The night before her graduation art show, Lin Wei caught her boyfriend Chen Jingming betraying her. The intimate figures in the photos, the unfamiliar perfume in the hotel room, and his words, “We were never right for each other,” were like an icy blade, shattering all the hopes she had held for her youth.
Even worse, Chen Jingming hadn’t just cheated. He had secretly used the contract for her father’s factory as collateral and racked up a huge gambling debt. Red paint hurled by debt collectors splattered the factory gates. Her father fell ill from the shock and ended up in the ICU. In a single week, Lin Wei’s world collapsed into ruins.
Just when she was at her most desperate, the Chen family delivered a gold-embossed red invitation. Chen Zhiyan, Chen Jingming’s uncle, a man who was always silent, with eyes as deep as a pool, proposed a deal: marry him, and he would pay off all the Chen family’s debts and protect the Lin family.
“This marriage is only for show. We’ll keep out of each other’s way and divorce when the time is right.” Lin Wei gripped her fountain pen and signed the contract. The pen’s nib cut through more than the paper; it pierced the last of her hopes for love.
She became her ex-boyfriend’s aunt by marriage and moved into the Chen family’s old residence, sharing a roof with a man eight years older than her, always composed and self-controlled. He shielded her from his relatives’ barbs and handed her turpentine when she couldn’t paint, but never once asked about her past.
But when Chen Jingming returned, full of regret, when undercurrents surged through the family, and when warmth began to emerge beneath the contract’s icy shell, Lin Wei realized that this marriage, which began as compensation, might conceal a love more complicated than betrayal.
The silent man had long been holding up a sky where it would never rain, in a place she couldn’t see.
