At the age of twenty-seven, Su Nianci got engaged to Liu's eldest son.
It was a business marriage. She doesn't love him, he doesn't love her, they both understand each other tacitly.
What she wants is the 51% equity left by her mother before she died - and the only condition for redemption is to marry into the Liu family.
The night before the engagement ceremony, she met him for the first time at the Liu family's ancestral home.
Wearing a gray sweatshirt, he squatted in front of a long wooden platform to change soil for a pot of orchids. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, and his fingers were caked with mud.
Lao Zhou said: "This is the younger brother of the eldest son."
The man turned around and called her "sister-in-law." Word by word.
There was something in that glance that she couldn't tell. It's not surprise, nor indifference - it's something more than a first meeting with a future sister-in-law.
She didn't know at that moment.
He remembered her for seventeen years.
Seventeen years ago, on a rainy day, at the entrance of a private primary school. When she was ten years old, she held a blue umbrella and drove away the senior boy who bullied seven-year-old Liu Huaiheng and gave him half a box of fruit candies.
"It's okay to cry. But don't let them see you cry."
She grew up and forgot. He remembered it all his life.
And she will marry his brother tomorrow.
