She Is Not the Other Woman - Chapter 10

Chapter 10

Three months later, Song Zhiyi signed the last quarterly settlement statement in her newly rented studio.

Outside the window stood the plane trees of the old district. She had moved here exactly two months ago, and her workstation was half the size of the one she used to have.

She had received the divorce decree at the beginning of the month.

The process had been calmer than she had expected. Fu Wenzhou had his lawyer send over three versions of the property division proposal. On the final version, she refused to compromise any further, and he signed it.

The day the official seal came down, Song Zhiyi waited at a red light outside the courthouse.

When the light turned green, she walked away without looking back.

Her clients did not leave.

After she posted the long timeline graphic, two brands took the initiative to call and ask how she was doing. Not out of sympathy, but because her proposals were well written and she responded to their requests quickly.

“Ms. Song, we’ll still be giving you next quarter’s communications plan,” the person on the other end said.

“All right.”

After hanging up, she went to pour herself some water. The cup was newly bought and had nothing to do with the matching couple mugs from before.

A colleague in the industry asked her in private, “Zhiyi, was that post on your Moments a little impulsive?”

She said, “It wasn’t impulsive. I checked it three times.”

The other person asked no more.

Fu Wenzhou’s days were not easy, though they had not fallen completely apart either.

One of his Series B funding negotiations collapsed, then he found another investor. The valuation was discounted, and the board added two external seats.

No one in the industry discussed it openly. But that timeline had spread too far, and when people met him, some of them looked at him differently now.

It was not contempt. It was the understanding of, Oh, so this is what kind of person you are.

That kind of understanding was harder to bear than contempt.

He changed his WeChat profile picture, and his status was changed to blank. The old routine of late-night voice messages, restaurants, and showing weakness-he realized he no longer dared to use it.

It was not that he did not want to. It was that he tried once, and halfway through typing, he suddenly saw the sentence structure. It was exactly the same as what he had sent to Song Zhiyi and Lin Zhi.

He deleted the entire paragraph and turned off the screen.

The room was very quiet. He sat there for a long time.

Lin Zhi’s new studio was in another city. Somewhere in the south, humid, with cheap rent.

No one helped her. She did not ask anyone to help her either.

In the first month, she took three commercial shoots. It was not much, but enough to live on.

She removed every work related to Fu Wenzhou from her portfolio. That set of photos really had been good, but she did not want to have to work around that face every time she showed clients her work.

After she removed them, her portfolio became noticeably thinner. So she started shooting again: wet markets, rooftops, motorcycles after the rain.

As she kept shooting, she gradually filled it back in.

One day, while organizing an old hard drive, she saw a photograph. It was a casual street shot she had taken outside the café back when she met Song Zhiyi. The composition was crooked, but the sunlight was beautiful.

She looked at it for a while. She did not delete it, nor did she save it to a new folder. She simply let it remain on the old hard drive.

Song Zhiyi would occasionally come across Lin Zhi’s account.

Lin Zhi had changed her platform ID, but her photography style had not changed.

Song Zhiyi did not follow her or like any of her posts.

Once, Lin Zhi posted a series of rainy-season photos. The last one was of an open window, with a cup of cold tea on the sill.

The caption was only four words: A new beginning.

After Song Zhiyi finished looking at it, she put down her phone.

She thought of their final conversation that day. They had both said “delete it,” then exited on their own.

This was how it should be.

They were not friends. They never had been. Once that point of intersection was removed, they returned to their own paths. It was enough to occasionally know that the other person was still moving forward.

At the end of May, Song Zhiyi received a package.

There was no signature, and the sender’s address was in some southern city she had never visited. Inside was a very thin photography zine.

On the title page, a small line of text was printed:

“For everyone who has been forced into someone else’s script.”

Song Zhiyi flipped through a few pages. The photographs were very good, as if someone had finally drawn their gaze back from other people.

She did not try to find out who had sent it.

She placed the zine on the studio bookshelf. Not somewhere special, not somewhere prominent. But it was there.

Then she picked up her phone and replied to a client’s message, confirming the time for next week’s proposal.

Outside the window, the plane tree leaves stirred briefly in the wind, then fell quiet again.

The days were long in June. She still had things to do.