Chapter 033: Do You Remember Ma Huifang?

Chapter 033: Do You Remember Ma Huifang?

Right up until Wu Chen and Lu Guangnian walked out through the restaurant’s front doors, the other guests kept watching them. They no longer stared as openly as before, but their eyes never once left the two men.

Outside, luxury cars crowded the curb.

Wu Chen and Lu Guangnian didn’t stop until they reached the edge of the flower bed.

“You believe me now, Boss Lu?” Wu Chen asked, one hand tucked in his pocket. He glanced sideways at Lu Guangnian, then turned to watch the traffic streaming past.

Night had fallen. The avenue was awash in cars and shifting light, dazzling as a dream.

“At least you got one thing right—she lied to me. Something’s really going on between her and Liu Ligang. I’ll look into it.” Lu Guangnian claimed he didn’t believe all of it, but in truth he’d already come around to believing at least eighty percent.

It was only that no man wanted to admit he’d been cuckolded.

And in his case, the word cuckold barely began to cover it.

This was murder for money.

“How do you know all this? Who told you?” Lu Guangnian asked, slanting another look at him.

“Boss Lu, you need to understand something. If you didn’t have a close friendship with Ruobing, and if you and Atai didn’t call each other brothers, I wouldn’t have told you any of this.” Wu Chen smiled faintly. “Running into you tonight was pure chance. I’m telling you this out of respect for Ruobing and her brother. There’s no need to dig into how I know.”

He looked back toward the glittering street and said, mild as ever, “Can’t just let bad people win, can we?”

Lu Guangnian fell silent.

He couldn’t get a read on this man.

Something about Wu Chen felt entirely out of the ordinary. It had been a long time since anyone had spoken to Lu Guangnian in that tone, and Wu Chen wasn’t helping him because of who Lu Guangnian was—he was doing it for someone else’s sake.

Li Ruobing’s boyfriend…

Lu Guangnian already believed it. Wu Chen really was her man.

He’d met all three of her previous fake boyfriends and never once taken them seriously—nothing but timid lapdogs playing shield.

But Wu Chen’s manner had let him sense something like equality between the two of them. Leaving Li Ruobing alone at the table to pull Lu Guangnian aside for a private word was proof enough of that.

And Li Ruobing’s earlier defense of him—that line, “my boyfriend, the pretty boy your esteemed wife mentioned”—told Lu Guangnian exactly where Wu Chen stood in her heart.

He turned it over in his mind: maybe Wu Chen came from some great family, or maybe he had some unusual position. Or some unusual talent.

None of that mattered, though.

Lu Guangnian didn’t much care who Wu Chen was. He cared about his own affairs.

“Thanks, brother.” Lu Guangnian clapped a hand on Wu Chen’s shoulder.

Stripped of status, of every social calculation—it was simply thanks.

Lu Guangnian was more than thirty years his senior, yet he still called him brother. That was just his habit, tied to a mind that had never quite grown old.

A normal fifty-six-year-old man might already have grandchildren. Lu Guangnian had spent years unable to have children at all, and that kind of thing left its mark on a man’s spirit.

It was a bit like a woman who reaches forty unmarried and still dresses young and fashionable, while another who married at twenty already has grown children by forty. Too many years of motherhood change a person’s outlook, values, everything.

“Have you told anyone else about this?” Lu Guangnian asked.

“Not yet,” Wu Chen said. “Though I imagine Ruobing will ask me in a minute what we talked about.”

Lu Guangnian raked a hand through his hair and turned to stare down the street, a hard-to-name bitterness and grief surfacing in his eyes.

“Doesn’t matter. No wall keeps out every wind forever. People will find out sooner or later.” He fell silent again.

“What are you going to do about Liu Caixiu and Liu Ligang? And the child?” Wu Chen asked.

Lu Guangnian…