He half-dragged, half-carried me into the car. The heavy thud of the door slamming shut cut off the outside world entirely. In the cramped space, thick with the scent of cedarwood, his usual air of quiet elegance was completely gone, replaced by a suffocating, warning pressure.

I curled back into the passenger seat, not daring to utter a single word. I’m dead. I blew this spark way out of proportion. What was he going to do next? Deal with me right here on the spot, or casually throw me out of the moving car to get me out of his sight?

Fu Yanli didn’t start the engine. He just sat there, so quiet I could hear his heavy, measured breaths as he fought to suppress his rage. Every second dragged on like an eternity. Finally, he moved.

Unbuckling his seatbelt, he leaned in close. I instantly squeezed my eyes shut, shielding my chest with my hands:

“Fu Yanli! Don’t do anything crazy! We’re… we’re in a car!”

Nothing happened. Instead, his fingers clamped around my chin, forcing me to tilt my head up and face him.

“Is he handsome?” he spat through grit teeth.

I blinked, thoroughly bewildered. “…Huh?”

“That man,” he rasped, his gaze burning hot enough to incinerate the car’s interior. “Is he more handsome than me?”

I almost burst out laughing. This was what the brilliant professor was hung up on? What kind of insane logic do men even operate on? But taking one look at the sheer deadly fury written across his face, I decided to throw fuel on the fire:

“He’s… very gentle. He didn’t do anything inappropriate, he was just trying to steady me.”

“Steady you?” The grip on my chin tightened, sending a sharp sting through my jaw. “Tang Yu, do you think I’m blind?”

The pain snapped my remaining composure, and all my bottled-up resentment came flooding out:

“Yes! He’s better than you! At least he knows how to compliment me, to tell me I’m beautiful! What about you? Have you ever actually looked at me? In your eyes, am I anything more than a decorative vase sitting in your house?”

The air in the car turned instantly sub-zero. His eyes darkened into an abyss so deep it sent a chill down my spine. But then, he let out a laugh, a soft, low sound far more terrifying than his anger.

“No different?” He released my chin, his voice dropping into a low, husky register, tinged with something almost… fragile. “Tang Yu, do you have any idea what hangs in my study?”

His study? The ultimate forbidden territory that I had never been allowed to step foot into?

He didn’t wait for my answer. “There’s a painting hanging in there. A portrait I painted of you when you were eighteen. The very first day you met me… wearing a red dress, standing in the sunlight, smiling. Tell me, does that sound like you’re ‘no different’ to me?”

My brain completely short-circuited. Fu Yanli painted me when I was eighteen? We didn’t even meet until I was twenty-two! Was he talking about some parallel universe?

I stared at him, searching his face for any sign of a lie, but there was none. His expression was frighteningly earnest, carrying an emotion held back for so long it was on the verge of shattering.

“What… what are you talking about?” my voice trembled.

Fu Yanli offered no further explanation. Sitting back up, he buckled his seatbelt and turned the key. The car glided smoothly onto the road, but my head was spinning like a chaotic market square. Eighteen… if that’s true, what on earth has been going on for the past ten years?

The car pulled up outside our house. Without a word, he grabbed my hand and led me straight upstairs. He brought me right to the door of his study, the long-forbidden zone.

It was a spacious room bathed in cool tones, with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and the distinct scent of old paper. He stopped in front of a wide wall where a massive frame hung, draped beneath a heavy navy-blue velvet cloth.

He glanced at me, his expression unreadable, then decisively pulled the cloth down.

In that single instant, it felt as though all the light in the room converged onto the canvas. The painting showed a young girl in a vibrant red dress, standing under the bright sun, looking back over her shoulder with a smile so radiant it was impossible to look away.

It was me. Unmistakably me at eighteen years old. That dress was a birthday gift from my mother, and on that exact day… I had attended a college summer camp and gotten completely lost on campus.

A memory buried for a decade came crashing back like a tidal wave. A handsome, distant senior who had shown me the way…

My hand flew to my mouth in shock. “It was… you?”

Fu Yanli didn’t turn to look at me. He just kept staring at the canvas with a strange, unfamiliar gentleness in his eyes:

“It was me. I fell in love with you at first sight.”

My entire world crumbled and rebuilt itself in a fraction of a second. The man I had always believed to be cold, unfeeling, and detached like a machine; the man I had pushed and provoked in every imaginable way just to wring out a shred of emotion… had been silently in love with me for years. Long before I even knew who he was.

Then what were these three years of marriage? A cold, passionless play, or a love story that he alone had been quietly writing for ten long years?