Childhood Friends

I fell in love with a poor boy, but later broke up with him because he was poor.

Years later, he became successful and famous, while I, serving food, accidentally stained his girlfriend’s bag.

The young girlfriend sneered, “Do you recognize this bag? Can you afford to compensate for it?”

I smiled and handed her my own bag:

“A limited edition Birkin, three times the price of yours. Is it alright if I compensate you with this?”

At the premiere of the film “Huaian,” director Chen Huaixu said he had spent twelve years preparing for it-a belated promise to someone.

A reporter asked, “Someone very important, right?”

He joked self-deprecatingly, “A liar I’ll never forget.”

Later, my past was completely exposed, and netizens went crazy shipping our expired romance.

He held me, sobbing so hard he could barely speak:

“Qi An, I’ve saved up many millions by now. Would you consider me for a second marriage?”

After my wife disappeared, I frantically searched everywhere for her. Following a trail of clues, I finally found the Monitor from high school.

The Monitor had once been the top student in our class, with excellent grades, a sunny disposition, and good looks-the kind of child every parent praised, who should have had a bright future. Yet now, in his forties, he had sunk to working at a nightclub in his hometown.

I paid a hefty sum to meet him, hoping to learn the truth.

But sometimes, when you part the mist and see the stars, it isn’t necessarily a good thing.

I was helping my childhood friend, who was hospitalized, to the bathroom, but at the door, I ran into my ex-boyfriend whom I hadn’t seen in five years.

He was half-embracing a pregnant woman, his head slightly lowered, their posture intimate.

I vaguely heard the pregnant woman call him “husband.”

After five years of separation, I had imagined countless scenarios of our reunion, but I never dared to think that he would already be married.

When the earthquake struck, Zhou Yan instinctively shielded me with his body, ending up with multiple fractures all over.

In the hospital room, the girl next door said enviously, “Your husband risked his life to save you. He really loves you.”

I forced a smile. “Yes.”

But just last night, after I had fallen asleep,

He slipped into the bathroom and gently comforted the young girl he kept outside.

“I’m fine, don’t cry, be good.”

“As long as I think of you, I’m not afraid of anything.”

Zhou Yan and I grew up together, from each other’s first love to today-it’s been ten years.

We’re the model couple everyone praises.

No one knows he keeps a stand-in outside.

Someone who looks just like me at eighteen, when we first got together.

Five years after my boyfriend’s death, I met a man in an interview who looked exactly like him.

When work was over, I cornered him in the conference room: “Since you’re not dead, why haven’t you contacted me in these five years?”

He straightened his tie, his smile both flippant and distant: “This kind of pick-up line is a bit cliché, Miss Meng. Why not just offer yourself directly?”

I ignored him and reached out, touching a slight bump behind his ear.

He froze instantly.

I laughed: “What’s wrong? You look alike, and now even your sensitive spots are the same?”