When Shen Luxi was six, she gave her favorite strawberry lollipop to the new neighbor boy. In return, he told her, “It’s too sweet. How childish.” From that day on, the two of them were at each other’s throats for twenty whole years.
At twenty-six, Shen Luxi was 23 million yuan in debt, and her art gallery was on the verge of closing. Gu Yanzhi appeared before her in a sharp suit and handed her a marriage contract. “Sign it. I’ll pay off your debts, and you’ll pretend to be my wife. We’ll end it after a year.”
She threw a glass of wine in his face. But she signed anyway.
It wasn’t until they started living together that she realized this man was impossibly softhearted beneath his tough exterior. He said he was “going that way” when he picked her up, but actually drove for forty minutes. He said her cooking was “awful,” yet ate every last bite. He claimed it was “none of my business,” but his eyes said otherwise.
She thought theirs was a transaction in which each got what they wanted. Until the day she tore up the contract, and he said with red-rimmed eyes, “That contract was worthless from the start. All I needed was an excuse to keep you by my side.”
The cactus she had smashed when she was six had been in his care for sixteen years. At last, it bloomed.
And the secret he kept in his study held twenty years’ worth of photos of her, the notes she’d thrown away, and one faded line: “Every day since then, I’ve been thinking of you.”
It turned out that the deepest love in the world was spending a lifetime telling you, “Of all people, it had to be you.”
