Silent Waiting

Some deals change everything.
Some silences say it all.
Cheng Yi never planned to stay in America forever. She came for a degree, stayed to outrun a broken heart, and ended up with an expiring visa and nowhere left to go. When Ye - sharp, composed, and dangerously perceptive - offers her a solution, it sounds simple enough: marry him, get the papers, carry on with her life. No love required. No feelings involved.
She should have known that nothing involving Ye is ever that simple.
Because the man who proposed like a contract negotiation is also the man who shows up at her graduation with flowers she never asked for. The man who holds her through nightmares without being asked. The man who crosses thirteen thousand kilometres just to stand beside her - and then lets her go when she needs to face her past alone, because he trusts her more than she trusts herself.
For four years, Cheng Yi tells herself their marriage is just paperwork.
Then her past comes back.
Fang - her first love, her deepest wound - is waiting in the city she ran from. He never stopped loving her. He never stopped looking. And standing in front of him again, Cheng Yi realises that time doesn't always heal. Sometimes it just buries things deeper, until something tears the ground open.
Now she is caught between two men and two versions of herself: the girl who loved recklessly and paid for it with everything she had, and the woman who learned to survive - quietly, carefully, and with her heart locked behind glass.
Ye is waiting.
Fang is fighting.
And Cheng Yi must decide not just who she loves, but who she is willing to become.
A contract brought them together.
Only the truth can make them stay.