw himself in it—something tilted, something that had to be put right. Sitting here, trying to look at ease, was worse than doing something useful—and besides, these were small problems. Nothing he couldn't handle.

"Do you have a ladder?"

This was his ground. He rolled up his sleeves.

He worked through it steadily: chairs and tables back upright, branches and leaves swept clear, the fountain basin levered back into place. When he climbed the ladder to deal with the grapevines, she came and placed a handful of cable ties in his hand without a word. The moment landed unexpectedly, and he found himself wanting it to last—that quiet understanding, a closeness that felt like it belonged only to the two of them.

Lunch was lighter in spirit than he'd expected. Her mother talked through each dish with warmth, slipping in stories from Si Chen's childhood between bites. When she opened his gifts, she was genuinely delighted, full of praise for his taste. In truth, he'd simply walked into the shop, followed the sales assistant's advice, and bought whatever was most expensive and most well-known. He'd had no eye for it whatsoever.

What surprised him most was that she never asked the questions he'd been bracing for. Not once did she ask about his background or his income. She simply talked, and listened—unhurried, easy, until it no longer felt like a first visit at all, but like coming back somewhere he already belonged.

At some point, still up the ladder, he happened to glance toward the house—and found her watching him through the window. A look on her face as though she were seeing something from long ago reflected back at her. Then it passed, and a faint, contented smile took its place.

Si Chen told him afterward:

"Mum said—that's what Dad used to do."

That night, Yu Hao went back to his rented room. Four walls, not much else. He lay awake for a long time.

His dreams had never been ambitious: steady work, a family, the particular contentment of a life built carefully and honestly. That was what he wanted. But was that the kind of life that would be enough for her? Could ordinary happiness—the kind without spectacle—actually measure up?

For the first time, he understood what it felt like to want money not for its own sake but because of someone else.

A few days later, he went back—alone, this time—and spoke to her mother. He had made a decision: he would take the company's transfer, go where the work was, earn what was needed.

"She can take all the time she needs," he said. "I won't push her, no pressure at all. I only want to give her a better life—I don't want her to ever feel she's settling because of me."

Better to go and earn than to keep tormenting himself here. She was young. He could wait. Whatever came of it, he would accept.

But whenever she came to him—however it happened—he would be ready, arms open, with the best he had to offer.

Give her the very best. That was the obsession, the promise—the thing that carried him through ten years of wandering, more than anything else had.

Chapter 13 – Timing

Had fate ever truly been on his side?

Not long after he left T City, she quit the convenience store to prepare full-time for an exam she called critical. Yu Hao drove himself across every market, every client, every channel. One goal only: earn more, move up. He had never wanted money the way he wanted it now. It was a hunger he didn't recognise in himself.

At night they kept a video call open, just to have each other in the room—talking about nothing much, easing, just a little, the weight of what she was carrying. Sometimes they'd share a screen and watch the same film from different cities, side by side in the only way the distance allowed.

When holidays came, he rushed back to her. They walked. They breathed.

From early autumn through the dead of winter, they kept that quiet rhythm. Yu Hao was careful never to press—never to say the thing that might force open a conversation neither of them was ready to have.

Near the New Year he returned to T City. However hard she tried to hide it, he could see it: a shadow between her brows she couldn't quite shake. He guessed the exam hadn't gone the way she'd hoped. When he asked, she only shook her head and turned her face into his chest, already crying.

He was no good at comfort. All he could manage, low and clumsy, was: "It's all right. I'm here… I'm here."

Looking back now—if not for him, would she have hesitated at all?

The road ahead of her had been wide open.

He had assumed her "exam" was something like a standard language certificate. In fact it was A-Levels. Her scores were excellent. A renowned British university sent an offer with a scholarship attached—a generous one.

Her mother, who had never once involved herself in their relationship, called this time. Dinner, at the house. Yu Hao felt the ground shift slightly under him: was this it, then? The moment?

Her mother's gaze was warm, and the question went straight to the point.

"And you—what are your plans?"

He knew she wasn't asking about work. She was asking about the two of them.

As it happened, he was ready. He had thought it through.

Within the year: a flat. She would choose every piece of furniture, each detail would carry her taste. Within two years: married. Within five: the mortgage gone. Debt had no place in the kind of life he wanted to build with her.

That was the plan. He laid it out at that table, and it became a promise.

Perhaps it was the steadiness in his voice. Her mother's expression shifted—something in it settling.

She said, quietly: "It hasn't been easy for you."

The words, they landed somewhere deep.

Responsibility had always meant something to him. Now it meant more, and differently.

At the gate, she leaned her head against his shoulder, eyes bright with something she was trying not to let spill. He held her hand and said:

"Don't worry. We will be together—I promise."

She didn't answer. The tears came anyway, sliding down and dropping onto his shoulder, one after another.

Afterwards, she joined a foreign trade company and kept studying at the same time. Every night, the video call. She worked through trade manuals; he drafted sales reports in hotel rooms somewhere else entirely. The sound of her turning pages, drifting through the speaker from the other end, was the closest thing he had to rest.

He had wanted a riverfront apartment. She talked him into a smaller two-bedroom in a better-value district—more room to grow into, no need to overreach at the start. The gift money he'd saved, her mother quietly redirected into furniture. The wedding budget went straight toward the mortgage, which all but erased the loan. She had decided, without asking him first.

It was the one time she caught him off guard with her firmness. She hadn't asked. On the day they went to register the marriage, he carried a small, private regret: there should have been more of a ceremony than that.

They'd agreed on five years. He delivered in three.

He had thought about it often: how thin the margin had been. One missed step and there'd have been two lines that cross once, then pull apart—growing further with every step, until there's nothing left to cross.

When they first met, she was deep in preparation for an international high school exam. By the time they made it official, she already had an overseas offer in hand.

He had wondered, more than once, he'd let himself sink into the thought: if he'd missed those moments, would her life have been more brilliant for it?

Arts management in the UK, perhaps. Brand launches, spotlights, a world that suited her down to the ground. Maybe alongside that boy in the yearbook—the one with the insufferable triumphant grin—who would never, Yu Hao knew, have let her slip through his fingers. A man that stubborn doesn't lose what he's decided to keep—Yu Hao knew that much.

And Yu Hao himself? A passing chapter. A poor boy she'd briefly known, a small unremarkable episode in a life that was otherwise dazzling. A footnote, at best.

The thought hollowed him out. The exhaustion of it came down like weight—the kind that settles in the bones and won't shift. He slumped in his chair, eyes fixed on the ceiling. Up there, in the dark, something bottomless was waiting—closing in, step by step, ready to swallow him whole.

His phone buzzed. He glanced at the screen and swiped, barely lifting his finger.

"Mum's asking if you're coming home for dinner."

"Busy. Not tonight."

He set the phone down.

And then—in that same stillness—a ringtone he hadn't heard in three years.

She had set it herself, the day she changed his phone. After she left, it had never sounded again.

He froze for a moment, then picked up without thinking.

"A crab… got away—!"

He could picture her perfectly: wide-eyed, the picture of innocence.

Something surged in his chest—a sudden heat, a warmth he had no word for and hadn't felt in far too long. He sat up straight. His voice came out low and certain:

"I'll be right back."

Yes—timing. That was what it came down to.

You had to catch it.

You had to be there.

Every moment she might have slipped away, he had been there—and he had held on. Call it luck if you wanted to. But he knew luck had a shelf life.

Miss it once, and that might be the end of it.

The future—he was not going to miss it.

Like right now.

Chapter 14 – My Father

“We're not that close, really. Me and him.”

That's always been Si Yuan's honest assessment.

When he was dragged to the police station, he'd already run through what would happen next. He kept his mouth shut, not a single useful detail, and planned to slip away during the few days it would take them to verify his identity. Except technology didn't give him the window he needed. They traced his birthplace in no time and contacted the orphanage up north that had taken him in briefly, all the way from the other end of the country.

That place. He would rather have done almost anything than go back there.

He was still working out how to avoid it when the man showed up at the station and said he wanted to adopt him.

Right. Si Yuan thought. These two have lost their minds. Give it a few days—they'll come to their senses, and then getting out will be easy. So he nodded, easy as you like.

The orphanage workers who'd made the journey south were visibly relieved that someone was willing to take this particular problem off their hands. They said something polished about better opportunities in a more developed region, the kind of thing people say when they want the paperwork to move quickly. It did. Within days, Si Yuan had been officially handed over to these two strangers.

The day they took him away, the man crouched down until they were eye to eye. He looked at Si Yuan steadily, like someone who'd already made up his mind. He took off his own coat and draped it over the thin, shivering body in front of him. Then he took Si Yuan's small hand—red from the cold—in both of his broad ones.

His voice, when it came, was low and unhurried.

"Let's go home."

The moment they arrived, the two of them got to work. The woman disappeared into the kitchen; pots and pans began their conversation. The man, without explanation, steered Si Yuan into a room. Si Yuan's stomach dropped: this muscle-bound man hadn't finished with him—was he dragging him in here to give him the beating he hadn't got at the station? Fine. Take the beating, wait for the opening, then run.

What the man actually did was roll up his sleeves and start clearing out the study. A room for Si Yuan. And apparently, the way to do this was to enlist a six-year-old, because—and the man said this without irony—a real man learns to do things for himself.

Si Yuan had been around, he'd learned exactly which words hit hardest, and he could produce them without thinking.

"I'm not living in a small room. If you can't afford better, you've got no business having a wife and kids."

Normally that kind of line earned a reaction. He'd braced for one.

Instead, the man seemed to find this entirely reasonable. Two days later, he was gone—off to earn money for a bigger place. Which completely dismantled every escape plan Si Yuan had prepared, because you cannot run away from someone who isn't there.

Well. That had backfired spectacularly.

In the beginning, he came home every week. Within a few months, every few weeks. Eventually, months would pass without a sign of him.

When he did come home, he went straight for his wife—like a man who'd been deprived of something and was making up for lost time—and then followed her around like a shadow she couldn't shake. From where Si Yuan was standing, she was the child in this house: whatever she wanted, she got.

Si Yuan, the actual child in the house, was reduced to passing tools when a lightbulb needed changing. He washed the vegetables before the man swept in to do the chopping—then stood by while she told her husband what impressive knife skills he had, and the man somehow worked harder because of it.

Eventually Si Yuan was cut out of even those small jobs. He began to feel like an unwanted third person in the room. When did he first clock it? Probably around the time he noticed that the day after the man came home, Si Yuan would always be dropped at his grandmother's—to keep Grandma company, apparently—and collected again before work the next morning. Not that he minded—it meant time running wild with his aunt.

Fair enough, really. The man had barely made it back. He wanted his wife to himself.

He was just an outsider, when it came down to it.

"Have you been annoying Mum?"

"Don't annoy Mum."

Those were the two constants. First line: arriving. Second line: leaving. Both delivered while ruffling Si Yuan's hair into a complete mess, without noticing he was doing it.

Back in primary school, Yu Hao would show up for school events—on his wife's instructions. Si Yuan at that age had withdrawn into himself—barely a word at school, nobody he called a friend, quiet to the point of invisible. He didn't go looking for trouble. Trouble, however, had a way of finding him.

In the first term of Year Five, a bunch of little thugs went for him. Si Chen made one call, Yu Hao was on a flight home that same night. He got in late, the flat already quiet, Si Yuan already asleep. He tiptoed into the room and held the boy gently, without waking him.

By morning he had a lawyer on the phone and the transfer paperwork in motion. When it came to dealing with the school—the parents, the teachers, the back-and-forth at the hospital—he said one thing, and Si Yuan felt it settle somewhere in his spine:

"I will not stand for my son being wronged. Not even a little."

Later, when Yu Hao was cleaning his injuries—carefully, working around every bruise, applying the ointment like he was afraid of causing more pain—Si Yuan asked the question he'd been sitting on for a while.

"Why didn't you just have your own kid?"

He'd seen it happen before. The couple who'd taken him in before this one had seemed fine, until they had a baby of their own. Then Si Yuan stopped existing to them, and eventually it became easier for everyone if he left. At least in the orphanage, nobody was pretending. No comparisons, no disappointment. A sourness rose in his chest.

The man was quiet for a long time.

"You're our only child. That's not going to change."

Si Yuan went still.

...Alright. So these two actually mean it.

The last two years, the couple had been in the middle of a long, cold standoff—and Si Yuan had somehow ended up as the go-between. The reluctant messenger. The inconvenient intermediary.

The man's solution: pull Si Yuan out of school and send him to Germany for a year-plus exchange programme. To keep his stubborn wife company, was the actual reason, whatever he called it officially. School holidays back home meant being deposited in the company as an "intern."

That was when Si Yuan got his first real look at just how frightening the money-making machine actually was.

At home the man spent his time trailing after his wife—emails unanswered, calls ignored. Si Yuan had genuinely assumed the money was just lying around out there, easy as picking up fallen leaves.

Then he saw the reality of it:

Six a.m.—alarm, up immediately. Wash, exercise, breakfast, one thing after another without pause.

Eight—into the office before the rush, straight to the sales figures.

Nine—team assembled, day's tasks assigned.

From ten onward: department by department, product by product, sales plans, new launches, procurement decisions—no gaps, no drift, and that was before anything unexpected came up.

It repeated every day like clockwork, precise to the minute. Si Yuan found it faintly alarming. The man didn't seem like a person. He seemed like something wound up and set running.

Home? More accurately: back to the hotel. He was either at the office or in transit. The one non-negotiable: a short drink before bed. Every night, without fail. Though Si Yuan noticed he didn't seem to have much of a social life—or maybe that was only when Si Yuan was around.

Working for someone like that, there was no possibility of coasting. Si Yuan—who had started with nothing—found himself, before long, responsible for website design. He was a middle schooler who hadn't turned eighteen yet. He sometimes wondered whether the employees had been rescued by this man at some point, or owed him money, or had somehow been put under a spell and ended up giving everything they had.

The strange thing was, most of them seemed to think he was a decent boss. No empty promises. No padding. Do the work, do it well, get paid above market rate. That was the whole arrangement.

As for days off: Si Yuan came to understand that the concept didn't really apply to this particular person.

Or maybe: the time at home was the only holiday he ever took.

In the quiet of late nights, the rapid sound of keyboard keys would come from the study. When the woman was in the kitchen, he'd slip out to the balcony and fire off messages in the gaps. Even the brief wait in the car before picking Si Yuan up—he used that too.

The money was not falling from the sky. He was catching every drop.

In Year Two of primary school, Si Yuan wrote an essay: My Father.

"My father is very busy. Busy with work, and busy loving Mum."

On parents' day, the teacher singled it out and read it aloud—to the whole room, parents and classmates both. On the way home, the man lifted Si Yuan up onto his shoulders, laughing. Back at the flat, he hugged him like he'd won something.

There was one sentence Si Yuan had left out of the essay.

Maybe it was because he was so busy.

Maybe he'd forgotten—that he had a son at all.

Chapter 15 – My Mother

"This woman is an absolute menace."

That was Si Yuan's verdict, reached within days of arriving at this house.

"Si Yuan, dinner's ready!"

"Si Yuan, shall we try that place today?"

"Si Yuan, which one did you think was better?"

"Si Yuan, was that restaurant any good last time?"

The name the man had given him came out of her mouth in a hundred different shapes—stretched, shortened, sung, never the same way twice.

She could cook. When Si Yuan and her husband cleared every dish off the table, she'd sit back with the look of someone who had done exactly what she set out to do. Si Yuan could never get his head around her obsession with food. Her mind appeared to have one dedicated operating system: what to eat, where to eat, how to make things taste better. To him, the whole question was simple. Three meals a day. Full stomach. Done.

The truth was, she only cooked when the man was home. The rest of the time, she dragged Si Yuan on expeditions across the city, sampling and passing judgement on restaurants. He felt less like a child and more like a small dog being walked, the difference being that at least dogs had somewhere specific to go; he was just being towed from restaurant to restaurant.

Still. For the food alone, staying didn't seem like the worst outcome. That was his thinking at the time.

Beyond food, she loved fashion. Specifically: dressing Si Yuan in it. Whatever she spotted in magazines, whatever strange style caught her eye on the street, eventually ended up on him. He made the mistake of mentioning, once, that he liked Naruto. She dressed him as the main character, from headband to sandals, and took him to an anime convention.

He spent the afternoon surrounded by fans he'd never asked for, blinded by camera flashes. She stood to one side with her arms folded, wearing the expression of a manager watching her client perform. Entirely self-satisfied.

She went on to join every cosplay group she could find and treated Si Yuan as her personal model for every event thereafter—until the week before he started school, when she finally let him off the hook.

None of it made any sense. Here was a woman whose husband worked himself half to death for the money, and she wasn't spending it on handbags or beauty treatments. She was spending it on a child who didn't ask for the attention. And she herself always dressed simply. Si Yuan began to seriously question what the man was working so hard for. Was it even necessary?

Her approach to his education was in a category of its own.

When he started school, he was far behind classmates who'd had nursery and prep classes. He was, in the most literal sense, a blank page. On top of that, he didn't speak to anyone, moved through the school day alone, and responded to direct questions with silence. The teacher recommended a hospital assessment and raised the possibility of a special school transfer.

She listened to the full thirty-minute presentation, then glanced sideways at Si Yuan and asked:

"Do you want to go?"

What kind of question was that? Was this actually his decision to make? Even the question annoyed him. Si Yuan turned away and stuck out his bottom lip.

"No answer means yes. Three—two—"

"No!"

He spun back. She nodded, turned to the teacher, and delivered her response with total composure:

"He says he doesn't want to. Our son prefers to keep to himself. He doesn't talk much—but he doesn't cause trouble either, does he?"

The teacher had no answer to that. The implication was clear enough: in a classroom full of chattering and squabbling, a quiet child was practically a gift—wasn't that a point in his favour?

After dinner that evening, she pulled him into the kitchen and had him load the dishwasher—cups, bowls, chopsticks, lids, everything—while she talked at him in a casual, take-it-or-leave-it tone:

"I hate washing dishes. But you can't throw them away after every meal. So the dishwasher is non-negotiable—even if other people think it's unnecessary. There are a lot of things in life you dislike but have to deal with anyway. If you don't enjoy people, don't force yourself. Just find a way to live on your own terms without giving anyone grounds to criticise you."

The first part, six-year-old Si Yuan could follow.

The second part took him years to untangle. What exactly did "dishwashers" have to do with "how you lived"?

From that day on, she never loaded the dishwasher again. That was his job now. She had outsourced it in the same conversation she'd explained the philosophy.

A few days later, the school called her in again. Si Yuan was at the bottom of the class.

He was fairly sure she hadn't absorbed a single sentence. She nodded throughout and, when the teacher finished, asked one question:

"What score would you consider acceptable?"

The answer gave her material to complain about for days.

"Ninety? Above ninety? What kind of world is this? First-year children need to score ninety? And these initials—z, c, s, zh, ch, sh—tell me, Si Yuan, don't you think? I don't even understand half of these myself."

She complained while flipping furiously through the textbook, then solemnly declared she would teach him herself.

The problem: she read every syllable as though it were English. Her pinyin was, to put it plainly, incomprehensible. At first Si Yuan assumed she was putting it on to amuse him. Then it dawned on him: she genuinely didn't know. She'd grown up with a different system entirely.

She'd rather memorise all the obscure stroke components and type in Wubi. When even that failed, she'd turn to him with a helpless look and ask:

"How do you type this character in pinyin?"

She was more trouble than any teacher he'd had. Rather than deal with her from one side and the school from the other, Si Yuan decided the most efficient solution was to score precisely average—high enough to cause no alarm, low enough to demand no expectations, and neither the teacher nor she would bother him.

By the time he had privately concluded she was functionally illiterate, she had, over three years, passed both the junior college and full degree self-study examinations.

Four exam sittings a year. She registered for three or four subjects each time like someone who had a point to prove. While Si Yuan did homework at one end of the table, she drilled past papers at the other. Most baffling of all, she didn't even buy the textbooks—just online notes and past papers, and she cleared every single subject.

Later he worked out why. She treated pinyin like it was an unfamiliar foreign language—because to her, it was. Faced with English texts, she could read at a pace that left him behind.

You'd think, given how rarely they were together, that they'd have run out of things to say—and yet they were on video call nearly every night. He would sit on the other end, quiet as a mountain, and listen to her talk through the small events of the day. For hours, sometimes.

Looking back, those years had their own particular sounds: the occasional keyboard clicks from the screen, the soft rustle of turning pages, the scratch of Si Yuan's pen on paper—rising and falling, one after another.

The moment Si Yuan genuinely revised his opinion of her came in Year Five.

He had always kept his head down. A group of boys from another class—apparently hit by an early onset of teenage delusion—had decided that this "low-IQ autistic kid" was a soft target, and made a habit of proving it. Insults. Deliberate collisions. He'd learned to let the words wash over him and dodge the shoves, occasionally stepping aside at just the right moment to send them stumbling flat on their faces in front of everyone. They didn't appreciate that. Eventually they cornered him in the toilets.

One on one he could have managed. Five or six was another matter.

He ran for the corridor. The little monsters chased him down, shouting, yanking at his clothes and not letting go. By the time a teacher and other students pulled them apart, his shirt was twisted and his trousers had been yanked halfway down.

The parents' meeting was precisely what he'd expected. Denial. Just a bit of fun. My child would never. And the most insistent was, naturally, the parent of the ringleader. Si Yuan rolled his eyes internally: your "perfectly well-behaved child" was the one running the whole operation.

Si Yuan kept his expression neutral.

What followed was a sequence of moves that showed him, for the first time, exactly what she was capable of as a mother.

A lawyer, hired the same day, dispatched to deal with the producers of said little menaces—so she wouldn't have to.

Pressure on the school: hand over all surveillance footage, or be named as a co-defendant.

A full medical examination. Then a psychology assessment.

Then the police station—with the footage as evidence—where she filed a report citing molestation and attempted sexual assault.

The police went still. Si Yuan said nothing. The school looked like it wanted to cry. The suspects and their parents fell apart entirely.

The lawyer was thrown. The man who'd flown back overnight the moment he heard "our kid got hurt" was thrown. The police watched the footage several times. The torn buttons. The trousers around his knees. The boy straddling him. The angle of the hands.

The truth was it was a blind spot in the camera's field of view—the boy had been grabbing Si Yuan's other arm. But from that angle, the footage didn't contradict her.

And then?

Nothing. She had thrown the grenade and walked away without a backward glance—leaving the wreckage entirely to the lawyer.

She handed everything to the lawyer and stopped answering her phone. The school called—ignored. The parents sent messages—ignored. Officials who came to the door were turned away with reference to the psychologist's report, which recommended strict rest and zero emotional stimulation. Si Yuan had sat through that assessment in a state of deliberate blankness—detached, vaguely vacant—and emerged with a medical report that was, for their purposes, exceptionally serious in its recommendations.

While the fallout continued outside, she hired a moving company, relocated the household, arranged the school transfer, and took Si Yuan on a trip to the city where the man was posted. All in the same week.

When he thought it was over—when he'd packed his bag for Yinghua and was ready to start fresh—she was leaning in the doorway, arms folded, watching him with that look, the one he'd learned to be wary of. All calm on the surface, razor-sharp underneath, and it made his skin prickle.

"You knew the corridor had cameras. But what if they hadn't worked? What if the school had refused to hand them over?"

Well. She'd known the whole time.

One against five, and every single one of them had come out with as much damage as he had— his capabilities were on the record. Back when he'd been running the streets, he'd picked up plenty of knowledge from older hands about how to make it count— even if he hadn't had to use it much directly. He'd played the victim under the cameras because the moment was right for it. The whole thing had been a calculated performance.

Her eyes didn't miss much.

Since she'd seen through him anyway, there was no point keeping up the act—and he wasn't about to back down either. Si Yuan lifted his chin and met her eyes, his voice quiet but with an edge:

"What do you want?"

"Don't do it again."

"That's it?"

"At your new school—try living differently."

"And then?"

"From now on: however you want to be happy, go be that."

In his first year at this house, Si Yuan would develop fevers without warning—in the middle of the night, out of nowhere. They'd burn for days, and more than once turned into pneumonia that put him in hospital.

She held him through those nights. Didn't let go. Like if she loosened her grip for even a moment, he'd be gone.

Even years later, that stayed with him.

He knew she loved him.

She only wanted him to be happy.

Nothing more.

Chapter 16 – Small Things at Home

This man had absolutely no spine. Completely and utterly at his wife's mercy.

Case in point: Si Yuan called him home earlier, and he brushed his own son off without a second thought. His wife said several words, and he came running like a dog that heard the food bag open.

To the heroine: A crab the size of my palm got loose. Am I, your devoted son, not permitted to help with this crisis?

To the male lead: That crab was already pinned under the pot lid. Was it going to stage an escape and bite someone? And for the record—your wife assembled flat-pack furniture by herself in a foreign country. There are pliers right there in the kitchen—any one of them would have done the job.

But once she decided to perform, she fully committed.

She stood there looking helpless and fragile, one finger pointed at the lid on the floor, as though catching that crab was a matter of life and death for the entire household.

Si Yuan didn't need a mirror to know his eyes had been rolling so continuously they were practically worn through. But the moment she shot him a look—sharp, unmistakably threatening—his instinct for playing supporting cast kicked in on cue. He applauded.

"Dad, that was incredible."

The little crab that had been scrabbling along the rim of the lid ended up in the pot anyway, steamed to a bright red.

It was bitterly cold, so they decided on hotpot. From the moment the man got home, he didn't stop. Once the broth came to a boil, his chopsticks were in constant motion—sliding in sliced meat, dropping in vegetables, managing the pot with the focus of someone on duty. He was worried his "clumsy" wife wouldn't be able to crack the crab properly, so he took over himself, practically ready to pick out every piece of shell and deliver the meat directly to her mouth.

Si Yuan watched this and thought of a specific image: in Germany, this same woman had dismantled a ten-pound king crab with her bare hands like she was born to it.

Noticing Si Yuan's eyes fixed on those ceaselessly working chopsticks, the man occasionally flicked a piece of food his son's way—as if that would be enough to buy his silence.

Sometimes Si Yuan genuinely felt his father brought this on himself.

Then again. The man was happy. The woman was lucky. That was just how it was.

After the man had worked through every dish, eaten well, then washed up without being asked and left the kitchen gleaming—Si Yuan still felt something was off.

She must have sensed it too.

He was avoiding her.

God. He actually was. Actively, deliberately avoiding her.

The same man who'd been attached to her like a shadow just days ago was now dodging her eyes and saying less than usual. Si Yuan watched him slip out to the darkest corner of the balcony, light a cigarette, then another, then another. Maybe only the cold cutting into his face could make his badly assembled performance look anywhere close to natural.

Si Yuan knew something of it. He just kept it to himself.

The last time he'd seen signs like this was before the Great War Between Husband and Wife. Back then, the man had been hiding the company's crisis from her—months without coming home, barely even calling. When she reached out, he'd mumble something about being busy, say as little as possible, and hang up fast.

Which, by normal logic, should have made her suspect he was seeing someone.

But she didn't go there.

Si Yuan was fairly certain she'd run through every possible scenario in her head—every single one—except that one.

He'd brought it up once, in Germany. He hadn't even finished the sentence before she slapped the table like she'd been struck by a revelation—tilted her head, thought for a moment, and produced an expression of genuine, unfeigned astonishment.

Oh. Right. How did I never think of that?

Si Yuan braced himself. He thought she was about to detonate.

Instead, her mind made a sharp turn into completely unexpected territory, leaving him not worried but entirely speechless:

"Well then, we'd be perfectly positioned to divide the assets fairly. You'd better think carefully about who you want to stay with."

This time felt different.

Even with those X-ray eyes of hers, working out what had happened would take time.

What Si Yuan hadn't anticipated was that she, who normally came at things from an angle, precise and unhurried, seemed unsettled tonight, out of character, chose a direct frontal assault instead.

No preamble.

Bang.

The balcony door flew open. Freezing air knifed into the living room and sent the curtains snapping sideways. Si Yuan, sprawled comfortably on the sofa, nearly launched himself off it from the cold.

Damn. Could she not at least give some warning? The tonal whiplash is brutal.

The man on the balcony looked equally startled. He stubbed out the cigarette fast, came in at speed, and shut the door behind him. She crossed her arms, advanced at a measured pace—each step carrying its own weight—and backed the tall man into the corner of the room.

The whole sequence was seamless. Si Yuan could only stare.

Female Holmes. Authoritative entrance.

"Si Yuan," she said sharply. "What's going on?"

Wait—what? The posture was clearly aimed at her husband, but the question had been redirected at him. How exactly was he supposed to answer that?

"I… how would I know?"

The last few words came out thin as a whisper, which rather undermined the performance.

Though, thinking about it, her tactic made sense. The man was clearly in evasion mode—half-dead in his expression, deliberately dodging—he was not going to confess voluntarily. So Si Yuan reluctantly provided some context:

"Who knows. Maybe the stuff in your old room's wardrobe put a curse on him. He took one look and something came over him."

Her eyes shifted—quick, calculating, foxlike. In the space of a breath she'd assembled most of the picture. She gave Si Yuan a look that very clearly communicated: you—I'll deal with you later.

Then she snapped her attention back to the man in front of her.

Si Yuan understood. She had told him a thousand times: don't touch anything in her old room.

"And then?" she asked.

The words came out lightly. But her smile had an edge to it—half curious, half dangerous—and she kept moving forward with the calm, unhurried momentum of someone who wasn't planning to give any ground.

He looked down at her. The softness in his expression didn't belong to a man who'd been cornered. His fingers moved through her curls—slowly, repeatedly—as if learning them again. Then he pulled her in and buried his face in her hair.

His voice came out low and rough, resonating from somewhere deep in his chest.

"I keep thinking… will there come a day when you regret it?"

The question settled in the air between them and stayed there, heavy and long.

"I won't."

Her answer was clean. Immediate. Steady—though something underneath it was trembling faintly. The man went still. Then his shoulders straightened, as though something inside him had been restored.

Si Yuan saw it: a small light returning to his eyes.

"Should I regret it?"

How was anyone supposed to answer that.

The question went straight into the softest, most undefended part of him.

With that stubborn streak of his,* Si Yuan thought, *he'll need at least ten days, probably a month just to process this.

An hour later, Si Yuan and Si Chen were watching a variety show, laughing when a joke landed.

Yu Hao, however, was still somewhere else entirely. The jokes on screen might as well have been broadcast from another planet.

Every now and then, though, he'd reach out and run his hand gently over his wife's hair where it spilled across his knee. Occasionally he'd peel an orange and place a segment at her lips. The tenderness was excessive in the best possible way—unhurried, patient, a little absurd.

And each time Si Yuan naively convinced himself the atmosphere had finally settled, she would produce another surprise—

No.

More accurately: another ambush.

She came out of the bathroom as though someone had switched a dial. The show's punchlines no longer reached her. Her expression had gone cool; her lips were pressed together; her eyes had shifted into that register—the one that meant trouble was on its way.

Something was definitely coming.

Something significant.

Sure enough, after a moment of restlessness she suddenly turned and knelt upright on the sofa, looking directly at her husband.

Before Si Yuan had time to process the scene, she'd looped both arms around Yu Hao's neck, leaned close to his ear, and murmured in his ear. Then she burrowed into his chest like someone hiding from the world.

What was that?

Was that adult flirting?

Was this something a teenager was supposed to witness?

What happened next was even more alarming.

As though a spell had been cast on him too, the man shot to his feet. He stood there for two full seconds—then grabbed his wallet and went out the door at a pace that suggested the building might be on fire.

A brief silence followed.

Then the woman turned around and crawled toward Si Yuan across the sofa—slowly, deliberately, with the energy of something haunted—and pressed her head against his shoulder, nuzzling in small, persistent movements.

Please,* Si Yuan thought. *I am not built like your husband. I don't have his shoulders or his constitution. Keep drilling like that and you'll go straight through me.

She looked up at him—those big eyes, suspiciously wet, lower lip caught between her teeth, the exact look of someone who had done something and knew it.

A moment later she deflated entirely, sinking sideways against him like a balloon that had quietly given up. And in a voice that was barely above a murmur, ghost-like, she began:

"Si Yuan…"

Chapter 17 – Would You Ever Regret It?

By the time that man tore out of the apartment like he was running for his life, Si Yuan still hadn't worked out what new drama his mother was cooking up this time.

Then he came back—panting, hair all over the place—death-gripping a plastic bag so enormous it looked obscene. Si Yuan's heart seized.

Has something catastrophic happened?

He clocked the man's jittery, on-edge expression, then let his gaze slide down to the half-dead woman slumped on the sofa. From there, it drifted to the bulging bag dangling from his father's hand. Through the thin packaging, a few lines of pink lettering peeked through.

In the next instant, Si Yuan froze. It felt as though invisible hands had clamped around his throat and squeezed.

He shoved the woman away on instinct, handed her back to her husband, and bolted barefoot for the balcony. He flung the door open and let the bitter wind lash across his face like a whip—

For the love of all that is holy, let a child keep his clean, pure, innocent mind.

Sanitary pads.

An entire bag of sanitary pads.

Bright colours. Every style imaginable. The man must have cleared the whole shelf—every brand, every size, every absorbency rating, every "extra-long overnight ultra-super dry" option in existence.

How did Si Yuan know?

Because he'd done this run before.

His mother, after all, could never keep track of her own cycle.

Sometimes she'd double over with cramps, completely caught off guard, and only then would it dawn on her: Oh. It's those days again.

When they first arrived in Germany, there was one time she was writhing on the bed in pain—and because the move had been such chaos, she'd forgotten to stock up. So she sent Si Yuan to the chemist for an "emergency purchase".

Thirteen-year-old Si Yuan, smack in the middle of puberty, found himself stranded in front of a wall of pads, tampons, and liners—an endless, bewildering feminine universe he had absolutely no business navigating. He stood there phone in hand, translating labels, trying desperately to work out what the differences even were.

The pharmacy lights were mercilessly bright. A lone teenage boy hovered in front of the feminine hygiene aisle, his face a portrait of pure suffering.

The ground, unfortunately, did not open up and swallow him.

In the end he grabbed a handful of everything. At the checkout, he nearly wanted to climb into the shopping bag himself.

But sometimes it really wasn't her fault. Her period always arrived a few days late—regular as clockwork, and yet never actually on time.

How did Si Yuan know that?

Well—heh—because that man, every time he called from the other side of the world, would solemnly remind him:

"These few days—don't let her get cold."

How he always knew it was those few days—that, Si Yuan had never quite figured out.

What followed was explosive enough to deserve its own entry in the dark annals of culinary history.

One day in Germany, she finally hit her limit with the daily diet of dry bread and sausages and decided to cook herself a proper meal. While watching cooking videos for inspiration, she noticed Japanese housewives would dab kitchen paper into the pan to soak up excess oil when frying fish. She thought she'd try the same with salmon.

When she reached for the kitchen roll, she discovered they'd run out.

In a flash of what she clearly believed was genius, she dashed into the bedroom, rummaged through every drawer, and unearthed a packet of tampons she'd declared "unused for ages."

Without so much as blinking, she pulled two out and dropped them straight into the sizzling pan.

Si Yuan didn't witness this firsthand. She told him about it afterwards—over a plate of perfectly golden pan-fried salmon, radiating self-satisfaction, pitching her discovery like she'd just invented a revolutionary kitchen gadget.

Si Yuan nearly choked to death on the piece of fish still in his mouth.

What made it worse was that he happened—by some cursed impulse—to glance into the kitchen bin. And there they were: two oil-swollen tampons, puffed up and glistening, sitting calmly on top of the rubbish as though waving hello.

That was the moment Si Yuan wrote off his relationship with Salmon. Permanently.

Then there was the time he found her in the kitchen holding a small, pink, dainty funnel, carefully pouring salt into the salt jar. Then she used the same funnel to pour oil—her expression focused, like a scientist mid-experiment.

She held it up proudly and showed him her latest "kitchen essential."

A menstrual cup.

"This thing is amazing," she announced, with complete sincerity. "If you snip one end off, it works exactly like a regular funnel."

A funnel that required surgery before it could be used.

Si Yuan made the fatal mistake of arguing with her. He looked it up.

When the search results loaded, his soul quietly vacated his body.

That was the moment Si Yuan decided he and Salmon deserved a second chance after all.

The next morning followed the usual script. No surprises.

She lay pale and curled up in bed, groaning and rolling. Her husband shuttled between bedroom and kitchen like a man on a mission: stuffing a hot water bottle into her arms, mixing brown sugar water, dispatching Si Yuan downstairs to buy fermented rice wine because it was "good for recovery."

Si Yuan's teeth ached just watching.

This is self-inflicted suffering. All it takes is one painkiller.

Fuming, he dug through the medicine box, found a pack, and flung it onto the bed at the tangled-haired, tightly-curled woman.

Thirty tablets. Enough for months.

"See? When you were with me, I would never have let you suffer like this."

She shot him a sideways glare—then moved with startling speed, shoving the box into the bedside drawer before the man carrying the brown sugar water could walk back in, like she was hiding contraband before a raid.

Si Yuan's temper snapped.

Fine. Let the man sort this out.

"Dad! I got medicine. Mummy won't take it."

"What medicine?"

"Painkillers!"

His father's brow drew together, voice dropping.

"Where is it?"

Hah. Let's see how you handle this. Let's see you set her straight.

"Bedside drawer."

"Mummy can't take painkillers," he said firmly. "They're habit-forming. And they interfere with sleep."

Si Yuan went completely still. He nearly dropped to his knees on the spot—I was wrong. I will reflect deeply on my mistakes.

So that was it.

That explained why she'd been drifting casually toward the bedside drawer. His mother hadn't been refusing the medicine at all—she'd been trying to sneak it when no one was looking.

It was confiscated without mercy. Probably disposed of downstairs—too shameful even for the bin at home.

She was now glaring at Si Yuan with eyes that could have melted steel.

An expression that said: Try me. I will end you.

Si Yuan nearly got down on his knees and begged.

Mum! I swear I didn't mean it.

I'm your own son!

Si Yuan figured she was sick of her husband's constant hovering—that look of desperate worry, as if she might not make it through. Especially the monk-like chanting, on loop all night:

"Are you feeling better?"

"Does it still hurt?"

"Are you cold?"

A few times would've been fine. But he cycled through it like a broken record, all night long—and even Si Yuan was ready to pull the plug. So the next morning, she finally put her foot down and sent him out to "go make money."

Si Yuan was genuinely awed by her skill at getting rid of him.

Before leaving, he still couldn't help himself. He pulled Si Yuan aside and said gravely:

"Keep an eye on Mummy."

He did.

Mother and son spent the whole morning buried in the sofa watching flashy variety shows, laughing until their eyes watered. At lunch, staring at a spread of takeaway boxes, something occurred to Si Yuan.

She hadn't been this lively in a long time.

Curiosity won. He asked outright.

She dabbed her lips with a tissue and smiled—secretive, deeply pleased with herself.

"I took the medicine. On the sly."

Si Yuan blinked. Then he raised his thumb in genuine admiration.

"He caught me once, back when we'd just got married," she said, a touch smug. "His reaction was so over the top I actually thought I was dying."

If Madam Mother felt like sharing ancient history, Si Yuan was a model audience. He listened without a word.

And as for the question that had been sitting like a stone in that man's chest—

Maybe now she'd actually say something real.

"So… did you ever regret it?" Si Yuan asked softly.

"Regret what?"

"You had better options back then. Didn't you?"

She said nothing for a moment. Then she let out a small sigh.

"I thought about it," she said. "But he—was worth the risk."

Her voice was quiet but carried a settled certainty—as though she were explaining it to Si Yuan, and at the same time giving herself an answer she'd long been owed.

"Did you win?"

"I didn't lose."

The past two days had taken a lot out of her. The pain had left her softer than usual—a little low, a little tender, almost sentimental. For the first time, she talked to Si Yuan about life the way people do when their guard is down.

"You know," she said, "sometimes I think—if I'd chosen the person everyone agreed was 'the right choice', they'd all have said I chose well. But would that person have been right for me?"

She paused, gaze going somewhere far away.

"Back then, all I knew was this: this man would love me for the rest of his life. I didn't want to miss that."

"But he's not with you that much," Si Yuan said.

"And how many days have I spent by his side?" she replied. "I have you. But him—all these years, he's been out there on his own."

Her voice dropped.

"Sometimes I wonder—has he ever regretted it? Maybe if he hadn't chosen me, his life would have been a lot simpler. Wouldn't it?"

This time, Si Yuan had nothing to say.

Because he believed the man who had just come home—and stepped inside and lingered by the door for a long moment—already had his answer.

Didn't he?

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