Zhou Shan’s expression changed. She slammed her hand on the table and stood up. “Rong Shu!”
Rong Shu couldn’t be bothered to respond. She turned and walked away.
Back at her desk, Rong Shu took out a small mirror and looked at the faint streak of blood on one side of her cheek. It wasn’t deep. She wiped it with a wet tissue; there was no need to clean it any further. With a face like hers, one more scar made no difference.
Then she thought of the girl again. There was something strangely familiar about her.
As the end of the workday approached, Rong Shu got a call from her father. Pei Yu was back, and he wanted her to come home for dinner.
Rong Shu was delighted. “Brother Pei Yu’s back? I thought he wasn’t coming home until the fifteenth.”
“He finished his work early, so he came back ahead of schedule,” Father Rong said.
“Okay. I’ll come home as soon as I get off work.”
Rong Shu drove back to the Rong Family Home.
It was a secondhand apartment in a mid-range complex in Xicheng District, a spacious, single-level unit they had bought earlier that year.
Father Rong ran a medium-sized real estate company. They weren’t exactly a wealthy family, but they were comfortable, so Rong Shu had grown up well-off.
But the real estate industry had fallen on hard times. A little over six months ago, the company ran into serious financial trouble after a failed investment and was on the verge of bankruptcy. When Father Rong learned she was pregnant with Sheng Tingchen’s child, he hadn’t forced her to go to the Sheng family and demand an explanation.
Watching her father grow older and more worn down by the day, to the point where he had to sell off family assets to repay the debts, Rong Shu had finally made up her mind and gone to the Sheng family. At the time, she had her own motives—not just for her father, but for herself as well.
She had gotten what she wanted: the Rong family had paid off its debts with the large bride price from the Sheng family.
But she had paid the price she deserved.
So all the pain she suffered now was her own doing. She had no one else to blame.
When Rong Shu returned to the Rong Family Home, Pei Lanhua came out of the kitchen. “Xiaoshu, you’re back.”
When Rong Shu was nine, her parents divorced. Her mother took her older brother and left Rong Shu behind.
Later, Pei Lanhua met her father, but the two never officially married. They lived together as a couple.
At first, Rong Shu hadn’t accepted her—she had even hated her. But gradually, Rong Shu came to feel Pei Lanhua’s kindness, and Pei Yu treated her very well, too. She had lost one older brother, but gained a new one.
“Auntie Pei, where are Dad and the others?”
“They should be on their way back. They’ll be home soon. Why don’t you rest for a bit?”
“Okay.”
…
Rong Shu went back to her room. Although she was married, her father had always kept a bedroom for her, redecorated in the style she liked.
The moment she returned to her own home, all her exhaustion and grievances vanished.
She sat on the edge of the bed and noticed the photo album on the bedside table. Picking it up, she opened it. The first picture was an incomplete family portrait.
The photograph was very old.
She had been only eight that year.
Her young, handsome father held her in his arms. Standing beside him was her older brother, who was fourteen at the time. Her mother stood on the other side.
She had torn the photograph herself.
She had hated her mother for taking her brother and abandoning her and Dad. Time had passed, and the sharp pain of that rupture was no longer there.
She turned to the next page.
In the photograph, a girl in her teens stood beneath a golden ginkgo tree, youthful and beautiful in a long white dress and a little square hat woven from light-brown straw. Sunlight fell across her radiant smile.
She had long, jet-black hair and a small oval face, with bright, lovely features. She was beautiful as the moon, but it was her eyes in particular that shone like stars in the sky.
Later, though, she had become seriously ill and taken steroid medication. Her body gradually grew heavier, and no matter how she tried to lose weight, nothing worked. She could only keep from gaining more by starving herself and exercising.
Rong Shu suddenly thought of the girl she had seen that day. Her features were somewhat similar to the girl in the photograph, especially her eyes.