The Heiress Return: My Billionaire Ex Husband Regret

The water was so cold. That was the last thing Shen Liying felt — not the impact, not the glass shattering, not even fear. Just the cold. It came through the broken window and wrapped around her like something patient, something that had been waiting a very long time for this exact moment. She thought, strangely, of her wedding dress. She had kept it. Five years, she had kept that dress in a box at the back of her closet, behind the shoes she never wore and the scarves she never touched. She had never been able to explain why. Some part of her had kept hoping, maybe. Some part of her had held onto the version of today that the dress was supposed to represent. Foolish. She had always been foolish. The cold was deeper now, and the light above the water was getting very far away, and Shen Liying thought: I knew. I knew what he was. I knew for two years before tonight. And still I stayed. Still I made excuses, still I smiled at his colleagues, still I cooked dinner in the kitchen of a house that had never really been mine and told myself that love meant enduring. The light was almost gone. I should have left, she thought. The first time. The second time. I had a hundred chances to leave and I didn't take any of them. The last thought she had, before the cold took everything, was not of Ruan Chenghao. It was of herself. Twenty-one years old, standing in front of a mirror in a white dress, with her whole life arranged neatly in front of her like a table set for a meal she had not yet eaten. Go back, she thought, to no one, to nothing, to the dark and the cold and the end. Please. If there is anything left that can hear me — go back. Let me go back. I will not make the same mistakes. I will not be that girl again. The water closed over her head. — ✦ — She woke up choking. Not on water. On air — too much of it, too warm, rushing into lungs that had forgotten how to want it. She sat upright with a violence that knocked something off the nightstand beside her. She heard it fall and shatter and did not care. She was breathing. She was breathing so hard her ribs hurt, and her hands were clutching silk sheets, and the room around her was bright with morning light that had no business existing. She sat very still for almost three minutes. Then she looked at her hands. They were young. The small scar on her knuckle that she had gotten at twenty-three — the one from the broken champagne flute at a Ruan Holdings dinner party, when she had tried to prevent a crash and no one had noticed or thanked her — it was not there. The fine lines at her wrist that she had begun to notice at twenty-five were not there. Her hands were the hands of a girl who had not yet done any of the things she was remembering. "That's not possible," she said, to no one. Her voice came out rough and strange, and the sound of it in the familiar room made something c***k open in her chest. She knew this room. She had grown up in this room. She had not slept in this room since the week before her wedding, five years ago, when she had been too excited to sleep and had stayed up until three in the morning imagining a future that had never arrived. Her wedding day. The thought dropped through her like a stone. She was back on the morning of her wedding day. She was twenty-one years old. And she remembered everything. For a moment — just one — she felt something that was not quite grief and not quite relief. It was the feeling of a door opening that had been sealed shut for so long you had forgotten what was behind it. She pressed one hand flat against her sternum and breathed until the shaking stopped. Then she got up. She stood in front of the full-length mirror in her childhood bedroom and looked at herself for a long time. Twenty-one. Unmarked. The shadows under her eyes from five years of bad sleep were gone. The careful blankness she had learned to wear to hide her thoughts was gone too — her face in the mirror was open in a way she had forgotten it could be, and that openness felt dangerous now. She would need to learn to hide again. More effectively, this time, and with intention. She thought about the white dress in the other room, laid out by her Auntie Fong on the chaise longue, pressed and perfect and waiting. She thought about Ruan Chenghao. His face came to her clearly — not as she had loved him once, but as she had seen him last night in the car, before the bridge, before the water. Smooth and handsome and empty of everything that should have been there. His eyes had always been beautiful. She had spent years trying to find something real behind them and had died before she understood that there was nothing to find. She had come back. She was not going to waste it. She sat down at her childhood desk, found a pen and a piece of paper, and began to write. Not a list of grievances. Not a plan for revenge — not yet. First, the names. Every name she needed to remember. Every deal, every betrayal, every moment where the ground had shifted beneath her in ways she had only understood later. She wrote for forty minutes without stopping, until she had filled three pages, and when she was done she read back over them with the detached focus of someone reviewing a business report. Then she folded the pages, tucked them into the hidden pocket of her toiletry bag, and went to wash her face. In two hours, her bridesmaids would arrive. In four hours, the ceremony was scheduled to begin. In five years, she would be dead. She had a great deal to do before any of that. She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror, and for the first time in a very long time — or perhaps for the first time in her life — she smiled at her own reflection. Not the polite, careful smile she had learned to produce on command. Something sharper. "He has no idea," she told the girl in the mirror. The girl in the mirror looked back at her with five years of knowledge in twenty-one-year-old eyes. "Good," she said. "Let's keep it that way."