Since the button was hanging from her neck, it was difficult to make a good comparison. Song Qingchun pulled the red string apart and gripped the button to place it alongside the buttons in the plastic bag.
Same color, same model, same size, same shape, even the lines on the buttons were the same.
Song Qingchun felt like someone had reached into her heart to grip it tightly until she could not breathe. Her facial expression froze as she stared dumbly at those buttons. Her pupils moved slightly before she teetered back two steps to fall against the wall behind her.
So… what Cheng Qingchong told me that night was true. When Brother Yinan and I were in mortal danger, the person who arrived to save us was him.
Him fainting and the gaping wound I saw on his stomach really were because of me!
Song Qingchun’s body started to shake uncontrollably. Cheng Qingchong had revealed many things that night. She had said that the knife wound had really been serious, that he had suffered for a total of three months before he woke up. Over the course of those three months, his heart had stopped beating several times. She also said that it was completely due to pure luck that Su Zhinian had survived that ordeal… and before he fainted, he had made Cheng Qingchong promise him that she would never reveal any of that to Song Qingchun because he did not want her to have his death on her shoulders.
Her heart was jolted with electricity and twitched violently. Even her breath stopped for a moment.
Ever since her late-night conversation with Cheng Qingchong, Song Qingchun would find herself thinking about her words when she let her guard down. However, she told herself every time that those were not real, that they couldn’t be real because Su Zhinian didn’t love her. She had to believe what she had seen.
To be frank, she knew this was a sign of her weakness. She was afraid of getting hurt, so she chose to evade it. She started to hypnotize herself. She even blacklisted Cheng Qingchong’s number on her phone; she had believed she could distance herself from this ordeal that way.
However, this was merely a fool’s errand. This was the worst self-defense mechanism. She had thought that as long as she held on until he left the country and she married Qin Yinan, she would not think about him again and would not get hurt anymore.
However, these buttons were like a slap to her face; they woke her up completely. Su Zhinian had not only saved her once but twice. He had almost lost his life twice just to save her.
All the while, she had thought she was lucky because she managed to survive all these tragedies… but now she realized it was all because of Su Zhinian. It was because he had used his own life to trade for her life again and again!
He said that she was merely a replacement, but did he need to go to such lengths for a replacement?
Especially yesterday, when he jumped off the edge of the building without a thought for the preservation of his own life, without asking for rewards, without regret without complaint…
No matter how hard she wished to lie to herself, she understood the meaning inherent in the action of dying for another. Song Qingchun gripped the buttons in her hand, and her weakened body slowly slid down the wall.
The person who was cruelest to her in the world was also the person who treated her the best in the world and the person who had managed to pull so many lies over her head.