At Last, He Heard My Silence

In the fifth year of our marriage, Zhou Jingshen gave the song I had written for him to his beloved first love. At the premiere, Song Wantang wore a custom-made gown and played the final note before millions of viewers. Zhou Jingshen walked onto the stage himself and said it was the most precious gift she had given his new film. I sat in the audience, my hearing test results tucked at the bottom of my bag. The doctor had said I was close to severe hearing loss in my left ear, and my right ear did not have much time left either. The song was called "Returning Tide." Ten years earlier, I had carried Zhou Jingshen down three flights of stairs during a fire. He was barely conscious, so I hummed it to him again and again, telling him we would make it out alive as long as the tide returned to shore. When he woke up, he mistook someone else for the person who had saved him. Later, he fell in love with me, but he always felt he owed Song Wantang his life. I thought love could make up for what he owed her, until he pushed me into the center of a public scandal to clear Song Wantang of plagiarism. He asked me, "Zhiyao, just this once, okay?" As I looked at the man I had loved for eleven years, I suddenly heard a long, sustained roar in my ears. In that moment, I finally understood. Some marriages do not die from betrayal. They die because one person keeps yielding, until the other assumes there is no cliff behind her. So I signed the divorce papers, took off my hearing aids, and told him calmly: "Zhou Jingshen, this isn't just this once." "It's the last time."