On her eighteenth birthday, Shen Zhiyi waited in the rain for three hours.
She clutched a cake she had bought with three months’ worth of living expenses, and carried a love letter she had spent six years writing in her pocket. She wanted to tell him: Lu Yanshen, I’ve loved you for a long time.
His car drove right past her.
Mud splashed over her trouser legs, and he didn’t even look at her.
That night, her confession was soaked through by the rain and thrown into the trash.
That same night, his father died in a car accident. Someone had cut the brakes, and her father’s fingerprints were on them.
Overnight, she went from being the chauffeur’s daughter who secretly loved him to the child of the man who had murdered his father.
He kept her imprisoned by his side and tormented her in the cruelest ways: making her kneel to scrub the floor, forcing her to wash clothes in cold water in the dead of winter, and making her watch him be intimate with other women.
She never tried to defend herself.
She silently endured it all, searching for evidence to prove her father’s innocence while slowly, piece by piece, cutting the love she had carried for him out of her heart.
He locked her in the storage room for three days and three nights. Burning with fever and barely conscious, she was still calling his name.
The hair clip she had secretly kept was the one he had bent down to pick up for her six years ago. She remembered that single touch for six years.
And when the truth finally came to light
he knelt before her, buried his face in her palm, and for the first time spoke the name he had kept in his heart for so many years:
“Zhiyi, I was wrong.”
But she merely withdrew her hand gently and gazed out the window, her voice fainter than moonlight:
“Lu Yanshen, I spent three years repaying my father’s debt. Please let me go.”
