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 paused, then turned to ask instead, “The child really isn’t mine?” He didn’t know himself why he trusted this stranger so completely—perhaps because Wu Chen’s words had finally untangled a knot he’d carried for years.

All the strange things that never quite added up suddenly made sense the moment Wu Chen said Liu Caixiu and Liu Ligang weren’t siblings at all.

But Lu Guangnian still hoped the boy was his.

He was an old-fashioned man at heart. He wanted a child, someone to carry the family business forward after he was gone.

“He isn’t yours,” Wu Chen said, without a trace of doubt. “Liu Caixiu timed her arrival at your side precisely—right around her fertile window. After a night with you, she went straight to Liu Ligang… Really, you already know your own condition. Barring a miracle, you can’t father a child anymore.”

Lu Guangnian’s face went grey. He looked down the street to his right, then to his left, his gaze unfocused, a faint red ring rising in his eyes.

“I’ll have the paternity test redone tomorrow.”

He sniffed and pulled a cigarette pack from his pocket—an unopened box of Yellow Crane Tower 1916.

As far as Wu Chen knew, Lu Guangnian had once smoked heavily, but he’d quit for two years after Liu Caixiu became pregnant. He’d started again since, but kept himself in check—never more than a few cigarettes a day.

Still, he always carried a pack.

Not for himself. For guests, when the occasion called for it.

He tore open the seal, took one out, and held the pack toward Wu Chen without thinking.

“I don’t smoke.” Wu Chen raised a hand.

Lu Guangnian put the cigarette between his lips, lit it, and drew deep, exhaling slowly before sniffing hard again. His eyes drifted along the street, unmoored. His thoughts were clearly in disarray.

He needed the tobacco just to hold himself together.

Suddenly he pulled out his phone, as though something had just occurred to him, and dialed. “Ermin. Take some men and find Liu Ligang—and anyone close to him at the company, Li Ying, Dong Zhiheng, all of them. Bring them to the villa in the western suburbs. Yes. Hold all of them there. I’m on my way.”

Xu Ermin—senior vice president of Juli Group, a brother who’d stood beside Lu Guangnian for decades.

He hung up, cigarette still burning between his fingers, and drifted into a daze. His mind was churning through too much at once.

“There’s an old saying,” Wu Chen said suddenly, a faint smile crossing his face as he turned to look at him. “If you’re going to help someone, see it through. If you’re sending the Buddha off, send him all the way west.” He tilted his head. “Do you remember Ma Huifang?”

Lu Guangnian snapped out of his fog and looked at him.

Something shifted behind his eyes.

“You’re what—early twenties? And you even know about her?” he asked.

Ma Huifang. Lu Guangnian’s first love, more than thirty years gone.

“I don’t just know her. I know she left you because you cheated on her. You were twenty-three that year, weren’t you?” Wu Chen said.

“The two of you met at seventeen. Six years together. And in the end, you threw it all away for a woman from a dance hall.” The words landed with an edge.

Lu Guangnian said nothing.

So many years had passed that he could barely picture her face anymore. But her name he had never forgotten—had carried it with him his whole life.

It had all happened back in the nineties, when the whole country was riding a wave of change, and any man bold enough to seize the moment could make a fortune overnight.

Lu Guangnian had been exactly that kind of man. He and Ma Huifang had once loved each other deeply, had even talked of marriage. But once he’d fallen in with certain people and started making real money, he’d lost himself.

At the time, he hadn’t thought he was wrong—he’d thought Ma Huifang simply wasn’t good enough for him anymore. It was only after he’d made his name that he looked back and understood how wrong he’d been.

But wrong was wrong. And what was lost stayed lost.

“You investigated me?” Lu Guangnian turned to him, his expression hardening. For someone Wu Chen’s age to know something buried that deep in the past was reason enough for suspicion.

“Does it matter? Ask Ruobing what I do for a living. See if she tells you.”

Wu Chen went on, “What matters is this—I also know that when Ma Huifang left you, she was already pregnant. She didn’t get rid of the child. She had him. A son. Which means you don’t just have a son now. You have a granddaughter too.”

Clack.

The cigarette dropped from Lu Guangnian’s fingers.

He stared at Wu Chen, utterly speechless.