Chapter 16: Love You

Lu Mingqi ultimately didn’t go upstairs.

Before taking a shower, he turned on the lights for me, refusing to let me fumble around in the dark playing with my phone.

After his shower, he returned to bed smelling faintly of cool water. He carefully kept his distance from me and lay on his side, facing me.

“Do you know why I made you sign that promise?”

The moment he brought it up, I was wide awake.

I looked at him curiously.

“Why? I asked you before, but you wouldn’t tell me.”

“Because of the marriage promise you wrote for me when we were kids.”

A hint of amusement flickered in his eyes, giving him the look of a handsome fox who knew exactly how much trouble he could cause.

“I figured that since you promised to marry me when you grew up, and actually did become Mrs. Lu, if you promised now to stay with me for the rest of your life, you probably wouldn’t go back on your word.”

I burst out laughing.

He was just as childish as Lu Mingxing.

Lu Mingqi took my right hand and gently enclosed it in his palm.

The warmth of his hand slowly seeped into mine, then spread through my entire body.

My heart skipped a beat, and my cheeks grew warm.

Almost instinctively, I looked away from his intense gaze.

This time, he was the one teasing me.

“We’ve been married this long. What are you still getting shy about?”

“We’ve only been married for three years.”

“But I’ve loved you for a long time.”

I deliberately teased him.

“That’s terrible. You fell for a child. What a pervert.”

He laughed and gave my hand a gentle squeeze.

“What are you talking about? When we met again at your brother’s birthday party, you were already eighteen.”

“But that was only five years ago.”

“Is five years not a long time?”

I moved a little closer to him and answered seriously,

“No. It isn’t.”

His eyebrow lifted slightly.

I smiled.

“We still have plenty more five-year stretches ahead of us.”

He went still for a moment.

Then the look in his eyes gradually softened, and he rested his forehead against mine.

“Those years of reading novels weren’t wasted after all. You’ve actually gotten pretty good at saying things that sound nice.”

“Have I said anything tonight that you didn’t like?”

“No.”

“Then that’s all that matters.”

He chuckled softly before pulling me closer.

“Remember that. We still have a lot more five-year stretches ahead of us.”

I patted my chest confidently.

“Don’t worry. I’m the most trustworthy person you’ll ever meet.”

SIDE STORY: LU MINGQI

1.

“Hubby, are you busy?”

“Look at this. It’s hilarious. I had to send it to you.”

Jiang Yueling’s message came through just as I was leaving the conference room.

I opened the screenshot she’d sent while walking back to my office.

It was an excerpt from one of those familiar “domineering CEO falls madly in love with me” novels, the kind so ridiculously melodramatic that you could tell what you were in for at a single glance.

She loved reading that kind of thing.

According to her, they required absolutely no brainpower and were perfect for killing time.

She had another habit, too.

Whenever she came across something ridiculous, she’d send it to me so we could make fun of it together.

She knew I was busy, so she always sent me only the most important part.

Three words had been circled in red on the screenshot:

Five million dollars.

Apparently, some wealthy-family male lead was fighting his own brothers tooth and nail over a five-million-dollar project.

“So ridiculous. I couldn’t stop myself from sending it to you. I love you so much, right?”

I could practically picture the smug little smile on her face, her eyes curved into crescents.

I couldn’t help smiling.

I teased her back.

“Read less of this stuff. It’s not good for your intelligence.”

She immediately sent me an angry sticker.

“Lies. I’ve never heard of anyone getting stupid from reading novels. People only get stupid when they fall.”

She really did have a mouth that occasionally got her into trouble.

I’d lost count of how many times I’d reminded her to watch where she was going.

She always listened with one ear and let it out the other.

And, as it turned out, she really hadn’t been taking me seriously.

Fortunately, the fall hadn’t been life-threatening. She’d only been left with some lingering aftereffects.

At the hospital, she spent two days dry-heaving over a trash can.

Only after the doctor confirmed that she was stable did I take her home.

The first thing she did after getting home was…

Check her “secret stash.”

I watched her sneak over to the safe, squat down, and count her gold bars over and over before finally letting out a sigh of relief.

She really was hopelessly obsessed with money.

The fact that she’d just gotten out of the hospital and immediately gone to count her gold was enough to tell me she was probably fine.

Only then did my heart truly settle.

At first, I planned to take an extended leave from work and stay home with her.

She refused.

She said very seriously,

“Go to work. I don’t need you to take care of me at home. If you stop working, how are you supposed to support me?”

She often called herself a “freeloader,” so in her mind, not working probably meant being useless.

In reality, she hadn’t spent all these years doing absolutely nothing.

She invested with me and had even put money into an art gallery with a friend, leaving the day-to-day management to someone else.

She simply stayed behind the scenes and collected the returns.

I asked her several times to reconsider, but she didn’t change her mind.

I happened to have a project that needed my attention as well, so I stopped pushing.

Life gradually returned to normal.

There was only one noticeable difference.

She stopped sending me novel links and screenshots.

Whenever I asked, she would only smile mysteriously and refuse to explain.

It was only later that I understood.

Perhaps by then, she had already begun to believe that…

we were living inside a novel ourselves.

So there was no need for her to keep reading one.

I had a vague feeling that something about her had changed.

But I didn’t ask too many questions.

As long as she was still herself—still relying on me, still loving me—everything else was unimportant.

2.

The youngest had always been hot-tempered.

He rushed into everything he did, acted without thinking, and was ridiculously easy to provoke.

My older brother and I had both pulled him aside and warned him more than once. He always swore he’d change, but in the end, he only improved a little.

That day at the company, I happened to run into Lian Rong—the ex-girlfriend he had never truly gotten over.

When I saw her about to fall, the image of Jiang Yueling tumbling down the stairs immediately flashed through my mind.

I instinctively reached out and caught her.

Only after Lian Rong had regained her balance did I finally breathe again.

But the image of Jiang Yueling’s pale face kept replaying in my mind.

I couldn’t control my expression.

Lian Rong thanked me nervously, then asked if I was feeling unwell.

I politely shook my head and told her I was fine.

That was when the youngest appeared out of nowhere.

The first thing he did was pull Lian Rong behind him.

Then he glared at me, clearly angry but too intimidated to say anything outright.

That kid had been spoiled since birth. He had a serious rich-kid attitude, and when he lost his temper, he didn’t care who he was talking to.

But he was afraid of me and our older brother.

He knew other people couldn’t really do anything to him.

We could.

And we absolutely would teach him a lesson if he went too far.

“I only caught her because she almost fell,” I explained.

The youngest didn’t believe me.

“Do you take me for an idiot?”

I fell silent.

…To be fair, he wasn’t exactly a genius.

I still had a meeting to attend, and I had no interest in arguing with him when he was already worked up. There was no point trying to reason with him in that state.

“We’ll talk tomorrow.”

I checked my watch. My online meeting was about to start, so I headed back to my office.

The youngest didn’t follow me.

But I could hear him questioning Lian Rong, accusing her of deliberately getting close to both brothers in the Lu family.

He even called my older brother and me “old foxes,” saying that we were capable of swallowing a girl like her whole without leaving anything behind.

What a brat.

What did he mean, “old foxes”?

We simply knew how to calculate our moves in business.

He was used to doing whatever he wanted, while I simply happened to be a man who followed his principles.

So I didn’t hold it against him.

I let it go.

What I never expected was for him to have the nerve to run straight to Jiang Yueling and say those things to her.

Even more surprising was her reaction.

She was completely calm.

She said our marriage was nothing more than a business arrangement, and that mutual benefit came first.

She even said that finding someone else wouldn’t be difficult if she wanted to.

When she saw me, she didn’t question me.

She wasn’t angry.

If anything, she seemed to be in a pretty good mood.

That wasn’t like her at all.

She wasn’t the type to make a scene, but for a wife to be accused of something by her husband and remain so calm that she didn’t even bother asking a single question…

That was obviously abnormal.

I wanted to have a serious conversation with her.

She refused, saying she had to go meet her close friends.

Deep down, I was a little irritated.

Did she really put them before me?

Maybe she was doing it on purpose, trying to show me that she was upset.

I drove her there.

The entire way, she remained focused on her WeChat messages and didn’t say a word to me.

I didn’t know exactly what the youngest had told her, but she clearly believed him more than she believed me.

The thought irritated me.

After three years together, was I really worth less than a few careless words from the youngest?

But then I realized it was worse than I thought.

She didn’t distrust me.

She simply…

didn’t care.

She genuinely believed she was the “villainous female lead.”

To be honest, my wife occasionally said things that made absolutely no sense.

I was used to it.

But this time, her expression was far too serious.

She wasn’t joking.

I had no choice but to take it seriously.

Everything she told me was absurd, yet somehow strangely logical.

It was so detailed that it was almost frightening—even down to the half scallion pancake.

She loved savory pastries and stuffed flatbreads, but she hated scallion pancakes with egg.

And yet, in her “dream,” she had been furious and terrified, blaming herself for being picky about food even when she was about to die, while simultaneously cursing the author for having no conscience.

None of it made sense.

I reached over and gently rubbed the top of her head.

Then I decided to take her to another hospital for a full examination.