The moment Ji Zichu entered the workforce, her parents began pressuring her to get married. They always said, "Once you're married, we'll have another son."
She was utterly shocked, but eventually understood. Her parents regretted not having a son. Because of the times, they could only have one child, and she had become both their child and their regret.
Every now and then, they told her what kind of child they would have had if she hadn't been born: twins, or a son.
They also told her that they'd once considered aborting her.
She couldn't understand why her parents treated her this way, but she knew she wouldn't marry just to please them. She had to marry someone who loved her.
Sticking to her convictions was difficult. At every matchmaking meeting, if she said she wasn't interested, her parents would instantly side with the man's parents, criticizing and berating her from beginning to end, even trying to bully her into marrying their "wonderful son."
Inside, she laughed. The more they did this, the more determined she became to stand by her convictions. Otherwise, even if she really did marry their "wonderful son," she'd still have to bear everything alone, no matter what happened. She was an "orphan."
After one particularly intense argument over marriage, she packed her bags and went on her own to a resort for a vacation, temporarily escaping the suffocating home she couldn't quite bring herself to leave.
When she was a child, she always wrote in her essays that home was a safe haven.
Could a safe haven battered by a typhoon really be called a safe haven?
Ji Zichu gradually saw through the illusion of her family's affection. She only wanted to love herself and put herself first.
For Leng Lanyue, having parents and not having parents amounted to the same thing. He was an unexpected child. If a checkup hadn't revealed that an abortion would harm his mother's health, he might never have been born into this world.
His parents were archaeologists, spending every day out on archaeological digs. As soon as he was born, they left him in the care of his paternal grandparents and packed their bags to join an archaeological project.
He grew up doted on by his grandparents, becoming the family "eyesore," which made him cautious in everything he did.
Though his grandparents spoiled him, they never played favorites. His second and third uncles didn't know this, and had people watch him, searching for any mistake he might make. Of course, he wouldn't let his elders get their way. At school, he was just a studious good student. Romance had nothing to do with him. At home, he followed the rules, and among his peers, he never competed for anything.
But after all those years of caution, disaster still found him.
He had just returned from studying abroad, and his grandmother was so happy that she held a welcome-home banquet at the family's resort.
On his first day back, he was still jet-lagged when someone set him up. With his consciousness fading, he fled the scene. He remembered the woman he'd run into earlier that day and stumbled all the way to her, collapsing into her arms.
From then on, their lives became intertwined, and their hearts slowly drew closer as they spent time together.
Theme: Love yourself before loving someone else
