Chapter 9

Chapter 9

After spending the whole afternoon doing 3D renders, I was right in the middle of a frantic work session when my mom called me again. Before that, she had sent me several photos.

I hadn’t even had time to answer before she tore into me.

“Are you missing a few screws?”

“What happened?”

“That Xiao Tan you’re so close with has already gotten into bed with Xiao Yu. Don’t tell me you didn’t know!”

Her booming voice startled me so badly that I blurted out without thinking.

“Then I guess I wish them a long and happy marriage?”

Her voice got even louder on the other end, rattling my eardrums. “Are you insane?! You’re just going to hand your own husband over to someone else like that? Do you even have any backbone? Are you even my daughter?!”

There was a reason my mom was so furious at my lack of fighting spirit.

When she was younger, she used to help the women around her catch mistresses. Her illustrious achievements included clawing a woman’s scalp bloody, kicking another so hard she broke her shinbone, and cursing someone out until the woman slit her wrists in the middle of the night.

Now, nearing fifty, she was still as sharp as ever, and every so often she even practiced on my stepfather.

I gave a few perfunctory responses and hung up. Then I opened the photos she had sent. Sure enough, they were all blurry action shots of Tan Xi and Yu Bixue. The two of them were half-naked, scrambling around on the bed and the sofa while my mom chased them down, the images so blurred it was almost impossible to recognize them.

My mom sent another voice message telling me to come to the scene and help her tear them apart. I ignored it outright.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go.

It was just that right now, I felt even guiltier than Tan Xi.

Before I knew it, two weeks had passed.

The man surnamed Zhao lay silently in my friends list like a corpse. If I hadn’t come home and found the drain clogged, there was a real chance we might have just ended things there.

Anyone who has lived in a high-rise knows that drains clogging every now and then is perfectly normal. So finding a strong, capable man to help me unclog my drain was also a perfectly normal thing to do.

So I quickly opened our WeChat chat and typed a message.

“My drain is clogged!”

The moment I hit send, I realized my tone sounded far too cheerful. I hurriedly tapped recall and retyped the message.

“Um, my drain is clogged…”

Before I could send it, the tiny text at the top of the screen changed from “Muzi Repairs” to “The other party is typing…”

Hah!

Only now you remember to look for me?

Too late!

I deleted the line I had typed, then turned off my phone to stop myself from opening the chat. I even threw it far away on purpose.

After that, I sat on the sofa feeling like there was a fire under my butt.

Every second felt like a year…

After finally making it through five whole minutes, my phone still hadn’t made a sound. At last, I couldn’t resist and unlocked the screen.

Almost at that exact instant, a message came from the other side. Five simple words.

“I’m downstairs at your building.”