Chapter 5 — I Won't Wait for You to Return

He lunged forward to snatch the glass from my hand, downing drink after drink in my stead, until he eventually collapsed with a stomach hemorrhage. As he lay there in the hospital bed, his complexion deathly pale, he still managed to offer me a faint, practiced smile. "The people who belong to me," he whispered, "I will protect them myself."

And yet, here we are. Now, he has ordered his office to issue public statements, fueling his fans to subject me to relentless cyber-bullying, all for the sake of protecting his "fiancee outside the industry." I scrolled through a secretly recorded video posted by a blogger. After the event concluded, the girl named Lam Vi—the fiancee whom Co Trach Vu had publicly acknowledged—was swarmed by reporters in the parking garage. She looked visibly frantic, waving her hands repeatedly in distress. "I truly knew nothing about any of this," she insisted. "Trach Vu always told me he had been single all this time."

She wasn't lying. She really was oblivious to the truth. The one who had been playing us all like puppets, holding us firmly in the palm of his hand, was Co Trach Vu all along.

"Tranh Tranh, be reasonable. Don't force me to resort to media tactics," Co Trach Vu said, his voice laced with growing impatience at my silence. I looked out toward the distant, sapphire-blue waters of the Erhai Lake reflecting the endless sky and asked him softly, "It has been seven years. Are you finally admitting that it is I who am forcing you, rather than you being the one who is hurting me?"

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"It means that I am done playing the game where you strike me and then offer comfort. I am finished with it."

With that, I hung up the phone abruptly. Beside me, Ha Nhan had also just finished tapping the block button on her screen. She turned to look at me, shaking her phone. "I blocked him."

"What a coincidence," I said, tossing my phone onto the table. "I just blocked him, too."

***

"Do you think this pot of daisies looks good in the coffee corner?" Ha Nhan stood before the floor-to-ceiling window on the first floor of the homestay, cradling a freshly trimmed plant and asking for my opinion.

"Slide it a bit to the left; it needs to cover that power outlet."

I held up my phone, scouting for the perfect angle to record a short video. It was our fourth day in Dali, and we had officially started our duties as volunteers. The proprietor had divided our tasks: I was responsible for greeting guests and creating promotional videos, while Ha Nhan managed the coffee corner and arranged fresh flowers for the guest rooms. We were so busy from dawn until dusk that our feet barely touched the ground, yet this frantic pace left us no idle moments to dwell on that pathetic heap of garbage from our past. The Dali sun was scorching, and while we were physically drained, the long-lost sense of freedom made even the simple act of breathing feel light and easy.

I edited the footage I had shot, laid down a gentle, melodic track, and uploaded it to the homestay’s account. When I switched back to my personal Weibo account, the mountain of hate-filled messages had swelled to the tens of thousands. Co Trach Vu’s team was still pouring money into trending topics, desperate to bury me. New press releases were flooding the internet, every headline dripping with calculated sentimentality: *“How much Co Trach Vu has sacrificed to reach where he is today—his callous former acquaintance is trying to leech off his success, it’s chilling”* and *“Fiancee terrified to step outside, Co Trach Vu keeps watch through the sleepless night.”* The comment sections were saturated with vitriol, calling me thick-skinned and accusing me of trying to ruin the lives of a happy young couple.

Things were no better on Ha Nhan’s side. Chu Dien did not confront her directly, but instead had mutual acquaintances send her long, exhausting voice messages. "Nhan Nhan, Chu is about to join a major national-level project; he had to pull countless all-nighters to earn this opportunity. If you two were compatible, stay together; if not, split up quietly. Why cause such a scene now? What possible benefit do you gain by destroying his future?"

Ha Nhan listened to the recording and slammed her rag down onto the bar counter. "I’m destroying his future?" she snapped. "When I was helping him research documents, processing his data, and pulling all-nighters to format his thesis, why didn't anyone say I was ruining his future then?"

The marketing accounts, sensing our silence, began to twist the narrative to suit their agenda: "If you really have proof, why not release it? They’re probably just looking to extort money, and since the negotiations fell through, they’ve resorted to this."