“My dad is sick.”
“What’s wrong with him? Is it serious?” Lu Bancheng asked the question even though he already knew the answer to it.
“His blood issue is critical right now. He needs a bone marrow transplant.”
“Has he found a match?”
“Yes, but the match doesn’t want to help. I don’t want his help, either, if there were any other option.”
Lu Bancheng felt sad and disappointed when he read her answer. He stared at the screen for a while before he continued chatting as “Zero.””What do you mean by that?”
After pausing for a second, Lu Bancheng decided to probe deeper. “Is the match your ex-boyfriend who cheated on you?”
“No, not him. It’s someone else,” she responded. Xu Wennuan had chatted to him a lot over the years in the game so, feeling familiar with him, she explained further, “He was a friend of mine. He agreed to help me on the condition that I would help him back. We got married, but it’s fake.” She kept it briefed because in real life they were still strangers.
Lu Bancheng continued feigning ignorance. “Zero” asked, “Are you sure you’re not in a drama series?”
“BB Is Scared Pls Protect Me” responded with a line of dots.
“Alright, I’ll stop joking. Can you tell me what happened?” he asked.
Xu Wennuan found it too embarrassing to talk about being raped, getting pregnant, and having an abortion, so she simply responded, “Something unpleasant happened.” She then switched to a different subject. “If I could go back in time, I would definitely tell myself to stay away from him.”
After reading her message, Lu Bancheng turned to look out the window. He had often wondered if she had ever thought about the two of them being intimate since they’d known each other for so long. Because she wasn’t telling “Zero” what had happened between her and Lu Bancheng, he couldn’t directly ask her. Lu Bancheng picked up his phone and responded to her after giving it some thought.
“Do you like him?” he asked.
“No,” she answered then quickly sent him a follow-up message. “I could like anyone, but not him.”
“Why did you marry him then?”
He was not sure if this question got to her, as Lu Bancheng waited for her to respond for a long time without receiving anything back from her. Just as Lu Bancheng was sure she wasn’t going to respond, a message popped up.
“Do you remember the girl with whom my ex-boyfriend cheated on me? I had an incident with her—a conflict. I think I told you about it—that I was in jail because of her. Well, he bailed me out. Even though I had done nothing to her or the baby, I was still embroiled in the whole thing. I was seriously scared. He had stood by me back then. I had thought he was a good man. Even though we weren’t the closest of friends, I still considered him my friend. I did trust him back then.”
