Chapter 1

The black-and-red stud in my hand was still giving off a barely visible glow. The room was frighteningly quiet.

It took Yu Jingchen a long time to find his voice.

“How do I know you haven’t hidden another one somewhere? You do this every time. If you’re letting me go, open the door. You couldn’t bear to—”

I dropped the tiny stud into the trash, opened the door, and went back to sit on the couch.

Yu Jingchen stared at the wide-open doorway. There was no particular joy on his face, though his breathing had grown heavier.

After a long silence, he spoke, his voice a little hoarse but full of defiance.

“Another round of run-and-chase, is it? Fine. This time I’ll hide so well you’ll never catch me, you controlling bitch.”

His footsteps receded. The slam of the door hurt my ears.

The pain spread from the nerves in my head down into my chest.

I closed my eyes. The system was still chattering excitedly in my head.

“That’s the way! That jinx was ruining everything for my darling.”

“You should have opened the door and kicked him out ages ago. Did you see how eager he was? As if he’s some irreplaceable treasure…”

Perhaps noticing the look on my face, the system had the sense to fall silent.

After a while, it brought up a transparent panel with a show of cheerfulness.

“All right, my precious girl. The jinx is gone. Let’s pick you a new male lead.”

Numbly, I opened the takeout containers in front of me.

There were two meals. I’d added the Chinese sausage Yu Jingchen liked to his.

I bent my head and chewed slowly, watching the system display one man’s profile after another. All I could hear was what Yu Jingchen had said.

“Stick with you and I’ll starve to death. A few mouthfuls of food, and I have to work all night.”

I wanted to ask him: Hadn’t he enjoyed it too?

All those nights entwined together, all those times he’d said we should stay tangled up until we died—had I imagined them?

“I’m sorry. I’m not interested in picking another male lead right now…”

I stopped halfway through the sentence when I saw the man’s photograph on the panel.

“Pei Qingyan?”

The system stopped scrolling. Seeing that it finally had my interest, it immediately enlarged his profile.

“You like this one, sweetheart? Don’t worry. I picked every one of these men myself. I guarantee they’re better than that jinx…”

Pei Qingyan was indeed better than Yu Jingchen.

Even in college, he’d often outdone him. Yu Jingchen called Pei Qingyan a fraud.

After we started dating, Yu Jingchen had wheedled my phone out of me and deleted every way I had of contacting Pei Qingyan.

But it wasn’t his handsome face or gentle smile that had stopped me short.

It was the fact that Pei Qingyan had died a year ago.

Yu Jingchen himself had told me.

My company had just begun its decline then. I was run off my feet every day. The moment I got home, he gave me a cold look.

“How was the funeral? Did he leave you anything? I thought you were going to follow him to the grave and never come back.”

I stared at him, bewildered by his sarcasm.

“Whose funeral?”

Only when he realized I truly hadn’t heard anything did his expression improve.

“That Pei Qingyan. Depression or something, apparently. What did he have to be so miserable about? You’ve locked me up for years without letting me out, and I haven’t…”

Pei Qingyan and I hadn’t been particularly close, yet my heart seemed to miss a beat.

That night, Yu Jingchen was unusually tender with me, almost as he had been when we first got together.