"Admit you ruined the letters. Promise that even if we get divorced, you won’t retaliate against me, you won’t use your power to bully my family, and you won’t come after me for your new wife. If you can’t, I’ll take this letter of guarantee to the military leadership and demand justice."
Su Wan stated her demands. She saw Lu Zhengchuan looking at her from the corner of her eye and immediately turned her head, deliberately showing him a sorrowful profile.
His expression changed several times at her words.
"You’re actually worried I’d use my power to bully you and your family?" Lu Zhengchuan asked in disbelief.
Su Wan raised her eyes and turned back to face him. "No matter how you look at it, you’re a military officer and I’m just an ordinary person. If you got angry and decided to come after me, it would be very difficult for me to fight back. So, with a letter of guarantee like this, I might feel a little more at ease."
"Besides, it’s no loss to you even if you write it."
"I’ll leave you with dignity and won’t pester you." With this sentence, Su Wan was making her intentions clear.
She was making it clear to Lu Zhengchuan that he didn’t need to worry about her causing a scene after they divorced.
As long as he treated her fairly and didn’t bully her, she wouldn’t cause trouble.
Lu Zhengchuan sighed, his brow tightly furrowed. "I’ll write it."
’This was exactly what she’d been waiting for him to say. Her whole act had been for this moment.’
She immediately watched Lu Zhengchuan intently as he wrote.
Lu Zhengchuan took a fountain pen and a notebook from his pocket and began to write the letter of guarantee.
He wrote the contents of the letter exactly as Su Wan had demanded.
"Change this here," Su Wan said, pointing at the paper with a slender, pale finger. "It should say that everything is being done of Lu Zhengchuan’s own free will."
Lu Zhengchuan glanced at it, crossed out what he had written before, and changed it according to her request. Although he looked a little frustrated, he didn’t say anything.
Su Wan, however, didn’t notice his ’obedient’ behavior.
The moment he finished writing the letter of guarantee, she quickly snatched it away. She checked it word by word, and once she was sure there were no problems, she got up to put it away.
’This time, she wasn’t about to give Lu Zhengchuan the chance to destroy the evidence.’
"Su Wan," Lu Zhengchuan called out to her.
"What is it?" Su Wan looked back at him languidly.
Lu Zhengchuan asked, "I’ve finished the letter of guarantee. Does this mean you’re not angry about the letters anymore?"
’Wow, he hasn’t forgotten his objective. Just what you’d expect from a military officer who’s always so mission-oriented.’
"I’m not angry at *you* anymore." Su Wan was playing with her words. She wasn’t angry with Lu Zhengchuan for the time being, but she hadn’t said she wasn’t angry with Zheng Zhizhi.
After all, the letter had been forged by Zheng Zhizhi in the first place.
’She just wasn’t sure what role Lu Zhengchuan had played in all of this.’
"Mm," Lu Zhengchuan nodded. His expression returned to normal, no longer cold. He reached into his pants pocket, fumbled around, and took out a piece of paper for her.
"What’s this?"
Su Wan took it casually. She had come to understand Lu Zhengchuan a bit over the past few days and knew he rarely did things without a reason.
’So, this paper was probably something important.’
When Su Wan looked at it, she was completely stunned.
"Didn’t you say all the letters fell in the water? How are these two..." In her hands were two letters that hadn’t been soaked, presumably the two surviving pages from the batch.
"I didn’t say *all* of them. Just that *some* fell in the water." Lu Zhengchuan’s wording was precise. He shot her a glance that seemed to chastise her for getting angry so quickly.
Hearing this, Su Wan couldn’t help but reach out and pinch him, lifting her pretty chin. "If you’d said so earlier, I wouldn’t have been so angry."
Lu Zhengchuan’s brow twitched slightly from the pain in his waist, and he looked down with a strange expression.
"What are you looking at?" Su Wan glared at him. "You did something wrong, so you deserve a little punishment, don’t you?"
"...I’ve never had my waist pinched before. So this is what it feels like," Lu Zhengchuan said, shaking his head as he explained.
Su Wan raised her eyebrows. "Oh? You’ve had girlfriends before and never experienced this?"
Now that she had the letter of guarantee and the evidence from the envelopes, Su Wan was ready to start probing Lu Zhengchuan. She needed to determine when he and Zheng Zhizhi had been in contact. Even just a few incidents would be enough for her to go to the leadership and have them rule in her favor.
Otherwise, if the leadership asked how she knew their old flame had been rekindled, and she couldn’t mention a single instance of them being alone together, they would just think she was making a fuss.
After all, the evidence she currently had was all related to Zheng Zhizhi.
Lu Zhengchuan’s brows lifted. "I’ve never dated anyone."
"...Impossible." Although Su Wan had expected him to deny his relationship with Zheng Zhizhi, she hadn’t thought he’d be so shameless as to deny even his past girlfriends.
Her voice dropped as she tapped her finger on his arm. "The other wives on base all said plenty of girls here have pursued you. You’re telling me you never dated a single one?"
"I really haven’t. If you don’t believe me, you can ask around on the base."
Lu Zhengchuan didn’t seem the least bit guilty. His expression was stern and serious as he sat on the stool beside her like a veteran official.
"If there’s nothing else at home, I’m going to the office now to write the application for the toilet renovation. I’ll let you know when it’s approved."
Lu Zhengchuan glanced at his watch. Seeing that it was getting late and that he had finally resolved the conflict with his wife, he wanted to head to the office. He still had another report to write.
"Is there anything else we need at home? Tell me, and I’ll pick it up from the commissary on my way back at noon."
Su Wan didn’t hold back. "Buy some bowls and chopsticks, laundry detergent, soap, and some rice and oil. Don’t get too much—about ten pounds will be enough for me for a while."
Lu Zhengchuan, who had been about to leave, stopped in his tracks at her last sentence.
"...I can’t eat at home? Didn’t we just make up?"
Su Wan blinked, realizing he meant he would be coming home for meals from now on. Although the thought annoyed her, she couldn’t go back on her word and provoke him.
’It was better to coexist peacefully than to provoke him.’
"Fine, you can come back to eat."
’Coming home to eat together is better than coming home to sleep together, I guess,’ Su Wan thought.
"Okay, I’ll buy more then. I’ll just pick up whatever vegetables are available," Lu Zhengchuan said.
Su Wan waved her hand. "Alright, you should get going."
Lu Zhengchuan had just left when Aunt Liu came over, beaming and carrying a permit.
"Wanwan, have you had breakfast yet? Look, this is the permit my oldest son got from the leadership. You can build a small earthen kiln in the yard."
"Really?"
Su Wan welcomed her inside, pleasantly surprised. She saw the document, and sure enough, it had a leader’s signature on it.
"Then I’ll go buy some bricks first."
"Come on, I know where you can find some. No need to buy them at all. We can just go to the Victory Team. They have an old, dilapidated kiln there. Since the kiln is village property, you can just trade grain for the bricks. The Victory Team often trades them away for people to use in home repairs. But many families in the village can’t bear to use firebricks to build their houses—they just build with mud walls—so naturally, there are a lot of firebricks left over."