“What tears the truth apart is never a conspiracy, but the iris at the corner of her eye as she smiles through tears.”
The first case Su Qingyu takes on after returning from overseas is representing business upstart Cai Zeran in a cross-border merger and acquisition. The iris-shaped brooch on his suit conceals a mystery, and the fingers handing her the contract are wrapped in the candy wrapper of the orange sweets she loved in high school.
When she discovers that his computer holds her medical records from twelve years ago, the most dangerous client becomes her savior.
“I spent twelve years turning myself into a monster, all so I could catch you when you fell into the abyss.”
Cai Zeran has two regrets in his life: letting go of Zhao Suhe’s hand beneath a wisteria trellis when he was seventeen, and failing to recognize her when they met again at twenty-seven, after she had changed her name.
He personally orchestrates chance encounters, creates crises, and even plays the villain, all to draw every poisoned arrow in the shadows toward himself. Until, after the car accident, the amnesiac woman presses a bloodstained flash drive to his throat. “Mr. Cai, shall we work together?”
When a chip hidden inside a ruby necklace brings a long-buried city hall case to light, and the password to the medical records room turns out to be the Morse code for a childhood promise, two souls torn apart by fate find warmth in each other amid a web of power and intrigue.
He has an iris she designed at sixteen tattooed on his back. The birthmark on her collarbone resembles the thorn bird he once sketched by hand.
And at the final hearing on a stormy night in Shanghai, Su Qingyu, seated at the plaintiff’s table, takes off her headset and holds up her wedding ring to the cameras broadcasting live across the internet. “As defense counsel, I hereby request permission to marry the defendant, Cai Zeran, right here in court.”
