The traffic outside the car window moved relentlessly, and the smell of food occasionally drifted through the air. Mother Ji sat in the passenger seat, her brows tightly knit.
“I didn’t drink at the time,” Father Ji muttered under his breath. “One sip hardly counts as drinking.”
Mother Ji let out a cold snort. “So one sip doesn’t count as drinking? Then if I stab you once, does that mean it doesn’t count as stabbing?”
Father Ji was rendered speechless. He gripped the steering wheel and lowered his voice. “Don’t argue in front of the kid.”
What if their daughter thought her parents’ relationship was on the rocks?
At that moment, Ji Zhaoxi was already asleep. She was sprawled at all sorts of odd angles, her head lolling back and forth with the motion of the car. She looked utterly exhausted.
Mother Ji turned around to glance at her and lowered her voice. “She definitely won’t eat later.”
Traffic was especially bad, and Father Ji couldn’t help laughing as he stared at the long line of cars ahead. “By the time we get home, she might have slept enough to be full.”
Mother Ji impatiently smacked him. “Stop laughing. You look awful. Turn up the heat.”
The corner of Father Ji’s mouth twitched. Now he couldn’t even laugh. Still, he obediently raised the temperature a little.
It was already completely dark. The car crawled slowly forward, while students in school uniforms could be seen everywhere along the roadside.
Sure enough, before they even reached home, Ji Zhaoxi had already woken up.
She gazed groggily at the lights outside the window, listening to her parents talking in the front seats.
Suddenly, she remembered the look in Lu Huainan’s eyes when she left.
She didn’t know how to describe it, but whenever she went to school, her dog looked at her with that same damp, pleading expression…
Of course, comparing Lu Huainan to a dog was somewhat impolite.
“You two wait here for a moment.” Father Ji found a place to park and got out of the car.
Mother Ji was still angry. She complained to Ji Zhaoxi, “Your father knows he’s not in good health, yet he still went drinking with those people. I really can’t go on living like this!”
Ji Zhaoxi had heard those words ever since she was little. Once, she had actually taken them seriously.
Back then, she had earnestly said to her mother, “Mom, then you should divorce Dad. I’ll go with you.”
The result had been a beating from both of them.
After that, whenever her mother complained to her, she no longer dared to say a word.
Before long, Father Ji returned, cheerfully carrying two bouquets of flowers and two little cakes.
“I ordered them in advance. You said before that you liked them.”
Father Ji stuffed the cake and flowers into Mother Ji’s arms. She let out a huff, but she no longer looked as angry.
“Here, here, here—this one’s for my girl.”
Father Ji kept winking at Ji Zhaoxi. She accepted the flowers and coughed helplessly.
“Mom, just forgive Dad. He really knows he was wrong.”
Father Ji nodded vigorously. Mother Ji said nothing, but seeing her expression, Father Ji immediately knew that she had calmed down. He kissed her on the cheek.
“Tsk!” Mother Ji impatiently wiped her cheek.
“Come on, come on, let’s go home and make our girl some beef noodles!”
Father Ji called out cheerfully, then continued driving while humming a tune.
The Lu family’s villa was unusually quiet. The servants went about their cleaning in silence, while several people sitting on the sofa stared awkwardly at one another.
“Big Brother’s back?” the boy asked, scratching the back of his head.
Why did the atmosphere at home feel like it had frozen solid? It was always like this whenever the household ice machine was around.
Mrs. Lu took a sip of tea and nodded gravely. “He looks extremely upset.”
The boy crossed one leg over the other, loosened his school uniform, and continued playing his game. “When is he ever not upset?”
“That kind of upset,” Mr. Lu said, his brows tightly furrowed as he held the newspaper.
The boy rolled his eyes. “What kind of upset? Did he get dumped again?”
Calling it getting dumped wasn’t quite accurate. Unrequited love would have been more precise.
When his brother had been in high school, he himself had still been in junior high. He had witnessed firsthand how his brother spent every day at home, constantly anxious and distracted over the girl he liked.
On the day of the college entrance exams, the whole family had planned to take Lu Huainan out to relax. Instead, tears suddenly began streaming down his face, and everyone in the family stared at him in horror.
After a long session of comforting him, along with some threats and inducements, Lu Huainan finally revealed the reason.
“I’ve been dumped.”
He and that girl might never cross paths again. They didn’t even have a single photograph together—a photograph they should have had.
Mrs. Lu was deeply shaken when she heard this. Once she recovered, she kept trying to comfort him, but nothing worked. He simply continued to cry with a cold expression on his face.
At the time, Lu Zhen, who was still in junior high, stroked his chin. “Brother, if you can’t bear to let her go, then win her back. At the very least, you could call her or something.”
“I don’t have her number…”
“Then what about WeChat?”
“I don’t have her on WeChat…”
Lu Zhen felt that the situation was getting serious. “Did she block you everywhere?”
Lu Huainan looked bitter. “I never had her in the first place…”
Lu Zhen began to feel that something was seriously off. “Brother, were you two ever actually dating?”
Lu Huainan silently shook his head.
The corner of Lu Zhen’s mouth twitched. “Then you can’t call this getting dumped. Isn’t this just a crush? She never accepted you. She might not even know who you are.”
His brother actually had the nerve to say he’d been dumped. His ego was unbelievable.
Perhaps because his words had been especially brutal, his brother never spoke to him again after that…
But he had only been telling the truth.
Mrs. Lu had clearly thought of the incident as well. Had he failed at another unrequited love affair?
The room was dark, illuminated only by the glow of a phone screen.
Lu Huainan lay on his bed, opening his chat with Ji Zhaoxi for what felt like the hundredth time. In silence, he scrolled through their conversation history.
Their exchanges had always been brief. There had been a few more messages recently, but they had spent so little time together that he reached the end of the conversation almost immediately.
He really wanted to start a conversation with her. But what if she was eating? What if she was busy? If he sent her a message, she would probably find him annoying…
But she had told him that he could contact her.
Lu Huainan gritted his teeth. He spent a long time typing, deleting, and revising before finally sending the message.
Meanwhile, Ji Zhaoxi was lying leisurely in the garden, enjoying the breeze.
She had just closed her eyes when a dog’s nose suddenly burrowed into her arms.
Without even opening her eyes, she tossed the toy in her arms into the distance.
The golden retriever wagged its tail excitedly and chased after it. Before long, it came running back.
Ji Zhaoxi pretended to be asleep. The golden retriever stood beside her, holding the toy in its mouth, and stared at her in silence.
After watching her for quite a while and realizing that she was still pretending to sleep, it began to whine in annoyance, repeatedly nudging its way into her arms.
The corner of Ji Zhaoxi’s mouth twitched. What a nuisance.
She helplessly sat up, pulled the toy from its mouth, and threw it even farther this time.
If she kept throwing it like this, she was really going to develop a mighty throwing arm.
She picked up her phone and saw the message Lu Huainan had sent half an hour earlier.
“Um… what date does school start?”
Ji Zhaoxi stared at the message in shock.
They had only just begun their vacation, and Lu Huainan was already thinking about the start of the new term?
