“Attorney Gu, your wife’s ambulance ran the red light half an hour ago.”
Torrential rain battered Gu Yan’s suit as he clutched the yellowed marriage certificate, his knuckles turning white.
His phone screen lit up with a message Su Nian’an had sent at three in the morning: “Our wedding date has arrived. I haven’t touched a penny of the money. The password is at the very bottom of the drawer.”
Half a year ago, he had slapped the divorce papers against her face. “You greedy fraud. For the next six months, I’ll make you regret every second you ever set foot in the Gu family.” Back then, she would always lower her eyes and clean up the teacups he had smashed. A pale collarbone peeked from her neckline, and she looked like a cat with its tail stepped on.
It wasn’t until his younger sister tearfully dragged him to watch the security footage that he saw Su Nian’an pushing Gu Tang to safety on the lakeshore during a storm, only to be swept into the treacherous current herself. And it wasn’t until he found the diagnosis she had hidden in an old sweater that he read the final line: “If she misses the surgery, her life expectancy is no more than six months.”
He frantically smashed through the rickety door of the old apartment building, only to find half a bottle of heart medication left on the coffee table and a farewell letter, blurred by rainwater: “Gu Yan, I wasn’t doing it for the money. But now I don’t even have the chance to say so.”
The ambulance siren pierced the curtain of rain. Gu Yan suddenly remembered how, whenever he coldly told her, “Don’t touch me,” she would always step back and quietly press a hand to her chest. She hadn’t been afraid of him. She had been in so much pain she could barely stand.
