Amid Shanghai’s neon lights, Liu Xinlei clutched the money from selling his patent and rushed to the hospital. He never saw the silver chain slip from Su Wanqing’s neck as she turned away. He had bought it with his first paycheck, but never dared to have his name engraved on it.
He had taken a knife for her, leaving a scar on his arm; taken drinks for her until he vomited blood, yet hid his cirrhosis diagnosis and said, “It’s just a stomach problem.” When his old back injury flared up, she was staring at the “cheating photos” Lin Weiwei had faked. She kicked over his medicine bottle and cursed him for “playing the victim.” When his father lay in the ICU after a car accident, he stood in the rain outside the Su family building, begging her for money to save his life. She sat in Gao Ming’s car and said, “Stop trying to scam me.”
Only after he left with a diagnosis of end-stage kidney failure, and she had cut his half out of every photo on the wall, did she see in the surveillance screenshots Chen Mo threw at her that Gao Ming’s men had stolen the company’s algorithm. In his diary, she found the words, “Wanqing said today that she likes white roses. I’ll get her some for her birthday.” On a gravestone in a small town, she touched the words he had secretly carved: “Daughter-in-law Su Wanqing.”
Five years later, in the wind at a cemetery in Zhejiang, Su Wanqing came every year to lay a bouquet of white roses. The words “Without you, the rest of my life is a sunny day” on his gravestone had darkened where her tears soaked them. The old silver chain she had searched for over three years felt as cold against her wrist as his voice when he last said, “It’s too late.”
This was not a case of loving the wrong person. It was the embers of a love he had kept warm through half a lifetime of silent endurance, which even all her regret could never rekindle.
