Chapter 1

Meng Yi and I were fighting again.

He pointed at my WeChat screen and began jumping to conclusions.

“Why did you tell him where you live?”

I rolled my eyes. “He’s a delivery guy.”

“Then why did you tell this one your back hurt after sleeping last night?”

I was speechless all over again. “He’s my personal trainer.”

“What about this one? Why did you tell him you’re free on the first but not the second?”

“He’s buying concert tickets for me,” I said helplessly.

My boyfriend’s three thousand loaded questions eventually drove him crazy.

He was so furious that he told me, “Delete them all, or I’ll kill myself!”

Fuck. He hadn’t been like this before he got the job.

1

The noise he was making gave me a headache.

How did a CEO find this much free time?

Every day, he was either checking up on me or on his way to check up on me.

He marched over, eyes bloodshot. “Are you deleting them or not?”

I reached out and stroked his abs. More than half my anger vanished.

“Fine, fine, I’ll delete them. Whatever you say.”

“Whatever I say? Really?”

I couldn’t help rolling my eyes. “What choice do I have? Your office is eighteen floors up!”

Just as I was about to soothe him, he erupted again.

“Who said my office was on the eighteenth floor? We moved to the twenty-seventh yesterday!

“I don’t believe I can’t catch this bastard! After all my years in business, who’s ever escaped these sharp eyes?”

Half a minute later, he looked as though he’d cracked the case.

“I know! Cheng Ming was number eighteen on the class register. You’re still thinking about him, aren’t you? I knew it. You never got over him.”

I froze.

Who the hell knew Cheng Ming’s class number?

By the time I met him, he had an employee number, okay?

I couldn’t understand how anyone could get this carried away.

When I didn’t answer, he went on. “So you admit it? No wonder that bastard’s barely said a word to me lately. Guilty conscience.

“No wonder he suddenly gave me another percentage point on that contract.”

I couldn’t let that pass. “Stop. That percentage point didn’t fall out of the sky. I negotiated it with him.”

To my surprise, Meng Yi grew even angrier.

“My team of six spent eighty-one days negotiating with his people and couldn’t get that one percent. You went in alone and got it?”

He drew a deep breath.

“So he’s still obsessed with you! Zhou Huan, let me make something clear. I’m not dead yet. Don’t even think of moving on to another husband. Not even your ex!”

“That would be getting back together,” I said calmly.

“You said you weren’t thinking about him! Now you’re talking about getting back together! You’re determined to drive me insane!”

I looked at his furious face and suddenly felt how pointless it all was.

A little bickering might spice things up. Endless suspicion was the unseen knife that killed a relationship.

At first, I’d let him make a fuss and soothe him with a few words afterward.

But the longer it went on, the more it bothered me.

He got angry so often, and for so long, that I was starting to worry he’d give himself breast cancer.

I sighed again. “If you really can’t trust me, perhaps we should take a little—”

Before I could finish, he was at the door. He opened it, looked back, and said, “Dream on!”

Meng Yi was my ex-husband Cheng Ming’s business partner.

Back then, Cheng Ming and I had run our company together. Our business philosophies differed, and we argued constantly.

Eventually, our differences became irreconcilable.

We agreed to give ourselves another six months. If we still couldn’t work things out, we would divorce.

That was when the idea of working with Meng Yi came up.

He and Cheng Ming had been classmates in primary school.

Apparently, they hadn’t been particularly close. Another classmate had to introduce them before they got back in touch.

I attended their first meeting. They actually seemed to get along quite well.

And Meng Yi wasn’t nearly as difficult as Cheng Ming had made him sound.

“Living abroad really does change a person,” Cheng Ming told me afterward. “I never expected Meng Yi to come back so much more approachable.”

“You two seem close. Otherwise you wouldn’t have struck a deal at the first meeting. I’m sure being old classmates helped.”

Cheng Ming laughed. “I didn’t expect it to go so smoothly either. Now that we’ve got this rich heir on our side, life should be a lot easier.”

From then on, the company really did thrive.

Cheng Ming treated our “heir apparent” as an honored guest.

For a long time, they were practically inseparable.

Once, Cheng Ming joked, “Good thing things are already the way they are between us. Otherwise we’d be heading for divorce sooner or later. I have no time for family life.”

I understood at once.

Our supposed six-month attempt to work things out had become a formality.

With the company booming, he had already made his choice.

From then on, he stopped hiding his womanizing. He paraded it right in front of me.

Once, he even discussed which girl at a certain private club was prettier.

When I frowned, he laughed.

“Don’t take it so seriously. Men have to entertain clients sometimes. Unless your next man isn’t in business. But that brings its own problems, you know?”

I smiled and said nothing.

I realized that once someone has decided you’re no longer going to share a future, their true nature starts slipping out. They have nothing left to hide.

The realization left me both weary and sad.

Who would have guessed that I’d married Cheng Ming because I once believed there could be no one else?

He was my first boss.

He was three years older than me. The year I joined the company, he had just been promoted to head our department.

He supervised four new recruits. I was the only woman.

I also had the best results that year, so I was the only one they kept.

I had no romantic interest in him at first. Who dated their boss?

Perhaps a few jokes between me and my colleagues got to him.

With a promising career ahead, he chose to resign. He even refused when senior management tried to persuade him to stay.

The day he finished the paperwork, he sent me a message confessing his feelings. He said he was officially going to start pursuing me.

It was one of the most moving moments of my life.

I’d thought no one in the world could ever love me as purely as he did.

Yet even a love that pure hadn’t survived the seven-year itch.

The first time I noticed something different in Meng Yi’s attitude toward me, I thought I must be imagining it.

By then, Cheng Ming and I had agreed to divorce, but we still presented ourselves as a happy couple in public.

Once, he and Meng Yi attended a dinner together and both drank quite a lot. Cheng Ming called to ask me to pick him up.

He liked me to appear on such occasions so we could play the loving couple and impress his business partners.

And if a project failed to move forward, he could conveniently blame his wife and co-owner for objecting.

I’d never liked those occasions, so I wasn’t in a good mood when I arrived.

I hadn’t expected him to be that drunk. He was slumped over the table.

“He wasn’t drunk when he called you,” Meng Yi told me. “Then he mixed his drinks and went straight down.”

He helped me get Cheng Ming into the car, then asked if I could drop him off too.

“It’s my driver’s little girl’s birthday,” he said with a smile. “I don’t want to bother him tonight.”

I hadn’t expected such warmth from a man who looked so cold.

But soon after getting into the car, he said, “I tried to get him to drink less. He wouldn’t listen. There was no need for this dinner in the first place. I don’t understand why he likes eating out so much.

“I don’t care for it myself. The food isn’t even good, and the drinking rituals are exhausting.”

He looked up at me.

“If I had a wife like you waiting at home, I wouldn’t want to go to a single one of these dinners.”

That was an odd thing to say. Still, I didn’t want to leave him hanging awkwardly. We’d made quite a lot of money thanks to him, after all.

“You’re used to living abroad. Perhaps you just haven’t adjusted to the drinking culture here. Different environments.”

He nodded. “Yes, I haven’t quite settled in. Especially the late-night activities after dinner. Those don’t interest me either.”