The debt collectors’ pounding rattles through the dead of night. Clutching a strange text message, Wen Ruan wagers a year of her life: one million yuan to become Lu Shiyan’s contract wife.
She thinks they’re simply getting what they need from each other: she’ll help the cold CEO deal with his critically ill grandfather and steady the family amid turmoil, while he clears her debts and protects her bedridden father.
Before the wedding, Lu Shiyan’s warning is icy: “Don’t talk about feelings. You’re just a pawn in my hands. In a year, we go our separate ways.”
But after they marry, he keeps breaking his own rules:
When she stays up late working on a manuscript, there’s always warm milk waiting on her desk. When his stomach pain becomes unbearable, he clutches the millet porridge she made and refuses to let go. When someone insults her humble background, he shields her in front of everyone, unable to hide the anger in his voice.
Wen Ruan eventually falls for him, believing that their business arrangement has quietly turned into something else.
Until one late night, she accidentally hears his icy voice from the study: “Once I get Grandpa’s will, I’ll divorce her. I gave up on feelings when I was fourteen.”
Was his tenderness a lie? His protectiveness a lie? Was even the blanket he tucked around her at night just an act?
More unsettling still, the debt collector who drove her into a corner had been sent by his younger brother, and among his mother’s belongings was an old photograph connected to her.
Did this marriage, born of scheming, come from a game he controlled from start to finish, or was it a long-overdue redemption even he hadn’t realized he needed?
