My Kept Puppy Came Home a Graduate, So I Ran Off Pregnant

Period setting + military officer + heiress + pregnancy escape + groveling pursuit + rekindled love

She is Zhou Wan Ning, the cherished pearl of the Zhou family of Jiangnan. She moved to the Soviet Union with her family and lived as brightly as the sun.

At a gathering arranged by friends, she met Liang Qi, once the dashing young master of the Liang family in the south, now reduced to scrimping over a few rubles. His family's decline had dragged him into the mire before he was even eighteen. He worked and studied in silence, hauling cargo at mines and farms late into the night, all to earn enough for a ticket home.

She didn't understand his desperate circumstances, but she understood the fire in his eyes.

During their years abroad, she stood up to a landlord trying to evict him, and he took a drunkard's punches for her. They shared a single piece of black bread in a cramped attic, and once ran hand in hand through a Moscow winter night, believing they could outrun fate.

Later, he left her a letter: “A girl like you belongs in the light. You shouldn't have to sink into the mud with me.”

She burned his letter, but she couldn't burn away the mark it left on her heart.

When they met again, people addressed him respectfully as “Commander.”

She stood before a greasy kitchen sink, her hands in cold water, no longer anything like the girl who had once shone as brightly as the sun.

He pursued her; she ran.

As he stared at the face exactly like his own, his Adam's apple bobbed and his voice trembled. “...Is this my child?”

She wiped the suds from her hands without looking up. “No.”