After a while, Su Zhinian finally turned around to accept the MP3 player.
“CEO Su, about that meeting…” Cheng Qingchong merely got half of her sentence out when she was dazed by the redness in Su Zhinian’s eyes. She swallowed the rest of her sentence and changed what she had planned to say. “Shall we reschedule it to tomorrow?”
Su Zhinian lowered his head to look at the MP3 player in his palm and answered softly, “Yes.”
“Then, CEO Su, if there’s nothing else, I’ll be leaving.”
Su Zhinian did not respond, so Cheng Qingchong grabbed the mess that she had cleaned up and walked out of the meeting room. Su Zhinian stood before the window for another ten minutes before turning to walk out of the meeting room. He did not return to his office but walked right into the elevator, got into his car, and drove home.
He changed his shoes at the front door and slowly padded upstairs. He was very tired, but he did not go to his bedroom but his study.
He sat in his chair and pulled out the MP3 player from his pocket. He looked at it for a while before pressing the play button on the device. The familiar music began, and he recognized it as his favorite song, ‘We’ve all been forgotten’.
After the four-minute-long song finished playing, the next song began, and it was still the familiar melody of ‘We’ve all been forgotten’. Su Zhinian frowned and picked up the player. He clicked open the playlist and realized there was only one song, ‘We’ve all been forgotten’.
Su Zhinian’s fingers that held the MP3 started to tremble. So many times, he had seen her on the streets from a far and noticed the earbuds in her ears. He had assumed she was listening to the radio, but it turned out that she had been listening to one song all along.
Su Zhinian felt someone reach into his heart to squeeze it. It caused the air in his body to leave instantly. He leaned against the chair before his frozen body started to thaw.
He slowly reached out to key in the password for the shelf beside him. He rummaged through it for a long time before pulling a very old document bag out of it.
Su Zhinian stared at the document for a long time, and his eyes started to shake with fear, as if the bag was Pandora’s Box. Finally, with shaking fingers, he opened it and pulled the document within it out. When he saw the first sentence of the first page, the color drained from his face immediately.
…
Song Qingchun did not know where to go. She only knew that she had to get away from Su Zhinian as fast as she could.
She waved down the first taxi that she saw and gave the driver a random address. The car finally stopped after an hour. She slowly raised her head to look around. Then, it came to her, that in her hurry to escape, she had given the address for Deep Bay.
She paid the driver and got out. The sky was still bright, so the place was deserted and eerily quiet.
Song Qingchun followed the lakeside and wandered aimlessly forward. She had no idea how long she had walked, but when she was tired from walking, she found a bench by the roadside and sat down.
By then, the place had started to get crowded. There was a group of seniors playing chess, children kicking a ball, and a few couples singing on the guitar.
Song Qingchun found the bench furthest from the activity and sat down.
She stared at the lake surface, and the words that he had told her reverberated in her ears.
I’m really sorry, this is not your fault. I will stop pretending you’re her in the future…