AD | Chapter 5

I finally settled down and got to work.

Lin Jiahui’s autobiography progressed at a painfully slow pace. The material she had provided was riddled with errors and offered very little in the way of actual evidence. No one was stupid. From the details Lin Zhian had accidentally let slip that day, I had already pieced together part of the truth.

What I really wanted to know was what, exactly, Lin Zhian and Lin Jiahui were to each other.

Brother and sister?

Sister and brother?

Or lovers?

As for Lin Jiahui’s determination to manufacture herself a noble family history, I understood it even less. Qi Qin had once been sent to a juvenile detention center. Plenty of superstar idols had been rebellious kids in their youth. A difficult past only made audiences more fascinated.

So why go to all this trouble?

Fortunately, Lin Zhian really was one of the most handsome men I’d ever seen.

He still had no idea what I meant by “staring Wei Jie to death,” but at least he was wonderfully accommodating. I’d say, “We can’t write it like this. I checked online. That girls’ school affiliated with the church closed in 1979.”

He’d say, “Okay, okay.”

I’d say, “This part needs changing too. Zhang, Jiahui was already buying children’s clothes at Lane Crawford before she was six. It’ll look like plagiarism.”

“No problem.”

He really was an exceptionally good-natured man.

Whenever he had some free time, he would come see me. He always brought a huge bouquet of poppies—bright red flowers that looked almost like opium poppies in full bloom.

He said they were Jiahui’s favorite.

I would sigh.

Everything that came out of this man’s mouth seemed to be about Jiahui.

Maybe part of the reason he came so often was that with me, he could talk about “Jiahui” without having to hold anything back.

I made boiled fish for him. By then, my cooking had improved tremendously.

This Zhuang Xiao Qin was no longer the foolish girl who had tried to kill herself over a man four years earlier.

Now she had one of the most dishonest jobs in the world, and as long as the price was right, there was room in her universe for every kind of deception and betrayal.

Lin Zhian and I got along remarkably well.

Sometimes I’d claim I was too exhausted from writing to cook and take him to the little restaurant downstairs instead. It was a wonderfully glamorous experience. Every female customer in the place looked at me as if they wanted to set me on fire with their eyes.

Lin Zhian had no idea I was enjoying myself for purely selfish reasons.

As far as he was concerned, I was a very innocent girl.

Innocent in the same way “Jiahui” had once been.

“How long ago was that?” I asked deliberately.

He thought about it seriously for ten seconds.

“Before she was seventeen,” he said. “After that, a lot of things changed. You know.”

“What do I know? All I know is that she was sent to New York at seventeen to study art history.”

I pretended to be clueless.

“What’s art history?”

Lin Zhian tapped me lightly on the head, looking guilty in the very obvious way of a man trying to hide something.

I burst out laughing.

I hadn’t been that happy in a long time.

There was something deeply entertaining about watching a handsome man get flustered.

To my surprise, he stared at me.

I looked away.

It wasn’t that my heart felt nothing.

It did.

But I refused to let myself fall again.

I had already died once for love. I had no intention of finding out what dying a second time felt like.

Better to suffer quietly in the gray area between friendship and love, or enjoy the intoxication of it, than to risk giving my whole heart away again.

I just never imagined I would see Zhang Li again.

I had thought that, in my world, he had turned his back and disappeared forever.

I saw him at a press conference for Lin Jiahui’s new movie.

He was there in the VIP section, now a vice president of a media conglomerate—a young, successful returnee from overseas and one of the hottest names in the media industry.

He was just as handsome as he had been four years earlier.

Immaculate suit. Effortless charm.

I wanted to pretend I hadn’t seen him.

But he saw me.

The surprise on his face was almost comical. He had probably imagined that Zhuang Xiao Qin, a girl with neither education nor skills, had ended up rotting away on some factory assembly line.

He certainly hadn’t expected to find me at a gathering like this.

So I smiled at him.

I was wearing that four-thousand-yuan Versace dress.

There was still a faint bloodstain on the hem that I’d never managed to wash out. But it was the only dress I owned suitable for a formal occasion.

The press conference itself was a celebration of peace and harmony, everyone smiling and saying all the right things.

In other words, painfully boring.

What interested me was the buffet afterward.

That was actually why Lin Zhian had brought me.

He said I worked hard enough in the heat and deserved a little extra reward. He pointed out which dishes were the most expensive and told me where they were located.

Then he disappeared.

Being Miss Lin’s assistant was clearly not an easy job.

I took him at his word and began raiding the buffet.

The society ladies around us ate practically nothing.

Their loss was my gain.

I ate two Australian lobsters.

By then my dress was stretched so tight around my waist that I could barely breathe.

That was when Zhang Li came over.

“Xiao Qin!” he called in his polished, charming voice. “How have you been?”

I wanted to slap him.

How have I been?

You nearly got someone killed, and now you have the nerve to ask how she’s doing?

But I smiled sweetly and answered around a mouthful of food.

“Thanks to you, I’m doing just fine.”

He chuckled, pretending not to hear the sarcasm.

A middle-aged woman in a white low-cut dress appeared beside him. She had a rather flat chest, which somehow made the dress look even more unfortunate.

He smiled and introduced her.

“Vivian, this is my wife. Vivian, this is Zhuang Xiao Qin, an old friend from my days in China.”

He said it without the slightest hesitation.

Smoothly.

Naturally.

As if he were reciting a fact.

I had already cursed him a thousand times in my head.

To preserve basic manners, I turned to his remarkably young wife and tried to make conversation.

“Chen Hao is a friend of mine, too.”

She looked at me in surprise.

The confusion on her face was unmistakably genuine.

“Chen Hao?” she asked.

Zhang Li explained.

“Chen Hao was a friend of mine before I went abroad.”

Then he turned to me.

“I don’t often talk about my friends back home with Vivian. She doesn’t know Chen Hao.”

Doesn’t know him?

I hesitated.

Did she really not know him?

Or was she pretending?

“What have you been doing lately?” Zhang Li asked, changing the subject.

He seemed genuinely interested in what had become of me.

“Xiao Qin!”

Before I could answer, Lin Zhian appeared and tugged me toward him.

“I’ve been looking everywhere for you. So this is where you were.”

I slipped my arm through his and smiled contentedly.

The color drained from Zhang Li’s face.

The woman he had discarded had someone else who wanted her.

A handsome, wealthy man.

At the very least, he had lost half this round.

Unfortunately, I hadn’t counted on an unexpected complication.

Someone walked over and gently pulled Lin Zhian away from me.

“Come with me for a moment.”

It took me a full three seconds to realize who it was.

Lin Jiahui.

Strangely enough, despite having spent all this time writing her autobiography, inventing her life on paper, studying countless photographs of her online, and even watching her perform live, I still couldn’t reconcile the woman standing in front of me with any of those images.

The only thing beyond question was that Lin Jiahui was extraordinarily beautiful.

She wore a black evening gown covered in rhinestones. Her enormous eyes shimmered as they moved, and she held her chin high.

She positioned herself in front of Lin Zhian as though deliberately putting him behind her.

Then she looked at me proudly.

“You’re Zhuang Xiao Qin?”

“Yes.”

“I heard you and him have been spending a lot of time together lately.”

“Jiahui…” Lin Zhian tried to interrupt.

“I wasn’t asking you. I’m asking her.”

Her voice was sharp and aggressive.

She stared straight at me.

I smiled.

“Heh. And who exactly are you to order me around?”

I heard her give a cold little snort.

Then, before I had time to react, the most unimaginable thing happened.

Lin Jiahui raised her hand and slapped me across the face.

Hard.

The instant I instinctively covered my cheek, I realized I was smiling.

Somehow, through the haze, I thought:

That was a pretty hard slap. She must have put her whole body into it.

Then I stumbled backward and fell.

The soles of those Ferragamo shoes were incredibly thin. They were designed for red carpets, not falling over.

As I hit the ground, I heard a terrible rrrip.

My four-thousand-yuan dress had split straight across the waist.

Some luxury brand, I cursed silently.

Lin Jiahui stood over me.

All I could see were her feet in high-heeled sandals, beautifully shaped toes painted a deep sapphire blue.

She looked down at me and spat one word.

“Slut.”

Then she pushed through the crowd and walked away.

The camera flashes erupted all around me.

After that came the humiliating task of getting back on my feet.

I picked up my shoes and held them in my hands as I slowly made my way toward the exit.

I wanted to walk faster.

I really did.

But my legs were trembling, and every step took an effort.

At every step, I had to push reporters aside.

They all held their cameras up like weapons, their lenses flashing inches from my face.

I didn’t even look at them.

I didn’t care that the torn dress exposed rolls of pale flesh around my waist.

Once you’ve been humiliated to a certain point, there’s simply no room left for shame.

When I reached the entrance, someone shoved through the reporters, grabbed me, and dragged me outside on a run.

It was Lin Zhian.

He pulled me into his white Ford.

Neither of us said a word.

He drove onto the Third Ring Road and sped away.

I began to tremble.

At first it was barely noticeable.

Then harder.

And harder.

Four years ago, when Zhang Li left me, I had thought nothing in the world could possibly be more painful.

Today, something worse had finally happened.

My mind went completely blank.

There was no need to kill myself.

I was already dead.

At last I understood.

Losing love was not the frightening part.

Losing your dignity was.

Especially in front of a crowd.

Lin Zhian handed me a tissue.

I threw it back at him.

I didn’t want to cry.

Crying was how little girls released their emotions.

For a battle-hardened old hand like Zhuang Xiao Qin, still being able to cry would almost be a luxury.

“I’m sorry,” Lin Zhian said.

“Xiao Qin, I’m really sorry.”

I said nothing.

“Today Jiahui asked me why I’d been spending so much time with you lately. I told her…”

He hesitated.

“I told her I’d fallen for you.”

I saw my own face in the rearview mirror.

Gray.

Livid.

My lips were pressed tightly together.

I could hear my teeth chattering.

You like me?

Me, looking half dead?

The absurdity of it was almost too much.

I laughed.

Then, the moment I stopped laughing, I felt sick.

“Pull over!”

Thankfully, we were on a relatively quiet stretch of road.

Lin Zhian stopped.

I threw open the door and stumbled to the roadside, where I began vomiting.

He was remarkably quick. He supported me and gently patted my back.

I hadn’t vomited that violently since I was eighteen.

That expensive lunch…

Even now, I couldn't help finding the whole thing darkly funny.

It wasn’t until I was bringing up bile that I finally started to panic.

Lin Zhian panicked, too.

“We need to go to a hospital!”

“If we go now, I’ll be on the front page tomorrow,” I protested. “These symptoms look way too much like pregnancy.”

Lin Zhian stared at me, caught somewhere between laughter and despair.

“Zhuang Xiao Qin, are you sure you’re not faking this? How can you still joke at a time like this?”

“What else am I supposed to do? Lie on the pavement and wait for the apocalypse?”

I shot him a look.

Strangely enough, after arguing with him, I didn’t feel like throwing up anymore.

I took the Wahaha bottle he handed me and rinsed out my mouth.

He looked at me with genuine admiration.

“You really are an extraordinary woman.”

I burst out laughing.

It was a long, long time before Lin Zhian started talking to me again.

That day, he drove aimlessly around Beijing.

For four hours, we wandered through a city so vast it seemed like one enormous cemetery.

For four hours, he kept talking.

In his own words, the truth had been suppressed for far too long.

And today, for some reason, it had finally decided to erupt.

“Jiahui and I left home when we were seventeen and came to make our way in the world. Her real name, of course, isn’t Lin Jiahui. What it was doesn’t matter anymore.”

“We were young and stupid. We had five hundred yuan between us and thought a big city was heaven on earth.”

“We spent two days and two nights on a bus getting to Beijing. Jiahui was carsick the entire way. She kept throwing up. I got into fights with people around us because of her.”

“That was how it started.”

“And, in a way, that was how it stayed.”

“Why?” I asked. “Why did you fight them?”

The moment the question left my mouth, I regretted it.

Lin Zhian smiled faintly.

“She was too beautiful.

“When she sang in nightclubs, men were always trying to get their hands on her.”

“We were very much in love back then. She really was a simple, good girl.”

“In the end, I was the one who dragged her into all of it.”

“How?”

“I used to fight like I didn’t care whether I lived or died. One time I beat up the son of a powerful gangster so badly that he was permanently disabled.”

“We had to run.”

“We didn’t have a penny. Where could we go?”

“Eventually, we were so hungry and desperate that Jiahui told me we couldn’t keep living like that.”

“She left.”

“Two days later, she came back.”

“She threw herself into my arms and cried.”

“She cried and cried…”

His voice faltered.

“I will never forget the sound of her crying.”

Lin Zhian’s face was expressionless.

I shivered.

He didn’t need to say anything else.

I knew something terrible had happened.

“After that, we sort of gave up.”

“If you went to the Tongzhou police station now and looked, you could probably still find our records.”

“If we’d committed murder or arson, maybe that would almost have been easier.”

“But what we did was shameful.”

“Shame that follows you for the rest of your life.”

“Do you understand?”

After a long silence, I said sincerely,

“At least you’ve finally made it. Congratulations.”

Lin Zhian shook his head.

“Xiao Qin, you’re not really that naive, are you?”

“Everything in this world comes at a price.”

“Jiahui paid hers for the life she has now.”

“She isn’t free.”

“You look at her and think she has everything. A single piece of her jewelry could feed an ordinary family for years.”

“But none of it really belongs to her.”

“She still has nothing.”

He paused.

“Actually, I’m probably the only person in this world who has ever truly cared about her without asking for anything in return.”

“But I’m tired.”

“I once hoped I could take care of her for the rest of my life.”

“I can’t.”

He suddenly slammed on the brakes.

“She wants to forget the life she used to have. She wants to become someone else.”

“Sometimes…”

He stopped.

“Sometimes I think she’s gone crazy.”

He thought for a moment.

Then he said firmly,

“She has gone crazy.”

Lin Zhian took a deep breath.

He seemed to think he was calm.

He wasn’t.

Tears were already streaming down his face.

I had never seen a man cry so much.

My heart ached.

He must have been exhausted.

So when, at last, Lin Zhian rested his head on my shoulder, I didn’t push him away.

Who said we didn’t really like each other?

We had met through lies.

But at that moment, when I was disheveled and humiliated, and he rested his head against my shoulder, there were no lies left between us.

We were showing each other the most honest versions of ourselves.

That night, when we finally said goodbye, neither of us wanted to leave.

And when Lin Zhian’s lips brushed lightly against the tip of my nose, there was a moment when I almost believed I had found happiness again.