[Chasing the Wife to the Crematorium / Suit-Wearing Brutish Second Male Lead Takes the Lead / Scraping By at the Bottom / Two Strong Leads Save Each Other]
For the sake of their families' interests, Pan Jiayi was engaged to Zhou Bolin, the younger brother of a longtime family friend.
On her birthday three years ago, Zhou Bolin left her buried beneath an avalanche while he went to save Lu Manning.
The day after waking up in the ICU, she flew straight to England, where she studied for three years.
Everyone thought she had been hurt by love.
In reality, she had severe emotional detachment and had never loved Zhou Bolin. But his actions had truly disgusted her.
She had applied to study in England long before. The timing was simply a coincidence.
Three years later, she returned to Hong Kong.
Zhou Bolin tried to make it up to her, but one of the things she had come back to do was break off their engagement.
She thought someone like Zhou Bolin wouldn't refuse. After all, in all these years, he had never once told her he loved her.
"Does it really have to be this way?"
Pan Jiayi nodded. "It does."
The thing Zhou Bolin regretted most in his life was not grabbing Pan Jiayi's hand back then and letting her be buried beneath the avalanche.
Every time he jolted awake from a nightmare, he wanted to call Pan Jiayi, but feared she'd ask him, "Why didn't you save me?"
So he never made that call.
The flight between Hong Kong and England was 9,600 kilometers. He had accumulated a thick stack of round-trip tickets, and the photographs he collected covered an entire wall of a hidden room in his study.
He had been part of almost all of Pan Jiayi's youth, and believed he would stay by her side for the rest of her life.
But he never expected Pan Jiayi to break off their engagement.
Much less that she would choose a rising business magnate without even a university degree.
Afterward, he asked unwillingly, "If I'd saved you first back then, would we have stayed together?"
Pan Jiayi answered without hesitation. "We would have split up sooner or later anyway."
