Chapter 19

What have I done for this marriage?

During those years when his career was flourishing, he was swamped with work every single day.

I tried to lend a hand, but he would always smile and say I didn’t understand.

Unconvinced, I enrolled in an MBA program.

I started learning about investments, reading financial reports, and gradually became able to hold a conversation or two with his business partners at dinner parties.

People our age all had children by then.

I felt uneasy, afraid he’d be lonely, afraid he’d stray.

I racked my brains to enrich our lives together.

I picked up new skills-anything he liked, I went and learned:

Baking, rock climbing, fencing, tennis, golf…

No matter how exhausting work was, I kept up with fitness, maintaining a good figure.

No matter what he talked about, I could always follow along.

I did everything I could to make myself his ideal wife.

I was terrified that my inability to bear children would one day become his reason to despise me.

Even though I was the real victim.

But in the end, every relationship enters a phase of exhaustion.

Everything I did was in vain.

He started to go on business trips more and more frequently.

New women appeared around him-faces I’d never seen before.

Tailored business attire hugging slender waists, knocking on my door:

“President Zhou drank too much, I’m here to pick up a change of clothes.”

I became less and less like myself.

Sensitive.

Irritable.

Hysterical.

We erupted into massive arguments.

In the tenth year of our marriage, I finally brought up divorce again.

That night, we tore each other apart with the cruelest words, shredding every last shred of dignity.

Yet he still refused to agree.

He slumped against the floor-to-ceiling window, lighting his first cigarette in ten years in front of me.

Ash fell softly as he gazed wearily out the window, speaking in a low voice:

“Shu Yan, you are my responsibility. I can’t divorce you.”

It was no longer “I love you.”

I had become nothing more than a helpless responsibility to him.

To hell with responsibility.