The day he personally sent her to a psychiatric hospital, he leaned close to her ear and said:
“I’ll come get you in three years, if you haven’t gone mad by then.”
She didn’t go mad.
She wrote three books in there, and every one became a bestseller.
In the third year, he came, just as promised.
Gu Xiuyuan thought he was continuing an imprisonment.
He had no idea she had been waiting for him to come for three whole years.
After bringing her home, he told her:
“You can hate me, but you can’t escape. I know you better than you know yourself.”
She believed him. He really did know all her weaknesses: the things she had only written in her diary, the fears she had never confessed to anyone.
But there was something she hadn’t told him:
Over those three years, she had been studying him, too.
Studying his vulnerabilities, his habits, and the moments when he would let his guard down.
Studying how to make him let her go with his own hands, then spend the rest of his life regretting it.
