That evening, having eaten a bit too much, I stepped out onto the open-air terrace to catch some fresh air and accidentally ran into Qi Han. He was leaning against the railing with a cigarette pinched between his fingers, looking simultaneously rugged and haunted.

“Wen Yu, you still think I was just some jerk who vanished all those years ago without a word, don’t you?” I stayed silent. He let out a bitter, self-deprecating laugh as he recounted the tragedy of six years ago: his younger brother’s fatal accident and his mother’s crippling depression. “I couldn’t bear to drag you down into that black hole with me.”

With that, he rested his chin on my shoulder. I stood completely frozen, my brain grinding to a total halt under the weight of such crushing truth. His disappearance hadn’t been a sign of falling out of love; it had been the absolute collapse of his entire world.

The production team had rented a lecture hall at University A to shoot a “parallel universe” sequence. The scene required Qi Han and me to share a kiss in the back row of seats. And in a stroke of cruel irony, the man standing at the podium delivering a lecture was none other than Fu Chenyan.

Qi Han tilted my face up, pressing a kiss to my lips that was so tender it felt almost reverent. He looked at me as though I were a lingering ghost from a past life. And my husband? He simply stood there, calmly lecturing, entirely devoid of any trace of jealousy or annoyance.

Here I was, caught in the middle of a scripted kiss, yet my heart felt completely cold. An indescribable sense of emptiness welled up inside me. Was it because he played his role as a “contract husband” too flawlessly, or because, to him, I truly didn’t matter at all? He wasn’t jealous, and I… hated every second of it.

Three days later, Fu Chenyan took me to visit his mother in her VIP hospital suite. She was wonderfully gentle, even sliding a family-heirloom jade bracelet onto my wrist and wishing us a lifetime of happiness. A wave of suffocating guilt washed over me, knowing she had no idea our marriage was nothing more than a piece of paper.

While stepping out to grab some water, I accidentally overheard a conversation from inside the room. His aunt was pressuring him about producing an heir, while his mother defended me: “Wen Yu still has her acting career. If she got pregnant right now, what would she do?”

Though meant as protection, those words made my stomach sink. Children? Right now, that was something I simply couldn’t give him.

On the ride back from the hospital, I watched as Fu Chenyan and his stunning, intelligent secretary left the house together to attend a business gala. Seeing the way she meticulously straightened his lapel, and watching his instinctive, protective hand catch her elbow when she wobbled slightly in her heels, a sharp sting of bitterness pierced through me.

He was flawless, rigorous, and profoundly responsible. He deserved a proper, polished wife, someone who could strategize alongside him and bear him well-behaved children. As for me? I was likely just a detour he’d accidentally taken. I made up my mind: the moment he got back, I’d bring up the divorce and get it over with cleanly.

At ten o’clock that night, Fu Chenyan returned home looking less than entirely sober. I grabbed the divorce agreement and marched straight into his study. He was sitting at his desk with his eyes closed, his face flushed from alcohol. The second I stepped forward to approach him, he snapped, “Don’t come over here!”

His cold rebuff only hardened my resolve. I slid the papers across the polished wood of his desk.

“Let’s divorce. Being together like this… it’s just too dull.”

Right at that exact second, something slipped onto the carpet. I bent down to pick it up and froze dead in my tracks: beneath the edge of the desk, his belt was unbuckled, and his hand was tightly clutching a scrap of my silk nightgown, the exact piece of lingerie that had mysteriously “gone missing” ages ago. The fabric was clenched so hard it radiated an aura of fierce, pent-up restraint and dangerous desperation.

Before I could turn and run, I was yanked straight down into his lap. His voice came out raw and gravelly:

“This so-called ‘spark’… can always be manufactured.”

During the two-hour “ordeal” that played out across the study carpet, every single hidden secret finally unraveled. Fu Chenyan let out a bitter, broken laugh against my skin:

“You think I married you without loving you? You want a divorce just so you can run back to Qi Han?”

As it turned out, he had been standing in the dark shadows of the terrace that night, but he had only caught the tail end of the conversation and let his own imagination run wild. His lack of public jealousy hadn’t been born of indifference; it was because he remembered me saying how much I despised controlling men. He had been terrified that if he showed his possessiveness, I would push him away for good and choose my ex instead.

Turns out, his alcohol consumption that night had been spiked with frustration, and he had retreated to his study to desperately tame his inner demons using my nightgown as a proxy. Once every single misunderstanding was utterly dismantled and sealed away with a fiercely possessive kiss, he murmured against my ear:

“Don’t you ever mention divorce again.”

I offered a soft, breathless laugh: “I suppose that depends entirely on your future performance.”

A freak accident struck the set when a rigging cable suddenly slipped; Qi Han threw his own body in front of me to break the fall, fracturing two of his ribs in the process. When I visited him in the hospital, I finally met the mysterious woman from his old scandal, who turned out to be his cousin.

Through her explanation, the whole truth came to light: Qi Han had sacrificed everything, signing a brutal “indentured” contract just to claw his way back to the industry and return home to find me. He reached out from behind me, pulling me into a tight embrace as his voice cracked: “Wen Yu… I don’t have anyone left. All I have is you.”

Gently, but with absolute finality, I peeled his fingers away from my waist. “It’s too late.”

Qi Han’s arrogance had been real, his love had been real, and his agonizing regret was just as real, but my refusal was absolute. The chapter of six years ago officially closed out with a simple blessing text and a hollow, detached “Thank you.”

My life with Fu Chenyan turned a brand-new page. He no longer bothered playing the detached stoic, and I had long stopped trying to pretend I was unbothered. We finally understood that true love isn’t a stagnant, mirror-smooth lake; it’s the quiet courage to keep choosing each other, over and over again, long after the scars have healed.

Beneath the clear glow of the moonlight, the study rug once again reclaimed its status as our “familiar battleground.”

“Fu Chenyan, you’re getting more insufferable by the day!”

“Only around you, Mrs. Fu.”