Cheap Love

["Generous Love", from the same series, is currently being serialized next door~]

"Everyone sings of the greatness of love, but my love was worth no more than a hundred thousand."

When I was bored out of my mind today, I glanced at a story on Jinjiang. That Dai Dan or whatever writes absolute rubbish. The male lead’s mother is so generous, pulling out a check for five million at once, and people in the comments say five million is too little. It’s complete nonsense-

She doesn’t know that the richer people are, the more careful they are with money.

I closed my eyes and remembered the newspaper wrapped around that hundred thousand fifteen years ago. Though it had been buried for years, I could still recall its cheap ink smell and the dark, damp, moldy stench that only comes in the plum-rain season.

The ceiling fan overhead rattled, shaking loose the dust of another era.

The woman smiled graciously. "Take this money, and you should understand what I mean."

Without a word, I broke up with Zhou Yinchu that very day. Unlike the male leads in romance novels, he didn’t try to stop me. He didn’t even put up the bare minimum of a fight. Forget his eyes reddening, he couldn’t even be bothered to furrow his brow. His gaze was full of undisguised disgust. "Fine. Don’t regret it."

Fifteen years later, that hundred thousand hadn’t been enough to change the modest life my family and I lived. I was still an ordinary woman, mediocre and a little pretty, while he had grown ever more unreachable.

That hundred thousand was a prize I’d been lucky enough to get from his mother.

My short-lived husband had already passed away. My son was attending Center Street Elementary, where his father had taught before he died. Because of my unhappy memories of that school and the way they’d tried to hush up my husband’s death... 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 more likely because he’d been born into a powerless family like mine.

He lifted his little face and comforted me. "It’s normal to fail, Mom. Don’t be sad. I can still get into the best middle school in Jiangcheng when I finish elementary school."

I said nothing.

Not because I was indifferent to my son. I’d spotted Zhou Yinchu, the school’s honorary trustee, surrounded by a crowd in the international school hallway.

He looked at me as if I were a filthy rat, completely out of place in a skyscraper.

-

That night, I stood outside the presidential suite at the Ritz-Carlton with a room key from his assistant.

The straps of my cheap bra slipped off my shoulders.

[Blurb recorded on 2023.6.3]

Theme: Love is more powerful than hate.