Chapter 2

There was no evening study session that day. When I got home, I could see warm yellow light shining from the second floor. Chu Leting was back from school.

As soon as I opened the door, he came downstairs. He seemed to be getting ice water from the fridge and had a clear pitcher in his hand.

It should have been an ordinary encounter. But the moment I saw him, I froze in terror and nearly turned around and ran.

Chu Leting wasn’t dressed. I looked away immediately.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry… Um, I’ll wait until you’re back in your room.”

I hurriedly turned my back on him, silently blaming myself for coming home at the wrong time. Maybe I should have texted to let him know I was on my way, so he could be prepared.

“It’s fine.”

To my surprise, a casual, faint laugh came from behind me.

Chu Leting wasn’t nervous at all. His slippers padded calmly across the living room to the refrigerator. He poured ice water into his pitcher.

“You’ll get used to it. I’m always like this at home.”

What?

It took me a long moment to understand.

Did he mean he planned to walk around naked even with his stepmother in the house?

I had only recently moved in. Deep down, I still felt like a guest in someone else’s home, and I knew my place: I was an outsider.

“Fine. I’ll try not to look.”

“I don’t care if you see me.”

“You’d hurt my eyes.”

“…”

That seemed to annoy him. He said nothing else, and his footsteps quickened as he went upstairs.

Only after I heard him enter his room did I turn back to change my shoes. I casually sent Chu Xing a message:

【Your son doesn’t seem to think he needs to get dressed when someone else is home. At least he isn’t lacking in confidence.】

When the connection was stable, Chu Xing could see everywhere in the house through the surveillance cameras, except our bedroom.

Five minutes later, he replied:

【Don’t be scared. I’ll talk to him.】

Fifteen minutes after that, someone knocked hard on my door.

Chu Leting stood outside, his face dark. One hand braced against the frame as he leaned toward me, grinding out the question:

“You told my dad?”

“Not exactly. He saw it on the cameras, too.”

At least he had put on shorts before coming to confront me. I felt relieved.

“You can wear whatever you want. I was just telling my husband about daily life. Did he scold you?”

The hostility between us was obvious. Chu Leting knew he didn’t have the moral high ground, so he shot me a sidelong look, flicked his hand, and turned away.

“Are you eating dinner?”

“Seeing you filled me up.”

“Great. Keep looking at me, then. I won’t have to cook.”

“…”

Following Chu Xing’s instructions, I checked on Chu Leting every two hours to make sure he was all right and could be helped in time if anything happened.

He was clearly unhappy about it. But he had promised his father he wouldn’t close his bedroom door, so even when he was annoyed, he could only put up with it.

During the day, he went to school while I turned a spare room into a traditional Chinese-style study and sat there writing. I sent Chu Xing a picture. His hearty laughter came to me across the ocean, bringing with it the blazing sun and salty sea breeze. It lifted my mood.

“I’ve always wanted a Chinese-style study. I just never had the heart to set one up. When I get home, will you let me enjoy a little cultured leisure there?”

“When my lord husband comes home, I’ll serve tea and burn incense.”

“Wonderful. If you buy anything heavy you can’t carry, hire someone to help—or send Leting to do it. Don’t tire yourself out.”

He gave me careful instructions, and I answered him with a few playful lines. The signal became poor, so we ended the call.

When I turned away from the screen, Chu Leting was leaning against the open study doorway in his school uniform. He looked at me, gave a cold sneer, and went back to his room.

“Are you having dinner?”

I followed him. He was taking off his uniform. He glanced at me, then continued without a trace of concern.

“No need. You can starve me if you want.”

He made a show of threatening to undress further, testing whether I would back down. I almost laughed at this childish battle of wills.

“I wouldn’t dare. You’re already haunting the place, and you’re not even dead yet.”

“…”

“What do you want for dinner? Tomato and egg stir-fry, noodles with minced meat, and another stir-fry?”

Something about those dishes made surprise flash in his eyes. Then his brows drew together, and the surprise turned to panic.

He quickly hid it. I didn’t ask.

They were all his favorite foods. I had asked Chu Xing beforehand.

I wasn’t trying to provoke Chu Leting. On the contrary, I wanted to win him over so we could get along.

Clearly, that wouldn’t be easy.

There was a very high wall inside him. He seemed obedient and self-possessed on the surface, but underneath he was bottled up and wary of outsiders, like a volcano burning hot and ready to erupt at any moment.

Things were awkwardly quiet between us. Whenever we spoke, we traded barbs without the slightest courtesy.

After dinner, I went back to my room to shower and sleep. Chu Leting usually studied until around two in the morning, then curled up on his pitch-black bed like an abandoned kitten.

We lived peacefully together for a month or two. Apart from dinner, there was hardly anything I needed to do for a high-school boy.

I had plenty of free time. Since he worked hard at school, I offered to wash his clothes and tidy his room. He always gave me a disgusted look and said, “If you touch my things, I’ll throw every last one of them away.”

In that case, I left them alone. He could ask if he ever needed help.

From my first day there, at Chu Xing’s suggestion, I had set an alarm to ring every two hours.

Until then, it had always been the alarm that woke me. But not tonight…

It wasn’t late yet. I had only just fallen into a shallow sleep when I heard faint, miserable screams in my dream.

At first I thought I was dreaming. As I woke, I realized the sounds were coming from inside the house.

Was Chu Leting watching a horror movie to relieve stress?

Listening more carefully, I heard a few strange gasps, too.

I was terribly sleepy. If I hadn’t had reason to worry about him, I might have ignored it and gone back to sleep. But Chu Leting was different. I was afraid something might happen to him, so I got dressed and went to check.

One glance nearly left me traumatized for life…

His bedroom door was still wide open, with only the desk lamp on.

Disturbing footage was playing on his computer. A woman was being hurt, and her screams filled the room.

I had interrupted a private moment. He seemed aware that I was there, but his response was deliberately provocative.

He had promised his father not to close the door. Even now, he was using that rule to challenge the constant surveillance.

I was horrified and froze where I stood. Several minutes passed before he spoke without turning around.

“Hasn’t it been less than two hours? Did I wake you?”

“Um… Your computer was a little loud.”

I don’t know how I managed to answer him so calmly.

Embarrassment should have been the worst of it. Instead, I felt cold with fear because of what had been playing on his computer.

Now I understood why Chu Xing’s two previous wives had divorced him—why they had given up the prospect of staying home and living comfortably on a million yuan a year.

He was only fifteen. His reaction to the suffering on that screen frightened me.

It was terrifying.

The person in front of me was no longer merely my husband’s son.

I was afraid I was looking at a violent criminal in the making, someone who might one day hurt other people.

“Why… why do you like watching these things?”

He seemed surprised that I hadn’t run away. The look lasted only a moment before he turned toward me, his expression unsettlingly intense.

“Don’t you think there are some people in this world who deserve to be treated like that? It’s a pity I can’t do it myself. If I could, I’d have ways of making them suffer even more.”

The night wind beat against the half-open window. It keened like a ghost from hell, making Chu Leting’s half-lit face look even more sinister.

“The way you deal with your feelings… um, I think I can understand a little.”

I never thought I would have the courage to step into his room. I sat on the rug by the bed and looked up at him. He seemed a little confused.

“Can you tell me who you hate? I’ll keep it secret, of course.”

“Yeah, right.”

He scoffed and pointed at the camera above me.

“Keep it secret? I don’t have any secrets.”

He had no privacy. To him, every second must feel like running naked down the street.

“You know what? I hate women. All women.”

He stared at me. His hatred was so intense that it made my skin crawl. His fingers gripped the edge of the desk until they turned white; every word he forced out was heavy with rage.

“They all deserve to die!”

For a moment, I was lost in the darkness of his emotion.

He said “all,” but he said “they”—not “you.”

In other words, he hadn’t yet put me on his list of people who deserved to die.

“Is it because of your birth mother? Do you hate her because you think she abandoned you? Did you also…”

I hesitated, then asked anyway:

“Did a stepmother abuse you?”

This time Chu Leting didn’t answer.

A storm seemed to hide in his dark eyes, yet he was so deeply calm that he seemed nothing like a teenager.

When we first met, I had noticed a faint white scar running from his shoulder down toward his abdomen.

Now that I looked more closely, I saw many scars on his body.

Young people healed well. They had all faded into pale marks, blending with his cool white skin.

“Go back to bed. It’s the middle of the night. Why are you talking so much?”

He seemed to tacitly admit it. He turned away and lowered his lashes, hiding his gaze behind a wall of self-protection.

“I’m afraid you’ll kill yourself.”

“Then stay here and keep watch?”

“No, no, no. I’m even more afraid you’ll kill me.”

I sprang up, waving my hands as I hurried out. But I still wasn’t reassured when I reached the door.

“I’m going back to my room. If you want to talk, call me. There are no cameras in my room.”

“…”

Chu Xing hadn’t told me the whole truth.

Or perhaps I was at fault for not pressing him harder and letting him brush me off with a few words. There had to be more to his history with the two women who had come before me.

The time difference at sea was substantial. When I messaged him, he was still working; he didn’t have time to reply until an hour later.

These were things Chu Xing didn’t want to revisit. But when I kept asking, he finally had to tell me what had happened.

After divorcing Chu Leting’s mother, Chu Xing spent a period wandering with his son, barely able to afford food.

Leting was five at the time. His paternal grandmother had died young, and his paternal grandfather had just passed away.

Chu Xing raised him alone while driving a truck for hire. To save the cost of motels, the two of them practically lived in the vehicle.

That winter, the old van leaked cold air. Leting fell ill every few days. With no other choice, Chu Xing decided to take him to his maternal grandparents and ask them to look after him through the winter.

It was the first time since his earliest memories that Leting had seen his mother and maternal grandparents.

That day, he was deliriously happy.

From his pile of old, ragged clothes, he picked his favorite outfit. Then he went into a general store and chose a lot of snacks as gifts for them.

Chu Xing thought a well-behaved child like that would surely make them happy. If the family could grow closer, perhaps Leting’s mother would keep in touch with her son more often.

No one could have imagined what happened next.

They not only drove the father and son away, they insisted that Chu Leting was not that woman’s child. Then they trampled all the gifts he had so carefully chosen.

They warned Chu Xing, “If you come here and cause trouble again, I’ll sell that brat!”

That day, five-year-old Chu Leting sat silently among the cargo in the van.

That day, Chu Xing was so consumed by guilt that he was distracted—and got into a car accident.

After the violent collision, little Chu Leting crawled out of the wreckage, surrounded by blood and broken glass. Ignoring the pain in his broken shoulder, he tried to drag his unconscious father out.

But he was too small.

He couldn’t even pull open the twisted car door.

He had no idea whom to ask for help. All he could do was run back to the home of the woman who refused to acknowledge him, then crawl and kneel, begging her family to save Chu Xing.

Tears streamed down his face. He didn’t dare cry aloud. He just kept saying, “I’ll pay you back… please… I only have my dad…”

But he had come at the wrong time.

The wealthy man his mother had recently married had arrived to pick her up.

His maternal grandparents panicked. They tried to chase the boy away with a mop and chairs, but he wouldn’t leave. Finally, his grandfather smashed a chair into his back, grabbed his arm—the one with the broken shoulder—and dragged him out of the neighborhood. He threw him into the foul-smelling ditch outside…

No one knew how a boy who couldn’t swim had crawled out of that filthy water.

No one knew how much pain he had endured.

All they knew was that he begged person after person along the way until someone finally helped save Chu Xing’s life.

From that day on, the words “mother” and “grandparents” never again passed Chu Leting’s lips.

“After that, I made another mistake,” Chu Xing said.

He thought that if there were someone at home to look after Leting, he could rent a cheap room for the two of them. Then his son wouldn’t have to live in the van with him.

When Chu Xing was young, he was fair-skinned and handsome, much like Chu Leting now. People liked him. Someone introduced him to a woman who had returned from a big city, and he agreed to marry her without much thought.

“She abused Leting, didn’t she? I saw all the old scars on his body.”

“Yeah. But Leting never told me.”

At the time, Leting was still in elementary school. He didn’t understand what marriage meant. He only knew that when that woman was home, Chu Xing came back from work to a hot meal, and no longer had to worry about him when he left.

“She acted one way around me and another around him.”

“But I didn’t see through it. Not until Leting was badly hurt and wouldn’t stop bleeding. He had to run to the neighbors for help, and the man next door took him to the hospital.”

“Only afterward did I learn that she had been exposed for selling sex in the big city. She went back to her hometown and couldn’t find a husband. Marrying me was a last resort.”

She had married a man she didn’t like out of desperation—and had to take care of the “burden” that was his son.

For a woman used to a luxurious life in a bustling city, it wasn’t hard to imagine the resentment she had nowhere to direct.

Later, Chu Xing found work on a ship. A mentor saw how honest and hardworking he was and took him under his wing.

But how could he leave for half a year if there was no one to look after Chu Leting?

The woman heard that working at sea paid well and refused to divorce. She knelt and begged Chu Xing for another chance, promising to treat Leting well and never hit him again.

“That year, the catch was poor, and the ship had problems. We missed the season, and everyone came home empty-handed.”

“When you got back, did she ask for a divorce?”

“She went crazy and smashed everything in the house. If I hadn’t shielded him, she would have thrown a whole kettle of boiling water over Leting.”

Chu Xing never told me exactly what happened with that kettle. I only discovered the large burn across his back much later, when I saw him changing.

“And the one after her? Why did—”

I wanted Chu Xing to tell me everything at once, but a big wave suddenly hit the ship. The connection lurched like water caught by the wind, breaking up into fragments until the call dropped.

“Do you want to know why my last stepmother divorced Dad?”