The Supporting Female Character Who Shared the Male Lead's Poverty Awakens

[The next book I want to write is "Cheap Love". Its blurb is at the very end~]

We spent three years together in Ohio, living a quiet, unremarkable life yet treating each other with respect. During his lowest, most destitute days, we looked after and supported each other. Or rather, most of the time it was me, a poor college student, taking care of him and his children.

I heard him talk countless times about how the Cheng family had repaid his kindness with ingratitude and abandoned him for their own gain... I knew all about how the wicked woman from the Cheng family had toyed with his affections before choosing someone else for an arranged marriage.

He made it.

Ohio couldn't keep him down. After securing a great deal of new investment, he cleared his name and decided to take the children back to China. The night before they left, his dark eyes were especially deep and tender as he swore, "I'll give you a lavish, top-tier wedding."

My face had been full of smiles, dependent on him and looking up to him.

But a terrifying dream suddenly surfaced in my mind: less than half a month after returning to China, this man who professed such deep devotion to me would marry the vain eldest daughter of the Cheng family, whom he claimed to hate with all his heart.

The two of them were following the tired old script of rekindled love, marriage before love, and children bringing them together.

As for me, the unimportant supporting female character, I was just a fool like Wang Baochuan, accompanying him to low-end wholesale stores in America to buy piles of cheap things and save him money, converting every dollar into yuan and being too miserly to spend a cent.

-

I'd imagined him leaving me for another woman because he'd gotten rich, but I never once thought he'd debase himself again by trying to please Cheng Shuangyi.

How could Shen Qi do this?

He had betrayed not only me, but also those poor, sordid years of his life, and the last shred of decency a man could have.

That night, after packing his few belongings, I packed up and threw away every piece of furniture in the house that bore his mark. I left him with just one sentence: "Get out. The farther away, the better."

[Bonus scene]

After Shen Qi returned to China, he spent his nights reveling in luxury and debauchery. The people who had once looked down on him and discarded him like trash suddenly reappeared in his life, begging for his forgiveness.

He thought he was the winner.

But inside, he felt hollow. The image of that foolish woman often lingered in his mind.

He never thought he loved her all that much. He believed their relationship had been nothing but a thoroughgoing act of exploitation. Yet he could no longer find such genuine sincerity in anyone else.

At last, she let it slip that she was coming back to China. He frantically ordered his two children to dress nicely so they could all go to the airport to welcome the woman whose eyes had once held only him

But she walked past him coldly.

As if their three years together had never existed.

[Everyone gets their comeuppance / strong female lead / second male lead wins]

[Most of the names in this novel come from Langston Hughes's poems.]

[The plot idea was recorded in a document in September 2020; the blurb was screenshotted in April 2023.]

Here is the blurb for "Cheap Love":

Today, when I was incredibly bored, I glanced through a story on Jinjiang. This author called Daidan wrote absolute rubbish. The male lead's mother was extravagantly generous, pulling out a check for five million at once, and people in the comments said five million wasn't enough. That was utterly absurd

She didn't know that the richer people were, the more carefully they watched their money.

I closed my eyes and thought of the newspaper wrapped around one hundred thousand yuan fifteen years ago. Though it had been shut away for years, I still remembered its cheap ink smell and the dark, damp, moldy odor that only came during the plum-rain season.

The ceiling fan overhead shook loose dust from another era.

The woman smiled gracefully. "Take this money. You should understand what I mean."

Without a second thought, I broke up with Zhou Yinchun that very day. Unlike the male leads in romance novels, he didn't try to stop me, not even a little. There was no reddening of his eyes. He couldn't even be bothered to furrow his brow. His eyes, always raised above everyone else, were filled with unconcealed disgust. "Fine, let's break up. Don't regret it."

Fifteen years later, the one hundred thousand yuan had done nothing to lift me and my family out of poverty. I was still an ordinary, mediocre woman with a touch of beauty, while he had grown ever more unreachable.

That hundred thousand was the spoils I'd been lucky enough to get from his mother.

My husband, who died young, was gone. My son attended Central Street Elementary, where his father had taught. Because of my unhappy memories of that school, and their attitude of sweeping my husband's death under the rug... I decided to move my son to an international school, so he wouldn't have to repeat my hopeless life.

I took my kind-hearted son, who was just like his father, to the admissions interview.

But I never imagined he wouldn't get in. I didn't think it had anything to do with his intelligence. It was surely because he was born into a powerless family like mine.

He looked up at me and comforted me. "It's normal to fail sometimes, Mom. Don't be upset. When I finish elementary school, I can still get into the best middle school in Jiangcheng."

I didn't say anything.

Not because I was indifferent to my son, but because I had spotted Zhou Yinchun, the school's honorary board chairman, surrounded by people in the hallway of the international school.

He saw me as if I were a stinking rat who didn't belong in a skyscraper.

-

That night, I stood outside the presidential suite at the Ritz-Carlton with the key card his assistant had given me.

The strap of my cheap bra slipped off my shoulder.

Theme: If you repay evil with virtue, what will you repay virtue with?