Chapter 2

Chapter 2

In truth, what really hurt me wasn’t Yu Bixue. It was Tan Xi’s betrayal.

She had very little ability to support herself. After graduating from college, she worked as a sales assistant at an art gallery, only half a day at a time, and what she made was barely enough to feed herself. Because of that, she had been living in the apartment I bought for three years straight.

In those three years, I never asked her for a single cent. In return, she did her best to take care of my daily needs. She also witnessed the entire process of Yu Bixue and me getting to know each other and falling in love. From time to time, she would even complain that he was too much of a straight man, that he had no sense of romance, and that I deserved better.

Because I knew there was someone else in her heart, I trusted her completely. I never suspected a thing. Yet when my guard was down the most, she stabbed me in the back.

On the drive home, the way they had exchanged those coy, intimate, smiling glances kept flashing through my mind. The road ahead seemed to vanish altogether, leaving only endless confusion to swallow me whole.

He said it was just playing along for the occasion.

She said I didn’t need to take it seriously.

They had taken the relationship I treasured most and turned it into a rotten mess, then turned around and accused me of making a mountain out of a molehill. Where exactly had everything gone wrong?

I thought about it for a long, long time.

There was no answer.

Instead, in my daze, I ran over the iron fence by the roadside, and my tire exploded on the spot.

It was already dark by then. On both sides of the road stretched vast, empty fields, sparsely planted with short heads of cabbage that extended hundreds of meters into the distance. Beyond the vegetable patch, however, there were lights, fire, and a house. A long wire had been strung between two thin, straight spruces, and several gray, dusty pieces of clothing drifted in the wind like ghosts.

I took another deep breath, and on the wind came the suspiciously delicious scent of braised pork.

I parked the car in the vegetable patch and got out for a closer look. A dark red sign stood at the entrance of the little house, printed with two huge characters that made no sense at all.

“Abort.”

“Fetus.”

“You do abortions here?”

Full of questions, I stood at the doorway and called inside.

The person within was startled by me. He set down the bowl in his hands, confusion showing in his eyes.

He was a young man with thick brows, dark eyes, long lashes, and a pair of clear fox-like eyes that tapered sharply at the corners. His jaw was smooth and sharply defined, giving him the faint melancholy air of a boy from a Japanese film.

He was so good-looking that it made you automatically ignore the baggy shorts and old-man undershirt he was wearing.

Honestly, a face like that had no business appearing in some wild vegetable patch covered in cabbage leaves, especially not in the middle of the night. It felt downright uncanny.

But that wasn’t even the uncanniest part.

“What abortions?”

Seeing his blank expression, I stepped back and took another careful look. Only then did I realize I had read the sign in the wrong direction.

Read vertically, it said: Tire Inflation and Repair…

“Ahem. I misspoke. Tire repair. My tire blew out.”

“Oh.”

I stared fixedly into his eyes until he finally looked away. “Where’s your car?”

“Outside, by the vegetable patch.”

“Okay.”

After that, I crouched beside the car with this man of unknown origins. He shone a work light under it for a long while before declaring with certainty, “You’ll have to go into the city to change the tire. I don’t have your model here.”

“Then how am I supposed to get home?”

“I can put on your spare tire, and you can drive back slowly…”

“No. I don’t dare.”

He looked at me.

I looked at him.

A long silence passed.

“Then what do you want to do?”

“I’ll pay you. Help me drive the car back into the city.”

“Is there any need to make it that complicated?”

“Five hundred.”

“But it’s too late right now…”

“One thousand.”

“Fine.”

He compromised, shuffling back in mud-caked slippers, probably to get the spare tire. Just as he was about to enter the house, I called out to him.

“Wang Ziyue!”

His steps remained perfectly smooth. Amid my ragged breathing, so frantic it felt like it might burst my eardrums, he did not pause for even a single second. He simply walked straight through the door.

No. This was too wrong.

Could I have recognized the wrong person?

But that aura, that face-they were clearly those of the white moonlight Tan Xi had pined after and kept in her heart for more than ten years.