Chapter 2

Chapter 2

In the five years we were together, Jiang Shen once said I was his life.

One winter, Nancheng City was hit by a rare snowstorm that lasted half a month. Jiang Shen wore a black wool coat and waited for me at the subway entrance every evening to pick me up from work.

Then he would take my hand, and we would walk beneath the dim yellow streetlights, our home glowing in the distance.

Jiang Shen didn’t like snow, but he said, “Because Ah Yan likes it, I’ll try to like it too.”

But when exactly did he start to change?

Jiang Shen gradually became very busy. Sometimes he wouldn’t come home for three to five days. At his worst, he would disappear for stretches of time and barely reply to my messages.

Yet every time he came back, he became that gentle, thoughtful man again.

There would be hot food on the table, and the laundry would be washed spotless.

As if… he were making up for something.

The bedroom door was pushed open, pulling me out of my memories of my previous life.

Jiang Shen stood in the doorway. “Ah Yan, I have to go to the office.”

The office again.

Jiang Shen had forgotten again that today was my birthday.

In my previous life, I had reminded him unhappily to come back early and celebrate my birthday with me. Jiang Shen had promised he would.

I waited the entire night, full of hope, until the candles burned down into the cake and left twenty small black holes behind.

Mocking my pathetic ignorance.

If he was destined not to come back, why promise me at all?

This time, I didn’t want to beg him to spend my birthday with me anymore.

After a long silence, I finally forced down the surge of emotion and answered quietly, “Okay.”

There was no movement behind me.

Oh, right. I remembered now. Every time before he left, I was supposed to give him a kiss.

Was he waiting for that?

I shrank deeper into the blankets, trying to keep myself a little warmer, and said softly, “I don’t feel well. I’m going to sleep first.”

“Okay.” Jiang Shen never forced me. With a click, he closed the bedroom door.

Downstairs came the sound of a car driving away.

The room sank back into a suffocating dead silence.

I gathered all my strength. A few minutes later, I got up, changed my clothes, and went out.

The truth was, after all these years, I knew nothing about Jiang Shen.

He had a company, but he never let me visit him at work, and he never said a word about meeting his family.

If that auntie hadn’t blurted it out at the wedding in my previous life, I wouldn’t have known how long I was going to be kept in the dark like some pathetic fool.

Five years had made me far too dependent on him. This time, I wanted to break that dependence with my own hands.

The late autumn wind was strong, howling as it blew my hair into disarray.

I hailed a cab by the road and gave the driver an address.

“Miss, what are you going to Old Street for all by yourself?”

It took all my strength to pull my lips into a strained smile. “To pick up my lover from work…”

That was Jiang Shen’s company address.

I had accidentally seen it on Jiang Shen’s phone in my previous life. Otherwise, he wouldn’t even have told me where his company was.

Back then, he had been disappearing frequently, often gone for three or four days at a time.

I thought it was because he was in the early stages of starting a business and was simply too busy. But was that really the case?

I clutched my handbag tightly, my blood pounding against my eardrums with a heavy thud, thud.

The car slowly pulled over to the side of the road, headlights shining.

The driver lit a cigarette. “Miss, are you sure this is the place?”

It wasn’t an office building. It was an apartment complex.

The gray sky hung over the apartment building. In front of the entrance, plane trees stood in the autumn wind, oppressive and gloomy.

The heater was on in the cab.

I sat inside, looking through the window, and watched with my own eyes as Jiang Shen and another woman turned out of an alley together.

A sharp, splitting pain ripped through my entire body, tearing constantly at my soul. All those years of bitter waiting and longing finally turned utterly lowly and cheap in that moment.

The woman was very young, slim and delicate. She wore Jiang Shen’s scarf, and when she smiled, her eyes were bright and captivating.

Jiang Shen said he liked the two dimples I had when I smiled.

She had them too.

In her hands, she carried fresh fruit and vegetables, as well as Jiang Shen’s favorite beer.

Jiang Shen had his hands in his pockets, a fashionable women’s bag hanging from his forearm, as he followed leisurely behind her.

With an indulgent, doting air, he watched her walk lightly within his sight.

His heart and eyes were filled with her.

They chatted and laughed all the way into the building entrance.

At the moment they stepped inside, the woman turned around, pushed him against the wall, and rose on tiptoe.

A gust of wind blew past, and the security door swung partly shut, blocking my view.

All I could see was the slightly lifted red high heel, swaying happily.

The cab’s hazard lights were still blinking, ticking softly. The driver flicked the ash from his cigarette, and it drifted down through the crack in the window…

“Miss, let it go. Break up with him sooner rather than later.”

I slowly clenched my hands. The next second, I suddenly threw open the car door and rushed out.

“Jiang Shen! You bastard!”

My voice was drowned out by the blare of honking horns. Staggering, I tripped over a manhole cover and slammed hard into a pile of filthy fallen leaves, scraping my skin open.

After the cars passed, there was nothing left on the bare main road.

The security door was blown crooked by the wind.

The people who had been standing there were already gone.

It felt as if someone had slapped me hard across the face, the blow both painful and loud.

In the end, it was the driver who helped me back into the cab.

He sighed. “Making a scene won’t help. When the sky wants to rain and a woman wants to remarry, there’s no stopping it. People’s hearts… you can’t hold on to them.”

…

On my birthday that year, I turned the house upside down.

Including Jiang Shen’s study and the bedroom.

Like a madwoman, I searched for evidence of his affair.

I kept at it until the early hours of the morning. Then I collapsed on the floor, clutching my aching stomach, curled into a ball.

Clean.

Not only was there no evidence of an affair, even the traces of his own life had been wiped away completely.

His computer had no password, and it looked like a brand-new machine. There wasn’t a single search record.

I had seen Jiang Shen sitting in front of that computer countless times, busy with one thing or another. So why had he deleted everything?

The toothbrushes, socks, and underwear I had bought him were all folded neatly and placed away.

In a hidden corner of the study, I found the gifts I had given Jiang Shen over the years.

Most of them had never even been opened.

It was as if he were deliberately erasing, from the outside world, every trace that I had ever existed by his side…

The warmth and happiness he had spent so long creating suddenly shattered like foam.

He had only pretended to love me.

Behind my back, he had built a family with another woman.