Lu Rangchen’s tone when he said this was deliberately drawling and languid — frivolous and bold.

And yet, who could have imagined — this man, in the club and beyond, was notorious as a cold, iron-faced force of nature. Unapproachable, impossible to win over. So many people had tried and failed to get close to him. And yet here, before Yunque, he was a fool bent at the waist for love.

Yunque was much the same.

To the outside world, she was always serene and composed — cool and distant. Only in front of him could she be her most genuine self.

She didn’t have to be so sensible.

She didn’t have to carry the things she didn’t want to carry.

She could wheedle. She could cling. She could be like a child.

Arms draped over his shoulders, Yunque looked at him steadily and said, “What is it you want to know?”

“I want to know a great deal.”

Lu Rangchen’s fingertip traced lightly across the corner of her mouth, his voice low and rough. “I want to know what you went through while I was away back then. I want to know whether it was my grandfather who forced you to leave the country. And then those things your aunt said.”

The truth was, these questions should have come up during the car ride.

But Lu Rangchen hadn’t been ready.

He didn’t know how to face it — and he had never imagined that there might have been circumstances behind Yunque’s departure all those years ago.

There was even a thread of something uneasy in it — a kind of rage with no clear direction. Rage that Yunque had gone through so much without telling him a single thing, and that had it not been for the chance encounter today, she likely would have kept it from him for the rest of her life.

He also felt a kind of exhaustion he had never felt before — a loss of power.

As if all those years of longing, of love and resentment toward her, had simply been a childish, laughable exercise in self-pity.

Yunque had never owed him a thing.

On the contrary — she had been the one protecting the reckless, headstrong Lu Rangchen he had been in his youth.

By now, Yunque saw no need to conceal anything further. She kept her voice quiet and said, “Your grandfather did look for me back then. It was the day my mother’s video went viral.”

“My mother was torn apart by the internet. People tracked her down in real life — filming her, humiliating her.”

“Ye Tian got into a fight trying to protect her and ended up at the police station.”

“And I——” Yunque paused for two beats, as if she were speaking the most difficult thing she had ever put into words. “The entire school was tearing into me. Putting me on display.”

She said it plainly.

But the reality had been far worse than that.

At the time, Yunque’s phone number had also been exposed, and she had been inundated with every variety of accusation and abuse — told she wasn’t worthy of Lu Rangchen, that she should wait to be dumped.

And then — not yet twenty years old — how could Yunque have faced any of that with equanimity?

She had been genuinely terrified, genuinely lost.

Terrified of more people heaping abuse on her. Terrified that Lu Rangchen would cast her aside.

And so, when she’d called it off, she’d said that she didn’t want to be the one who got left behind.

Hearing her say all this now, Lu Rangchen’s expression went completely still.

An indescribable bitterness and guilt dissolved inside his chest — suffocating, knotted.

Yunque didn’t know.

That because of those words she’d said to him — because of what had felt like betrayal — Lu Rangchen had come perilously close to hating her for the rest of his life.

But now, all he could feel was how pitifully foolish his younger self had been.

His eyes dropped, going dim and low. Lu Rangchen said, his voice rough around the edges: “I’m sorry, Yunque. I didn’t know any of it. I was locked away by my family during those days.”

These words, too, had taken root in Lu Rangchen’s heart for many years, and there had never been the right moment to say them to Yunque.

He said, “It was someone higher up in the family who arranged it — had me confined to a vacation hotel the group owned.”

“No phone. No computer. No way to reach anyone.”

“And there were people assigned to watch me.”

At the time, Lu Rangchen had only assumed his family was trying to keep him from having any further contact with Yunque. It hadn’t occurred to him that this was just one move in the old patriarch of the Cheng Family’s far-reaching scheme.

By the time he was free again, the entire storm around Feng Yanlai had subsided without a trace.

But all of that — Yunque had known long since.

She said, “I guessed, early on.”

She lifted her damp lashes to look at him. “I never blamed you. Not once.”

That snowy day, when she’d been on a drip at the clinic alone and couldn’t reach Lu Rangchen — she had not been entirely filled with grievance then. It had been sadness, yes, but also the knowledge that there was no longer any road forward for the two of them.

Even if they tried to drag things out —

They couldn’t have had a future.

The divide between them, at that age, was simply too wide to cross.

Letting go had been her only option.

Sure enough, before long, Yunque had met with Lu Rangchen’s grandfather. There had been no threats, no leveraged conditions — simply the quiet removal of a trending topic. And that alone was enough to leave Yunque with nowhere left to turn, with no choice but to capitulate.

The crushing weight of money and power — that was the cruel truth.

Yunque had understood it before she was even twenty.

And through it, she had come to understand: she and Lu Rangchen simply were not from the same world.

That understanding stayed with her for many years, until she had grown from a girl drowning in helplessness into an adult who could stand on her own — and only then did she find the courage to let herself steal one more look at Lu Rangchen.

Yunque’s eyes shimmered softly. She sniffled lightly and said, “Lu Rangchen — I never thought you would still want to look at me.”

Lu Rangchen hadn’t imagined she would say something so self-diminishing.

His eyes grew faintly moist. “I never thought you’d be able to come back.”

“……”

“Even now it feels like a dream,” Lu Rangchen said, with a helpless, self-deprecating smile — his gaze the most candid it had ever been. “Last night I dreamed you left again.”

His tone carried something that couldn’t quite be named — a faint note of grievance and suffering.

It pierced Yunque’s heart.

She said at once, “I’m not going anywhere.”

Lu Rangchen smiled. “I know. I heard everything.”

That smile — and with it, a sudden wave of feeling washed over Yunque. She said, “Has anyone ever told you? You look very much like your grandfather.”

She raised a finger and pointed to the area around his eyes. “Right here — especially here. Only the two of you carry yourselves very differently. He has an air that’s commanding without ever needing to raise his voice — even his smile makes people uneasy. But you’re different. For me, even when you’re not smiling — you’re still gentle.”

Plain words, utterly unadorned.

And yet the emotion folded inside them was on par with a love confession.

At that, Lu Rangchen’s throat moved. Without thinking, he pulled her closer.

His warm lips came to rest against hers in a soft, fleeting press. His voice, rough at the edges: “You suffered so much. That’s on me.”

“I promise you — from now on, with me here, you will never have reason to fear anything.”

“You don’t need to worry about my grandfather. And you don’t need to worry about my mother.”

Those two references — like a storm cloud that had settled over his heart and refused to lift for years.

Yunque’s eyes grew warm at that, her nose suddenly stinging, and she said, “I know. With you beside me, there’s nothing I need to fear.”

Not his mother’s objections. Not his grandfather raising a hand to separate them again.

“And then what,” Lu Rangchen continued. “What happened after? After he forced you out of the country — how did your father get drawn into it?”

“……Because he found out you came looking for me.”

Yunque lowered her gaze and said, “He knew that you had come to reconcile with me.”

Perhaps money truly could do anything.

Even with a person thousands of miles away in a foreign country, their every movement could still be known at once.

Yunque would never forget that day — coming home from work to find a neighbor telling her that someone was waiting for her downstairs. And the moment she stepped out and saw that the person waiting was Lu Rangchen — that surge of emotion, simultaneously painful and joyful, so overwhelming she could scarcely breathe.

Yunque had never cried so hard in her life.

She had locked herself in the bathroom, sat on the floor by the door with her knees pulled to her chest, and let the tears come like a broken dam through her fingers — but she hadn’t dared make a sound.

Because Feng Yanlai was in the bedroom.

Two people crammed into a cheap rented apartment, keeping busy every day with work and studies, all their reserves of courage long since worn down to nothing.

She couldn’t bear to imagine what it would have meant if Lu Rangchen had been here alongside her, living like this — how much guilt and pain that would have brought her. And that was to say nothing of the fact that, before she’d even come home that evening, an assistant of Cheng Fusen’s had called her to say that her father had already been dismissed from his post at the company.

Zhu Ping’an was getting on in years, no longer suited to the work of a train conductor. His employer was an outsourced firm — not the unassailable state entity she’d always vaguely assumed. As it turned out, a single word from the old patriarch of the Cheng Family was enough to have the company sweep Zhu Ping’an out the door.

The whole family depended on Zhu Ping’an’s income alone.

Deng Jiali had been frantically messaging her then — Yunque, how could you do this, why did what happened between you two have to drag your father into it, your father is out of work now, how are the four of us supposed to survive?

The woman’s accusations were burned into her memory even now.

It was in that moment that Yunque felt she was on the verge of breaking.

There had even been a second — barely a second — where she thought about running downstairs, throwing herself into Lu Rangchen’s arms, telling him: take me with you, let’s run away together, I don’t care about any of it.

But she couldn’t.

She simply couldn’t.

She wiped the tears from her face. And through the old, small window of the bathroom, she stared down at Lu Rangchen waiting for her below.

He wore a black down jacket, a cigarette between his fingers — still that same long-limbed silhouette — but with an air of dissipation and ruin that hadn’t been there before.

He was thinner. Taller.

His bearing had turned despondent, the bright energy of his youth gone.

Even the fabric of his coat was no longer the rich quality of the past, but the most ordinary sort.

Yet the way he looked at her hadn’t changed.

When he tilted his head upward in her direction, it was still the same — deep and ardent and willing, as if it cost him nothing.

Only the faint blue-white haze of cigarette smoke drifted up between them, obscuring the view — and in the dim, amber backlight of the bathroom, Lu Rangchen never quite made out her face.

That was the first time Yunque felt she had ruined Lu Rangchen.

And the life that had been his rightful inheritance.

And yet — she could never have guessed.

In the future, when the two of them spoke of this, Lu Rangchen’s response was a quiet, cold laugh.

Like he couldn’t do anything with her, like he was exasperated beyond measure. He laughed without warmth and said, “Yunque, are you a masochist? What do you mean, you ruined me? You think you could ruin me that easily?”

“And what’s this about a life that was rightfully mine in Rome?”

He scoffed, dismissing it without a second thought. “How do you know Rome is where I wanted to be? Am I not allowed to come running toward you instead?”

“Running toward you” — those two words hit like a hammer driving into her chest. Yunque went still instantly.

Her gaze trembling, she could barely stop herself from murmuring his name: “Lu Rangchen……”

Lu Rangchen raised one brow, laughing low with that familiar arrogant ease. “Or are you telling me you don’t have enough confidence to believe you’re worth more than Rome?”

“……”

Yunque was suddenly struck speechless.

It was as if, in an instant, something enormous and roiling had submerged her completely.

There was still more Lu Rangchen wanted to say. He almost felt like laughing. “You said I looked despondent — that’s because I’d just come from training before I looked for you. I’d gotten my bonus money and came straight over the moment it hit my account.”

“The coat I was wearing was team-issued — five hundred yuan per person, standard distribution. Nothing bare-bones about it.”

“I’d just come off a flight and barely had time to do anything before I came looking for you. Of course I looked worn-out.”

“But all of that aside — you called me despondent, and I take issue with that.”

“I am not some fragile, pampered creature, Yunque. I have never been the kind of second-generation rich boy you seem to picture — born into leisure, coasting through life on his family’s name.”

“Even if you weren’t in the picture, I would have found a way to make my own money when I grew up. A man building himself into something by the time he comes of age — isn’t that just how it should be? Especially when he’s chasing a wife to another country — you think I’d go with my hand out to the family?”

A few sentences in, and Yunque was completely disarmed.

Someone had once told her that Lu Rangchen was terrifyingly good with words — so good they’d tried to recruit him to the debate team. Yunque hadn’t believed it then. But right now, she believed it entirely.

It wasn’t merely a matter of being good with words.

Lu Rangchen had a character so fine that it seemed to radiate light from somewhere within him — and this, more than anything else, was why she had fallen for him in the first place.

In an age when most boys still hadn’t learned to respect women, he was the one who already knew how.

She had loved him not because he was born privileged — but because he was a genuinely, profoundly good young man. A profoundly good person.

Yunque had never been moved like this before in her life.

She felt her own voice trembling as she spoke. She said, “Lu Rangchen… what have I done to deserve this…”

Lu Rangchen’s reply was light, unhurried: “Because you are Yunque.”

“The one and only Yunque in all the world.”

“……”

The urge to cry swelled behind her eyes. Yunque fought it back, and through the sting of tears that almost came, broke into a soft, watery laugh. “Lu Rangchen — what do I do? I feel like I’m falling deeper in debt to you, and deeper in love with you, with every passing moment……”

If he remembered correctly — this was the second time he’d heard her say, with her own lips, that she loved him.

His throat moved. And moved again.

Inside Lu Rangchen’s chest, something blazed and crackled like a wildfire in the wind.

He looked straight at her, eyes lit with a spreading flame. He said, “Then let’s register our marriage.”

“……”

He gathered his courage, his gaze steady and unwavering. “Let’s register, Yunque. Let’s register our marriage.”