Speaking of Lin Zhi and Xie Han.

The story between these two traced back to when they had been drinking together at the bar the previous night.

By then, Lu Rangchen and Zhu Yunque had left. Lin Zhi was feeling a bit downcast — thinking that even someone as emotionally severed as Lu Rangchen had gotten what he’d always wanted, while she herself still had to face a marriage of convenience to some stranger she knew nothing about, not even his name or face. She felt stifled.

As luck would have it, beside her was a Xie Han who also looked rather despondent.

Lin Zhi had always been a person who cared about appearances. When she came across a good-looking man who also suited her taste, she couldn’t help but start thinking.

Of course, Xie Han himself was no paragon of virtue either.

Two consenting adults, fueled by drink, with the pretense of good conversation — so they talked their way into bed.

Both of them were idle rich second-generation heirs with money to spare and no obligation to clock in anywhere. Naturally, unlike Lu Rangchen and Zhu Yunque who had gone home early each to their own affairs, these two rolled around between the sheets from midnight straight through to noon, then slept for another afternoon before lazily stirring awake.

The hotel suite they had booked hadn’t been checked out yet. Lin Zhi was ravenous, so she simply brought Xie Han out for a meal — and who could have thought she’d run into Lu Rangchen at this particular moment, with such perfect timing.

Running into him was one thing.

But then she’d gone and infuriated him with a single sentence.

It wasn’t until all four of them were seated at the same table that Lin Zhi cautiously asked Zhu Yunque: “……You two really didn’t, last night?”

At this point, Lu Rangchen and Xie Han had gone to the front counter to select drinks.

The restaurant’s most renowned offering was its imported wines — each with its own pedigree and story. The two men happened to look at each other, and though it wasn’t quite a matter of shared understanding, Lu Rangchen curved his lips in a skin-deep smile, tilted his head, and said, “Want to go take a look?” Xie Han gave a nod and followed.

Taking advantage of the fact that only the two of them were left at the table, Lin Zhi let down all restraint.

Zhu Yunque also genuinely hadn’t expected that the first thing Lin Zhi, whom she hadn’t seen in years, would say to her would be this.

She paused for a moment and said, “Didn’t what?”

“That, you know,” Lin Zhi was practically urgent about it. “Did you two not do it?”

Lin Zhi had always been uninhibited, and spoke without many filters.

But Zhu Yunque was different. Even if she was at heart more unconventional than she let on, she was still reserved, still prone to shyness.

So upon hearing those words, her eyes flickered with something complicated, and her heartbeat spiked abruptly by several paces.

Lin Zhi caught the tell in her eyes.

She made an incredulous noise and said, “No way — is Lu Rangchen really that pure-hearted??”

“……”

Zhu Yunque suppressed the curve of her lips.

Still thinking she ought to preserve some of Lu Rangchen’s dignity, she honestly shook her head and said, “No. He was too busy last night.”

“And besides,” she added, “we only just got back together.”

“So what if you just got back together,” Lin Zhi said with a dismissive laugh. “It’s not like it would be your first time. What’s with all the rules? Oh, though of course that’s not something I should be saying to you — this is really on that guy for being clueless.”

Zhu Yunque’s throat suddenly felt a little dry. She lowered her eyes and picked up the teacup on the table for a sip of water.

The air felt even hotter now.

Lin Zhi, however, was perfectly relaxed.

She spooned up the pre-meal ice cream the server had brought over and said, half-muffled, “You don’t even know — that guy has been so uptight all these years. So many people have tried to set him up with someone, and he was completely indifferent to every single one. Not to mention any casual fooling around. Sometimes I worried he was going to suffocate from the repression.”

“……”

Zhu Yunque had known that Lu Rangchen hadn’t had any particular women in his life during those eight years.

But she hadn’t imagined it would be like this — that he had kept everyone at a great distance.

Then Lin Zhi added, “And his adoptive mother too — always pushing him to get married, burning incense and making offerings at temples every year, worried he was going to end up a bachelor for life.”

“But who would have guessed — this guy is so sure of what he wants that he really did just wait for you to come back.”

She paused, then deliberately looked over at Zhu Yunque.

Her words carried another layer of meaning, and her eyes posed the silent question: “So, you’ve thought it through this time, haven’t you?”

All that circling around, and she was finally ready to make her position clear.

Zhu Yunque’s brow gave a faint twitch. Catching on a beat late, she said, “Such as?”

Lin Zhi propped her face in her hand, tilted her head, and said, “Such as how long you’re planning to date him this time. Are you planning to use him until you’ve had enough and then kick him to the curb again?”

Frankly, her tone was fairly cutting.

But if it had been any other friend of Lu Rangchen’s, they wouldn’t have given Zhu Yunque even a polite look, let alone this much honesty.

Zhu Yunque understood it better than anyone, and she knew why Lin Zhi was asking.

It was nothing more than wanting to extract another answer on Lu Rangchen’s behalf — a certain, unwavering answer that ensured he wouldn’t be hurt again.

A late-arriving guilt rose up inside her.

Zhu Yunque had nothing to resist. She looked at Lin Zhi plainly and said, “This time that we’ve made up — I don’t plan on separating again.”

“Even if his adoptive mother doesn’t approve?”

“Yes. Even if she doesn’t approve.”

“And what if Lu Rangchen were the one to stop wanting you?”

The question came out of nowhere.

Zhu Yunque was genuinely thrown off for a moment, and her answer came almost on instinct: “He has that kind of intention?”

They held each other’s gaze for a few seconds, and in the end Lin Zhi couldn’t hold back — she burst out laughing, saying, “Zhu Yunque, I’ve discovered that when you’re clueless, you can really be spectacularly clueless.”

“After the two of you worked so hard to get back together, he’d drop anyone but you!”

“……”

The tension in her heart settled with those words.

Zhu Yunque suddenly felt profoundly foolish — so foolish that a flush of warmth crept up her cheeks.

But Lin Zhi seemed quite satisfied with her reaction. She said, “Still, seeing you like this — you seem pretty reliable. I can say I’m reassured now.”

She spread her hands in a gesture of mild exasperation. “You have to understand where I’m coming from. It’s your fault for wounding him so deeply when you broke up last time.”

The previous words hadn’t stung. But this one pinched at Zhu Yunque’s chest.

Zhu Yunque pressed her lips together lightly and said, “I know. You’re not wrong to say it. I was the one who wronged him.”

She looked at Lin Zhi, her eyes calm and certain. “Don’t worry. No matter what we face in the future, I won’t let him down again.”

……

For some reason, despite it being a weekday, the restaurant was packed in a way that seemed almost unreasonable that afternoon.

And on top of that, the craft ale section had self-service selection.

There was an entire cabinet packed full of bottles, a glittering array of choices, and people were clustering in that direction — so by the time Lu Rangchen and Xie Han made it over, there was simply no way to push forward through the crowd.

Neither of them was particularly impatient by nature.

So they just leaned against the bar and, without quite intending to, fell into conversation.

Who started it, neither of them could recall — the tone was polite — but it was Lu Rangchen who brought up the two women.

He genuinely couldn’t quite understand it.

Back then, Xie Han had obviously had real feelings for Zhu Yunque — Lu Rangchen couldn’t figure out what the nature of their relationship had been at the time, and he couldn’t figure out what Xie Han and Lin Zhi were to each other now.

Lu Rangchen was the type who never liked to beat around the bush.

When something came to mind, he’d simply say it directly.

Only when he spoke, his hawk-sharp gaze was more incisive than usual — seemingly relaxed and languid on the surface, but carrying an underlying pressure.

Xie Han was a man who knew how to navigate social situations. He had seen through the subtext from the start, so now he smiled rather equably and said, “You don’t need to worry about that. Lin Zhi and I both know the score. Today we’re together, tomorrow we go our separate ways. You can’t expect me to take it seriously, and I couldn’t even if I tried.”

Both of them had arranged marriages waiting. From the very beginning, they each knew where they stood.

Lu Rangchen wasn’t particularly worried about Lin Zhi, but he still gave a low, measured response before shifting the subject. “And Zhu Yunque?”

The name — not just an old scar branded on his own heart.

But an old wound on someone else’s too.

Xie Han paused and looked at Lu Rangchen with a smile, saying, “Someone like me — do I deserve her?”

It hadn’t been expected that he would speak about himself that way.

Lu Rangchen’s eyelids gave a brief flicker, then his long, narrow eyes half-narrowed, and he looked at Xie Han with a hint of interest. “I’ve noticed you have a rather clear sense of self-awareness.”

“How could I not?”

Xie Han tilted his chin toward the two women sitting together chatting in the dining area. “I slept with your friend. Do I still have any right to claim I have feelings for someone?”

“And I’m about to get married, though I have no idea which poor girl is going to end up with me.”

……He was transparently, unapologetically a scoundrel.

Lu Rangchen already thought poorly of this sort of person — let alone the fact that Xie Han had had an ambiguous history with Zhu Yunque.

He gave a displeased snort of laughter. “From what you’re saying, if today’s meeting hadn’t happened, you’d still be holding on, would you?”

Xie Han heard the possessiveness in his tone and shook his head with a rueful smile.

He said, “Brother, you’ve really misjudged me on that count. I may be a scoundrel, but I’m not the kind who goes around stealing someone else’s person.”

“Moreover,” he let out a long breath, “Yunque never had any interest in me to begin with. What is there to hold on to?”

Even though Zhu Yunque had told him herself that she and Xie Han had never been together, the sudden, overwhelming relief he’d felt in that moment was nothing compared to the satisfaction of hearing Xie Han admit it with his own mouth.

His brows tensed for a moment, and then Lu Rangchen let out a sharp, self-deprecating laugh.

He wasn’t sure if he was laughing at himself for being so lacking in “confidence,” or at how easily he had been fooled by these two in the first place.

Xie Han was sympathetic enough. Now that they’d reconciled, he figured he might as well go the extra mile and do the decent thing.

So he spoke again: “Actually, Yunque and I — while we were abroad, we were genuinely good friends. Being from the same hometown of South City meant we were a bit closer to each other than to others. When she and her mother had just arrived in Australia, her mother’s health wasn’t great, and she had no choice but to go out and work to pay for medical expenses. At the time I was very much into having fun and quite lazy — when I found out about her situation, I just had her come work at my place as a part-time cleaner.”

“……A part-time cleaner?”

Lu Rangchen’s heart gave a lurch. His thick brows drew together with evident displeasure. “You’re not joking?”

Xie Han shrugged. “What’s there to joke about? Please — this kind of arrangement is perfectly normal abroad. Besides, the hourly rate I paid her was very high, far more than she’d have made washing dishes outside, okay?”

Normal, yes.

But Lu Rangchen simply couldn’t accept it.

He couldn’t accept that the girl he held like the most fragile thing in the world — whom he feared might melt at the slightest warmth — had gone abroad and taken a job cleaning someone else’s home. He couldn’t bear the thought of her having to lower herself like that, all just to earn her mother’s medical fees.

No emotion had ever, in any moment, surged through him the way this one did — nearly threatening to drown him.

His throat tightened. He lifted his head, and his gaze drifted forward to where, not far away, Zhu Yunque sat laughing and chatting with Lin Zhi with apparent ease.

The girl’s features were clean and gentle, her eyes and the corners of her lips all softness.

She was still the white camellia from the deepest recesses of Lu Rangchen’s memory — as though she had never been touched by a single gust of wind or drop of rain.

He pulled his deep, dark gaze back. His jaw tightened as he looked at Xie Han and said, “Then what?”

“Then I developed feelings for her, of course.”

Xie Han laughed without a care in the world. “I’d always thought she was beautiful, and I wanted to pursue her. So I used that as an excuse — and I really couldn’t stand watching her clean for me, so I just told her directly that I liked her.”

“I said to her: be my girlfriend, and I’ll cover all your mother’s medical expenses.”

“The result? The next day, she quit.”

“Stubborn as anything — not a moment’s hesitation.”

“……”

Lu Rangchen could almost picture her eyes back then — fierce and unyielding — and his chest suddenly tightened unbearably.

He was silent for two seconds.

Then in a low, quiet voice, he asked, “And after that?”

“After that, I went and found her at school,” Xie Han had never chased anyone with this much effort in his life. “I apologized to her. Said I genuinely liked her, wanted to pursue her properly, no disrespectful intentions. But who could have predicted it — she just came back at me with: there’s already someone in my heart.”

At this point.

There was no helplessness in Xie Han’s expression, but he looked at Lu Rangchen with something closer to envy.

He curved his lips in a wry smile and said, “Brother, you believe me? From that moment on, I’d already seen your face.”

“……”

“In her wallet. A small photo of you at the school notice board.”

“She kept it like that — like she was keeping a treasure.”

“She was crying when she told me. Her eyes were red. She said — this is the person in my heart. No one can compare.”

“She also said, no matter how far you go to pursue her, it’s useless.”

He continued, and as he reached the end, Xie Han’s eyes dimmed slightly, but he smiled anyway. “Because in this lifetime, she could never fall for anyone else.”