Before My Withering [枯萎之前]

Chapter 31

[What remains unchanged is my foolishness and courage to love] 

I felt uneasy snooping into other people's family affairs, and I had so many questions in my head that I didn't know where to start.

Until we sat in the Japanese restaurant box and closed the door, Zhou Chen said solemnly, "Sorry for letting you see this kind of thing again."

"No, I'm sorry too..."

I don't know what Qi Shu and Zhou Chen did to make an old man so angry, but listening to what they argued about, I had something to do with what they were saying.

"Do you... have anything you want to ask?" he asked.

I nodded, then shook my head. I had so many questions I wanted to ask, but when they're already at the tip of my tongue, I felt that none of them seemed particularly important.

In the end, I asked, "Will you get in trouble for what happened today?"

Zhou neither said yes or no, but said, "I can handle it."

That would be yes. I felt glum.

I'm always giving him trouble.

But I didn't manage to hide my expression to him. "Don't blame yourself," he said. "It would still happen sooner or later even without you."

Really.... I half-believed him, thinking he was just comforting me.

"It's true." He took my hand. "Let me tell you a story."

He thought for a moment and said, "More than thirty years ago, there were two young people. They each had lovers and happy lives. They shouldn't have anything to do with each other."

"But because one parent engineered the two to be in the same room during their susceptibility and estrus, and the almost 100% pheromone match and innate attraction between the AO allowed the man to permanently mark the woman in a highly irrational situation."

Zhou Chen's voice was neither hurried nor slow, but I vaguely felt that he was restraining something.

"Both sides were from prestigious families, and with such a thing happening, they could only take advantage of this and marry. So these two young people formed a family and cut off all contact with their old lovers.

"After they gave birth to their child, they also wanted to divorce, but at that time, the interests of the two families had been tied together, and it was no longer just a matter between them two.

"In the face of reality, they finally chose to resign themselves to their fate, and until now remain a perfectly matched couple in the eyes of outsiders."

Zhou Chen sighed, then said, "These two people are my parents."

"They were so unbelievably in love in front of me that I thought they were the most loving couple in the world until I inadvertently discovered the truth."

His tone was insipid, but as I listened, I felt worried. Unconsciously, I held him back and asked, "When did you find out..."

"One day when I was nine." He squeezed my hand in comfort. "After that, for a long time, I felt that the whole world was deceiving me. I even fell seriously ill because I was so mentally stressed."

Nine... Such a small child suddenly found that his parents' love for a long time was nothing but a lie.

I didn't have the heart to further think about it.

Then I suddenly understood what Zhou Chen and his grandfather meant by those words. If I guessed correctly, the initiator of this marriage tragedy is the old man.