My Husband’s First Love

Xu Zhiyi designs jewellery, and her marriage to Pei Heng, who runs the Pei company, was a five-year contract with terms on both sides. She had lived this once before. In that first life she loved him for ten years and pushed him into marrying her, and he went on loving someone else the whole time. She woke up again at the start and decided to keep her distance and not repeat any of it. Inside the arrangement, small things accumulated. She noticed he could not sleep and began making him tea for it every night without saying so. He was quietly collecting every piece she designed and never mentioned it. Then she found the scrapbook in his study, clippings about her going back years, and understood the marriage had never been only a transaction. They divorced anyway, and two years passed. She came home an established international designer to mount an exhibition, ran a high fever, and he looked after her through it. At the show she unveiled the pieces she had never released, all of them made from him, and he brought out what he had kept from the day they first met.