Chapter 4
Chapter 4
When we got home, Yang Jisheng handed a stack of warm towels to me as I sat on the sofa with my eyes swollen red from crying. “She was just a student my mother used to sponsor. You’re overthinking it.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Having already imagined an entire tragic romance between a rich heir and his long-lost love, I was sobbing so hard I could barely stop. Pressing the towel to my eyes, I snapped viciously, “If it wasn’t for a woman, then what was it for?”
He went to the safe, took out a cigar, and tapped the mouthpiece. “I don’t enter relationships with people casually.”
“That, I thought you understood.”
“…Hmph.”
Hearing him say that made me feel a good deal better.
But the resolute way he had acted that morning still left me deeply humiliated. “Then what did you mean by divorce? Don’t tell me you were just saying it for fun.”
“I wasn’t.”
Yang Jisheng lifted the cigar to his lips with two long fingers, but he did not light it. His eyes, faintly gloomy, fixed on me.
“I was seriously asking you for a divorce, Zhong Wanying.”
At that moment, the lamplight stretched his shadow out impossibly long, laying it across my vision like a bottomless black abyss.
My cheeks burned in waves from the sheer embarrassment and humiliation. “No. I won’t divorce you.”
“You won’t regret it?”
“No.”
The moment the word left my mouth, he set down the cigar and strode over to me.
“Poor thing. Crying your eyes red over an outsider.”
As he spoke, he picked up the towel that had already gone cold and carefully wiped my eyes. His lowered gaze was half-hidden beneath thick lashes, carrying a subtle stubbornness.
I had to admit, in three years of marriage, this was the first time we had looked at each other for more than a second.
In the end, I was the one who couldn’t take it and looked away first.
Early the next morning, the man sleeping beside me tossed and turned, then suddenly muttered to himself, “No. I have to take my mom away.”
Still groggy, I asked, “Take her where?”
He didn’t answer. Instead, he got up at once to wash up. Seeing him move with such brisk efficiency, I felt too embarrassed to keep lazing in bed.
After a hasty breakfast, we returned to the Yang residence.
We had just brought his mother to the door when we ran straight into a tall, burly middle-aged man with an upright air about him.
The man was quite warm in his greeting. “Jisheng, when did you get back?”
This was Yang Jisheng’s biological father, and also my father-in-law, Yang Qitai.
Toward his eldest son, who had not been home in ages, he put on the tender look of a doting father. Yang Jisheng, however, was cold to him and didn’t even bother with small talk. “I’m taking my mother to stay with me for a couple of days.”
“What, you’re leaving already?”
“Yes. I have work at the company.”
Yang Qitai raised his voice in disapproval. “Look at you!
“At least stay for a meal. Do your duty as the eldest brother. How long has it been since you’ve seen your two younger brothers?”
“I said there’s no need.”
Leaving behind that indifferent sentence, Yang Jisheng told me, “I’ll take Mom to the car first. Wait for me by the gate.”
I had long since grown used to their clashes, so I answered with a casual hum.
At the sight, Yang Qitai’s expression turned indescribably ugly.
When I had first married into the family three years ago, he used to order Yang Jisheng around, full of the imposing authority of a patriarch.
Later, perhaps because he realized his two younger sons were hopeless and the family still needed the eldest to hold up its reputation, his attitude gradually improved.
He had tried soft persuasion and hard pressure, threats and bribes.
He had used every trick in the book, all for the sake of getting his two useless illegitimate sons a share in his eldest son’s company.
Just as I reached the gate, a fiery red Bugatti drove in through the front entrance.
The polished window slowly rolled down. The person inside was smiling so broadly his face seemed to bloom, yet it still couldn’t hide the way he looked at people from the corner of his eye. “Sister-in-law, you’re getting prettier and prettier. My big brother is truly blessed.”
This was one of the twins. Perhaps because he was young and hot-blooded, both his cheeks were covered in red pimples.
His blatant stare made me uncomfortable, so I smiled and said, “What’s been going on with you lately, Rongsheng? Your face looks worse and worse.”
Hearing my concern, he blew at his bangs as if trying to look cool.
“I have an allergic condition. I thought you knew, Sister-in-law.”
“I do. You have allergies and an STD.”
I tossed out the reply casually and walked right around him.
After that, Yang Jisheng left with his mother. Only, he didn’t take her back to our home. Instead, after a winding drive, he brought her to a highly private sanatorium.
It wasn’t that I wasn’t curious. It was just that on the drive back, his expression was so tense that I didn’t ask right away.
“Can I trust you, Zhong Wanying?”
“What do you mean?”
After a long while, he turned his face toward me. His eyes were dark and bright, intimidating enough to send a chill down my spine.
“You have to help me keep the place I took her today a secret.”