She saved him, but he gave his gratitude to another woman.
Shen Zhiyi spent three years in a marriage that couldn’t earn Lu Huaishen even one backward glance. She burned her arm saving him in that fire, yet he held Su Wanqing’s hand, the woman who stole the credit, and said, “Thank you for saving me.” She was diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer all alone, while that very same night, he ordered her to donate blood to the woman he loved.
When the first snow fell, Shen Zhiyi signed the divorce papers and left him with just one sentence: “Lu Huaishen, I don’t love you anymore.”
On the ninety-seventh day after she disappeared, Lu Huaishen pried open her long-sealed drawer. Her diary was filled with the words “My stomach hurts so much,” and her diagnosis said “terminal.” Kneeling in her empty walk-in closet, he threw up his first mouthful of blood. So she hadn’t been incapable of leaving. She’d left because her heart was dead.
He went mad. He offered a ten-million-yuan reward, searched half of China, got into a car crash, broke his ribs, and personally sent the woman who stole her identity into the abyss. But when he finally found Shen Zhiyi by the sea, she was teaching children from an orphanage to paint, her smile calm and unfamiliar.
“Sir,” she said, “you’re blocking my sunlight.”
This is the story of a man who spends the rest of his life trying to atone, but can’t win back even a single word of forgiveness.
