Short Story

Three months after our breakup, my ex-boyfriend suddenly called.

“The bar is empty, Xixi. Why haven’t you come to pick me up yet?”

My eyes welled up instantly. Fighting back a sob, I asked him in a low voice where he was. A burst of wild laughter suddenly erupted from the other end of the line. He gasped for air between fits of giggles.

“Are you stupid? I’m playing Truth or Dare, for fuck’s sake!” A sob escaped my throat. “You can call me whatever you want, Gu Ye, as long as you come home with me.”

The other end of the line went dead silent… “Dammit, who the hell is Gu Ye?”

It has been ten years since I died.

After a decade, I have finally seen the first person to come and pay their respects at my grave.

It is a man, limping as he walks toward me.

It is my father.

Ten years after graduation, at a class reunion in Beijing, I saw him again.

Among a group of male classmates nearing thirty and starting to put on a bit of weight, he still looked as young and handsome as ever.

We sat far apart at the table and didn’t exchange a single word.

When the reunion ended, a light rain began to fall, and I hurried to leave.

To my surprise, he stopped my car.

“Xiao Shan.” His eyes were just as clear and transparent as they had always been.

Perhaps it was because of the rain, but there seemed to be a faint hint of urgency in his voice.

“Could you… give me a lift?”

Everyone says Qi Zheng loves me.

When we were young, girls came and went around him, but as long as I turned around, he was always there behind me.

Later, he reformed for me and kept himself chaste for me. The once unruly and rebellious playboy began to learn how to cook and take care of the household.

On my twenty-sixth birthday, he knelt on one knee before me and produced that ring symbolizing true love.

After a long silence, I said only one thing-

“Qi Zheng, Wen Yi is dead.”

Qi Zheng’s face went pale in an instant. I looked at him calmly. He said, “I never thought you’d still remember her.”

The day before our wedding, I accidentally stumbled upon a chat log between him and one of his old buddies.

“I’ve never met anyone so easy to fool.”

“She’s from a single-parent household, you know? She’s starved for affection.”

“So, even if I treat her just a tiny bit well, she comes crawling back to lick my boots.”

…

Honestly, I once believed he was the one who rescued me from the mire I was sinking in. As it turns out, he was just playing me for a fool the entire time.

I thought I had found love, but all my sincerity had been thrown to the dogs.

I committed suicide.

On New Year’s Eve, when families gather together.

But I never expected that my ex-husband, who had always been indifferent to me, would go mad with revenge against those who treated me badly after my death.

He even wanted to die for me.

Yet when I was alive, he clearly didn’t love me.

Because he was poor, Zhou Jinyan never brought up the subject of marriage.

That was until the day I saw him casually open a bottle of wine that cost as much as my entire annual salary.

It turned out that being born into royalty and living a life of luxury was the true Zhou Jinyan.

His friend asked, “Aren’t you tired of playing the pauper after five years? When do you plan to come clean with her?”

Zhou Jinyan flicked his eyelids open with nonchalance. “On the day of the engagement, I suppose.”

I didn’t get hysterical. On the day of his engagement, I boarded a plane and crossed the ocean.

I later heard that on the day of his engagement,

He suddenly had a change of heart midway, driving back to an old rental apartment.

When he saw that the place was empty and I was gone, he completely lost his mind.

While the concubines of the harem fought for favor, the Empress was wondering when the emperor would finally die.

The emperor and I had been married since our youth, but ours was a match arranged without either of us having any say.

After all these years, we had only ever treated each other with distant courtesy.

And as my son grew older by the day, I found myself hoping more and more that His Majesty might depart this world sooner rather than later-if only so all my years of diligently managing his harem would not have been in vain.

I grew up in the countryside until I was seventeen. Then people from the capital came and told me I was the young lady of a marquis’s household.

But the moment I arrived in the capital, they hurriedly married me off to a spoiled wastrel.

Later, that wastrel caused a disaster and had his family estate confiscated. I was the only one who tossed him a sickle and said,

“Husband, come home with me and farm the fields.”

My husband Chen Jing and I lived in harmony as a married couple, raising a son and a daughter.

Everyone said that for a merchant’s daughter like me to marry Chen Jing was a stroke of divine luck.

I deeply believed that too.

Reborn back to the year I turned sixteen, I held up the embroidered ball, waiting quietly for the new top scholar as he made his triumphant ride through the streets.

But Chen Jing waved the embroidered ball away.

He didn’t even care who the ball hit. It was as if, in this life, whoever I married had nothing to do with him.

I suddenly realized with a start- In this life, Chen Jing wanted a different wife.

Later, the good man I married was the very one he had caused the embroidered ball to strike.