Chapter 23

Zhang Man had new intel too. She told me that Suhang’s ex-girlfriend, Duan Jiawen, and her husband both held respectable government jobs, a perfect social match on paper, but their relationship was terrible and they fought constantly. Strangely, over the past month, Jiawen had become completely submissive to her husband, which probably meant he’d gotten some dirt on her.

To dig deeper, Zhang Man even deliberately found chances to cozy up to a mutual friend of Suhang and Jiawen, and squeezed every last bit of gossip about the two of them out of her.

Duan Jiawen and Suhang had been classmates in middle school and dated for many years. Jiawen’s grandfather was a retired cadre, a man who’d lived his whole life frugally and upright. When he found out his granddaughter’s boyfriend was the son of a corrupt official, he was so furious he fell ill.

“You can marry the son of a worker, marry the son of a farmer, even marry the son of a beggar, but you must never marry the son of a corrupt official!”

On top of that, Jiawen had just taken the civil service exam back then. Her parents had long planned a stable life for their daughter and were afraid this relationship would ruin her future, so they strongly demanded she break up with Suhang.

Under all that pressure, Jiawen called Suhang to break up and said something brutally harsh: “Our Duan family is clean and innocent. There’s no way I can ever be with you!”

But after hanging up, she cried all night. The next day, she wired fifty thousand yuan to their mutual friend, to lend to Suhang in that friend’s name so he could have some emergency cash. She even used her father’s connections to get Suhang an interview at an investment bank, but repeatedly warned the friend: “Don’t tell him it was me.”

Who would have thought Suhang turned down the friend’s kindness and moved into my house instead.

When Jiawen learned that Suhang and I were engaged, it tore her apart. She felt he was doing it out of spite, to get back at her. In a fit of impulse, she wanted to break through all barriers to be with him. She even waited for him on his way home, but what she saw was him buying flowers for me. The way he carefully picked them out stabbed straight into her heart.

They even ran into each other once at a restaurant in a mall. Suhang saw her too, but his gaze was ice-cold as he pretended not to know her.

Her heart completely died after that. She met Xu Zhi, a man of matching status, through a blind date, and they quickly got married. Only after the wedding did she realize Xu Zhi was utterly irresponsible and was secretly cheating on her. She tried to catch him in the act and failed, only enraging him. He hit her, and Jiawen broke down in tears.

A friend rushed over to comfort her, and Jiawen sobbed that her biggest regret in life was breaking up with Suhang.

The friend told all of this to Suhang. He only replied indifferently, “Talk to her more, try to comfort her. There’s nothing I can do to help. I’m already married. It wouldn’t be appropriate for me to see her.”

The friend couldn’t hold back and blurted out the truth: “That money you used to come back to China-she’s the one who asked me to lend it to you. And the investment bank interview too, she burned every last favor to get that for you. She said something really vicious to you back then, but you never once thought about how she felt! When your family’s scandal broke, she was dragged into the rumors too. She suffered online abuse because of you, and you weren’t there. She was scared and hurt and completely alone!”

When he heard that, Suhang couldn’t sit still any longer. He went straight to see Duan Jiawen.

“But it was just that once,” Zhang Man said. “After that, they never saw each other again.”

“How do you know they never saw each other again?”

“Jiawen told her friend. She said after that night, she deleted Suhang for good. They’d never see each other again, and she was going to live a good life with her husband.”

I checked the dates. The night Suhang rushed over to comfort Jiawen was the same night he told me he was on a business trip to Lin City and didn’t come home. It had to be that night that her husband, Xu Zhi, caught them and got his leverage.

I swallowed my bitterness and forced myself to smile as I praised Zhang Man for how much she’d improved, saying she had the makings of a master detective and was getting more impressive by the day.

But Zhang Man didn’t smile. She suddenly hugged me. “Boss, if you want to cry, just cry.”

“Get lost!” I shoved her away. “I’m not crying. I’m going to make the bad guys cry.”

Zhang Man nodded hard. “Right, make the bad guys cry. That Xu Zhi is absolute scum, and Suhang isn’t any better. I want to skin them both.”

Once we calmed down, we realized it would be hard to pin any legal charges on them. Too much time had passed; any evidence was long gone. Zhang Man had even checked all the security footage in the complex, but it only kept the last fifteen days. Everything from back then had already been overwritten.

Maybe we could still recover the emails between Suhang and Xu Zhi, but that would only prove that Xu Zhi was threatening Suhang, not that he had harmed me. Legally speaking, Suhang was also a victim.

In truth, I’d never planned on going to the police. I was afraid my dad wouldn’t be able to take it. The doctor had warned that he needed to stay in a good mood. If he found out what his favorite son-in-law had done, it would destroy him.

At this point, the only option was to deal with it my own way.

I clenched my teeth. “Manman, I want to teach Xu Zhi a lesson.”

Zhang Man immediately nodded. “Leave it to me. I’ll help you handle it.”