Waiting, it turned out, was an almost unbearable thing.
She had kept the home fires burning for over eight years.
He had barely made it through two and was already close to losing his mind.
How had she done it? All those years—how had she endured?
Six months after they met, Yu Hao was reassigned and stepped onto a road that would keep him away for a long time. The title on his business card moved from supervisor to manager to regional head, then from one branch to the next. The cities changed. The salary climbed.
In the first three years, he still rushed to catch the Friday afternoon train home.
By the fourth, posted further away, he made it back once or twice a month.
By the sixth, between the start-up and the constant travel, he came home only for the major holidays.
But no matter how long he'd been gone—when the door opened, the flat was always spotless. Dinner was always on the table. The soup was already going on the hob.
"Welcome home."
He had taken it for granted, in those years, that someone would always be there—a person, a light, always waiting for his return.
He had never once stopped to think what, in all that waiting, she had actually received.
A birthday he wasn't there to celebrate.
A coat he never put around her shoulders when the cold came.
Medicine he never brought when she fell ill.
Worries he never helped carry when anxiety pressed down on her.
And the child who passed through their lives like a shooting star—he hadn't even been there to sign his name on the hospital form.
"Where are you?"
Where had he been?
In the Beijing head office, discussing some hollow, showy marketing slogan.
"The doctor says I need to be admitted for bed rest."
He had told himself, with genuine naivety: she's in the hospital now. She'll be fine.
"There's no heartbeat anymore… they say they'll need to operate."
Even if he'd been trying to hold himself together, how could he have said what he said—miscarriages are common. Lots of women go through this.
Lots of women do—but she was his wife.
By the time he reached the hospital, she was lying on a temporary bed in the corridor, white as paper, eyes fixed on nothing. The doctor said what doctors say in those moments: you're young. There will be other chances.
Something in her broke right then. She curled under the blanket and wept—a raw, animal sound, the kind that doesn't sound like crying so much as the world ending.
Years later, he could still hear it.
In the days that followed, she didn't blame him. She lay curled against him and murmured, in a voice barely above a whisper:
"I had a little brother once. He only lived a few months."
"He was so small. He looked so much like my father."
"This was our child…"
She must have been devastated beyond anything she let him see.
On paper, it was a weak embryo complicated by stress. But Yu Hao knew the truth of it: it was a warning from heaven. He had failed at the most basic duties of a husband. Of a father.
Back then he had genuinely believed that if he gave her enough—a solid foundation, financial security, the freedom to live without bowing to anyone—everything else would follow.
How shallow that was.
An excuse, nothing more.
Yu Hao had never expected to meet someone like a princess.
A girl who carried an innate kind of grace even in difficult times—not the kind that could be taught or bought, just something she was born with. She had a sharpness of eye, a quickness of mind, a taste and an instinct that set her apart from everyone in the room. Even when her family's fortunes fell, her composure and confidence never did.
Perhaps because she was so exceptional, he had often felt not quite enough. Not worthy of her, not strong enough to truly hold his own beside someone like that.
On their first trip to Hong Kong, she led him through Lan Kwai Fong, switching into English with strangers as easily as changing lanes. She walked into a bespoke tailor in Central and had a suit measured for him without a flicker of hesitation. She ate her way through back alleys and side streets and could name every star on the Avenue of Stars without thinking.
At one company gala he brought her as his guest. She was elegant, funny, effortlessly at ease with clients and colleagues alike, and the envy in the room was visible. He was the opposite—quiet by habit, someone who kept people at a careful distance, known as the man who only knew how to work, a machine with no patience for empty socialising. She had brought colour into a world that had been grey.
Sometimes he felt like a country boy being led by the hand into a grand garden he would never have dared enter on his own. She would look at him and say, with that calm certainty of hers: "I believe you'll make a world of your own."
She had lifted his life to a height he hadn't known to want.
He had grown up in a remote village. He'd never understood how a well-fitted suit could change the way a man held himself, how a plain dish could become something remarkable with the right presentation, how a single painting on a wall could shift the entire feeling of a room.
She had shown him what he was capable of.
So he worked harder, moved faster, determined to give his girl the best of everything, as quickly as possible.
But she had never been chasing wealth. She had never needed him to conquer anything. All she had ever wanted was a quiet, ordinary happiness.
He, however, couldn't stop. Something that went by the name of pride drove him like a creature with no off switch. It couldn't rest, and it wouldn't let him rest either.
That pride curdled into obsession, and the obsession into a kind of tunnel vision. He poured himself into work, into building and accumulating, telling himself it was all for her—so she could live better, do whatever she wanted, never have to compromise for money.
Some years back, he had resigned and started his own company. The early months were brutal beyond words. Then things found their footing, the path ahead grew clearer. And then, just a year later—a quality scandal hit the foreign brand he represented. Returns came flooding in. Claims arrived daily. Cash flow seized up. Salaries went unpaid.
Even then, he clenched his jaw and said nothing to her.
But she found out anyway.
Without a word to him, she sold two flats and a plot of land and transferred the money into the company account. The accountant assumed he had authorised it. Salaries were paid. Refunds went out. He only found out when he went through the accounts himself.
The fury that came over him had no bottom.
The first flat had been their home. She had never let it, never changed a thing, preserving exactly the way she had decorated it at twenty. The land was where she had planned to build something—she'd had it all mapped out in her head. She shouldn't have had to do any of it. He had, in those first hours of rage, half resolved to file for divorce and leave her everything that remained.
She had never truly understood what pride cost him.
And so, in that flat, they had their only real fight. Anger and hurt, each refusing to give an inch:
"Why didn't you tell me first?"
"I didn't think I needed to."
"You sold things I bought for you without a word?"
"Would you have said yes?"
"Do you think I'm useless?"
"That's got nothing to do with it."
"I would rather have let the company fail than have you do this."
"You have no idea what I actually want."
He had no answer to that.
He had never once asked.
The remote control shattered against the wall. It did nothing to cover what was collapsing inside him.
In every argument before this one, no matter how heated, it had never lasted more than a day. She would soften first—tease out a truce, coax an apology, quietly build him a way down from wherever his pride had taken him.
This time, she was genuinely done. She walked out with tears in her eyes, the door slamming behind her. The next day came the news: she'd been posted abroad.
He hadn't tried to stop her. He couldn't find a single reason that would have held.
Her world was too bright, too wide. He had no right to keep her inside the small, still box of a life he had drawn around himself.
It was the year after the miscarriage when a six-year-old boy stumbled into their lives.
On a busy street, the boy snatched the phone from Si Chen's hand and ran. Yu Hao caught him and marched him to the police station like a stray cat. The child sat back, crossed one leg over the other with the ease of someone who'd done this before, and waited to be returned to the orphanage.
Back home, Si Chen didn't say a word about the outcome that barely counted as a punishment. She went still for a long time, then slowly leaned against him and murmured:
"Hao. Do you know—his face is shaped like yours. Especially the brows."
"His eyes and his temper are exactly what I was like as a child."
"Our child… maybe our child would have looked just like that."
"Let's adopt him. Would you?"
He couldn't say no.
He had never been attached to bloodlines. The doctors had said everything was fine after the miscarriage—but what if the next pregnancy ended the same way? And the thought of her alone in that empty flat, with too much quiet and too much time to think—a child would be better than that.
Thank God for Si Yuan, who had kept her company through all those years.
The old fractures had finally given way, and the cold war that followed might have been the end of them entirely—if not for the boy who had been threading himself between them the whole time.
She was still here.
Somewhere behind a closed door, still angry at him. But here.
Today she had said she was tired. That she didn't want to go anymore.
Didn't want to go.
Perhaps that meant she was willing to stay.
In this home.
With him.