The Heiress's Game

Jin Wei saw Pei Yan for the last time that evening on the seaside promenade.

Jin Wei looked at him, at the man she had loved for ten years.

The sea breeze ruffled the hair on his forehead, and she noticed the bloodshot eyes and the unshaven stubble on his chin.

She suddenly realized that she had known the answer all along.

She knew it from the first time she saw him when she was eighteen, from the first time he said "wait for me," from the first time he left her birthday dinner midway because of a phone call from home.

"Pei Yan," she said.

Let's break up.

Pei Yan's lips moved as if he wanted to say something, but in the end he just closed his eyes and nodded.

The tear finally slid down his cheek and was blown away by the sea breeze.

Like all the tears she shed for him over the past ten years, they eventually vanished in the wind.

Jin Wei returned to Yunzhou that very evening.

As the taxi crossed the sea bridge, she glanced back at the skyline of Dahai City through the car window—the towering skyscrapers gleamed in the night, like a castle built of gold and power, breathtakingly beautiful.

After she returned to Yunzhou, life went back to normal.

The father still went to school every day, and after returning home he would correct homework, occasionally complaining at the dinner table, "Students these days are getting harder and harder to manage."

Her mother still went to work at the bank every day and went to the market to buy groceries on weekends. Jinwei cooked for her mother and accompanied her father on walks, walking along the old street on Binjiang Road again and again, pretending that nothing had happened.

But when she couldn't sleep at night, she would sit alone on the windowsill, staring blankly at the hazy night sky of Yunzhou.

The sky in Yunzhou wasn't as bright as in Dahai City; the stars were sparse, like someone had casually scattered a handful of broken diamonds and was too lazy to pick them up.

She recalled her first trip to Dahai City when she was eighteen. Sitting in Pei Yan's sports car, looking up at the towering office buildings, she felt as if the whole world was at her feet.

Ten years later she realized that there was nothing beneath her feet, only a suspended mass of dust scattered by the sea breeze.

Six months later, late one night, she received Pei Yan's last message.

"Jinwei, I'm sorry. I'm getting engaged to the second young lady of the Li family."

She stared at the screen for a long time.

The rain outside the window was loud, pattering against the awning.

She recalled what Gu Yunjin had told her six months ago—"Even without me, Gu Yunjin, there is still Miss Li."

That woman was absolutely right.

There's another message below: "I know you won't accept it, but I still want to give you some compensation. A house, money, anything is fine. Just ask, and I'll do it. Just to make me feel a little better."

She didn't reply.

She took a screenshot of the message and saved it to a hidden album.

The album is called "Ten Years," and it contains her first photo with Pei Yan—she was eighteen years old then, wearing faded jeans, standing next to his sports car, smiling as if she owned the whole world.

The last photo is a screenshot of that message, spanning exactly ten years from beginning to end.

The wedding of the Pei and Li families was held at the most luxurious hotel in Dahai City. The grand scale of the event led the media to call it "the most anticipated marriage between wealthy families of the year".

Jin Wei didn't specifically search for it, but the news articles seemed to have grown legs and automatically appeared in front of her.

The bride's surname is Li, and she graduated from Cambridge.

In the photo, she is wearing a custom-made white wedding dress, standing next to Pei Yan. The two of them smile at the camera, and the diamond bracelets on their wrists reflect dazzling light under the lights.

Netizens lined up in the comments section to offer their blessings, with the most frequent comment being, "They look like a married couple."

Jin Wei stared at the photo for a long time.

She tried to find a trace of reluctance or a forced smile on Pei Yan's face, but she found none.

His smile was poised and calm, like any groom, a qualified heir to a wealthy family who had just completed a major life event.

She didn't even know if he had truly accepted the marriage or was just completing a task.

Just as she didn't know whether every time he said "wait for me" over the past ten years was a sincere promise or an excuse to procrastinate.

That night, Jin Wei couldn't sleep again. She lay in bed staring at the ceiling, the same sentence replaying in her mind over and over again.

"After we get married, we'll buy a house by the sea, watch the sunrise every morning, and go for a walk every evening."

Those were the words he said to her when he was twenty-one. At the time, she thought it was a promise, but now she knows it was just a dream that a boy in his early twenties had on a beach with the sea breeze blowing.

Even he himself didn't know that this dream would never come true.

She made an appointment with a psychologist the next day.

She found that when she stood on the balcony and looked down, she would unconsciously think that if she jumped from here, would the pain stop?

The thought terrified her; she thought, she can't go on like this.

The psychologist was a woman in her forties who wore gold-rimmed glasses and spoke in a gentle voice.

"Ms. Jin, when was the last time you felt happy?"

Jin Wei thought for a long time, then shook her head.

Do you still love him?

She thought about it for a long time.

"I don't know if I still love him."

"But I know I never want to go to Dahai City again in my life."

For many years afterward, Jin Wei lived in Yunzhou.

She changed jobs and went to work in administration at a training institution run by one of her father's students. The salary was low, but the work was easy.

She has an orange cat, which she picked up from downstairs and named "Persimmon".

She never went to the seaside town again.

Everything that city left her with—the sea breeze of summer when she was eighteen, the kiss in the sports car when she was twenty-one, the last embrace in the sunset at the beach when she was twenty-eight—was stored away in a hidden album on her phone called "Ten Years," and she never opened it again.

The book "The Rich Family's Stepmother" is finished, so I can have time to update this one, but Hongguo, Canyon, and Douyin keep tempting me.