Slice of Life

I was my birth parents’ third child.

While my birth mother was pregnant with me, the village fortune-teller swore I would be a boy.

They could hardly wait.

They hid from place to place throughout the pregnancy and finally brought me into the world in the bitter cold of the twelfth lunar month—

a girl.

Meng Fanyu carried himself with effortless distinction.

I thought that even if we eventually broke up, having him as my first love would leave me with no regrets.

So I pursued him with everything I had.

Eventually, I won him over, and he laid down three rules: we would date, never marry, and break up when we graduated.

For three years, we loved each other with abandon.

On graduation day, I was the one who ended it, but he went back on our agreement.

Our conversation fell apart, and Meng Fanyu lowered his proud head with a bitter laugh.

He told me I had better pray we never met again.

From then on, I did everything I could to avoid him.

But with the slightest turn of fate, the world can become very small, and two people who once belonged to each other are bound to meet again.

Discovering my husband’s affair was a trivial matter.

At a dinner with friends, he, who had always been aloof, suddenly took the initiative to serve food to everyone at the table.

Later.

I heard him softly reciting a line from Roman Holiday in the study.

“In order to shake your hand, I shook hands with everyone.”

Ha!

Six years after our divorce, I ran into my ex-husband on a street corner while holding my three-year-old daughter.

He stared blankly at the girl in my arms for a long time before knitting his brows. “She’s almost six years old,” he said, his voice laced with accusation. “Why does she look so thin and small?”

Ha!

He actually thought the child I was holding was his.

I suppose he believed I loved him so deeply that even after he cheated and divorced me, I would have gone off and raised his child all on my own.

I did something terrible back in middle school.

At the time, I didn’t think much of it. I was even relieved that no one ever found out.

But once I learned the full truth, the despair made me want to die.

A person as vile and shameless as me is surely bound for Hell.

To win Jiang Bai over, I, a spoiled little princess with a monthly allowance of hundreds of thousands, spent three whole years pretending to be dirt poor.

All just so I could mooch meals and drinks off him.

But now his “white moonlight” has suddenly returned, and she even had the nerve to mock me for being a broke loser.

Fine! Great! You want to see who’s richer?

I’m done pretending!

On the final day of the divorce cooling-off period, I waited for Yuan Shiyu at the Civil Affairs Bureau for three hours.

The person who eventually arrived wasn’t him; instead, it was a hospital representative delivering a critical condition notice and a last letter.

Everyone thought he had finally agreed to let me go. Only I knew that the first sentence of that letter read: Wantang, I’m sorry, I really can’t make it this time.

When my Adoptive Father first saw me, I was eating a bowl of spoiled rice.

Hungry flies were fighting me for the food, and I couldn’t even spare a hand to shoo them away.

Later, he took me home. He threw me a party for my seventh birthday.

He said, “Xiao Jue, today is your new beginning. From now on, this day will be your birthday every year.”

Everyone smiled at me. Only my Adoptive Mother roared after the banquet had ended, “She’s your illegitimate daughter, isn’t she?”

On the day of my hairpin ceremony, my brother-in-law, tipsy from wine, barged into my room.

That same night, my mouth was gagged and I was taken to the Marquis’s Mansion.

My legitimate elder sister told me she could not bear children and needed to borrow my womb.

A year later, I gave birth to a son.

My legitimate elder sister brought me to the Bamboo Garden, where four old maids covered my mouth and buried me in a pit they had dug long before.

Before I died, I kept wondering what the point had been of someone like me coming into this world.

But I never imagined that I would be dug up again.

The person who found me was small and thin, yet he staggered along with me on his back for ten miles.

He covered me with the only clothing he had and gave me a chance to live.

An old man took me in. From that day on, I changed my name and became someone else.

Five years later, my wonton shop opened in Capital City, and I happened to run into my legitimate elder sister and her family being sold off.

She begged me to save her son.

But I pointed to the young man kneeling off to the side and said, “I’ll only save him.”

“I once blew thirty-five thousand on a man in a single night.”

Everyone thought I was drunk and talking big, and the room burst into laughter.

Only one person remained expressionless. He was the star of the night.

The entire department had taken turns playing Truth or Dare, all for the sake of buttering him up and securing the seven-figure ad placement case in his hands.

When the drinking was over and everyone had left, the man looked at me, the only one who had stayed behind.

His gaze was indifferent, his tone laced with mockery.

“Director Yu, how many years ago was that? And you still remember it so clearly?”