I wanted to surprise Gregory, so I never told him I was coming.
Using the address he’d given me, I found the apartment he was renting.
The door was unlocked. I pushed it open and stepped inside—only to freeze at the sight forever seared into my memory.
There was my husband, entangled with my best friend, both of them naked on the bed.
In that instant, my entire world crumbled.
I didn’t scream. I didn’t cry out. I just stood there, my blood turning to ice.
Laura noticed me first.
When her eyes met mine, she didn’t even flinch. Instead, she sat up from Gregory’s arms and gave me a triumphant smile.
Then she pulled an ornate tin box from the nightstand and opened it right before me.
It was brimming with letters—letters Gregory had written to her.
The earliest was dated the summer after their college entrance exams.
In it, Gregory called her *my lily, my perfect one, the light of my life*. He wrote that meeting me had been an accident in his life, while she was the one fate had destined for him. He promised to be good to me only because my father had funded his education—a debt of gratitude, nothing more.
Every page, every line, was a fresh stab to the heart, each word dipped in venom.
So the childhood sweethearts I thought we were, the mutual affection I’d believed in—all of it had been a one-woman show from the very beginning.
I was the one who was laughably, painfully superfluous.
“What happened then?”
Joe’s voice pulled me back from the memory.
“Then,” I said, my voice eerily calm, “they came for my father.”
Just three days after I discovered the affair, an anonymous tip was made to the city’s disciplinary committee. My father was accused of embezzling a hundred thousand yuan by abusing his position.
A hundred thousand—an astronomical sum in those days, enough to ruin a man and his family’s reputation forever.
My father was suspended pending investigation.
He had lived his whole life with integrity. How could he bear such slander?
Before the investigation team could get to the truth, he leaped from the roof of the factory offices, using his own life to prove his innocence.
Later, the truth finally came out.
That hundred thousand yuan *had* been moved by my father from the factory funds, but it wasn’t embezzlement.
It was the summer of Gregory’s sophomore year. His grandmother had suddenly fallen gravely ill and urgently needed surgery.
Our family’s savings had just been drained by my uncle’s medical treatment. With nowhere else to turn, my father temporarily used the public funds, intending to repay everything as soon as the year-end bonus was issued.
But he never made it to that day.
