Back Then, I Adored You

“I know you’re sad now, but you can’t endanger yourself like this.”

Lu Bancheng talked to Gu Yusheng for a long time, but Gu Yusheng had kept quiet. He wasn’t even listening to Lu Bancheng. With an expressionless face, he was deep in his own thoughts.

Finally, Lu Bancheng stopped talking. He eventually broke the silence with a sigh and said, “Last night your housekeeper called me, so I went out to look for you. I couldn’t find you anywhere, so I called Haozi. I thought he might know where you were. What I didn’t expect was to learn about your two wives. And then that Xiaokou has had a body double? My mind was blown. I didn’t find you until early this morning, drenched and passed out and your temperature was off the charts. After I got you home, I asked the housekeeper what had happened. All she seems to know was that you had kicked Xiaokou out of the house yesterday and yelled at her for… Is she Xiaokou’s body double?”

Lu Bancheng paused and then finally asked, “Did she leave?”

Gu Yusheng, who had been staring at the plants, blinked several times hearing those three words and looked down.

He didn’t answer Lu Bancheng. Instead, he leaned back on the sofa and asked in a tired voice, “Can you close the curtain?”

Lu Bancheng stared at Gu Yusheng for a moment before saying, “Okay.”

He stood up, walked to the curtains, and closed them completely.

As he headed back to the sofa, Gu Yusheng said weakly, “Can you turn off the lights, too?”

Lu Bancheng complied, and when he had finished turning off all the lights in the bedroom it was suddenly pitch black. Lu Bancheng carefully walked back to the sofa and took a seat. He turned to look at Gu Yusheng in the dark.

Gu Yusheng, sensing Lu Bancheng’s stare, adjusted his body. In a low voice he said, “I just woke up. I called everyone, and they told me they couldn’t find her.”

Lu Bancheng did not say anything, but he knew who Gu Yusheng was referring to. “They” were the ones he’d asked for help to find Liang Doukou’s body double.

“Haozi called me the other day and told me she was not the real Liang Doukou. I drove from Shanghai to Beijing to look for her. When I got to A city, she called me. She told me she was coming to Shanghai to see me. You have no idea how happy I was. I hadn’t been that happy for many years. I thought this was the beginning of us, a clean start. I had no idea she’d gone to Shanghai to say goodbye to me until I didn’t see her at home yesterday. When I woke up in the hospital and didn’t see her, I was scared. I had my intuition, but I didn’t know it would happen this way.”