The Deal of Love

Eight years of marriage went into looking after her mother-in-law and keeping her husband's younger brother in line, and Shona Yan got nothing back but the standing of an unpaid maid. Her husband cheated. She gathered evidence of it and took her mother-in-law's behavior onto a livestream, where the audience could see it. The divorce brings her into contact with Sterling Huo, who runs most of H City and cannot stand to be near women, with the single exception of her. He offers her a contract: he pulls her out of the marriage and away from the family, and she stays at his side. Shona uses the room this gives her. The livestreams grow into a following, she starts selling products through them and does well, and she cuts off the parents who keep coming to her for money. The wife who put up with everything becomes a woman who answers to nobody. Her ex-husband, watching all this, keeps looking for ways to get her back, and his methods are no match for the ones Sterling has. Sterling's care is steady enough that the cold reserve she built up starts to give way, and the arrangement stops being an arrangement.