Gone from His World

Su Zhixia lost her hearing as a small child and grew up reading faces and hands. Weeks before the large wedding she and Fu Siyan had spent months arranging, her hearing came back, unexpectedly and almost completely. What she heard, before she had any practice at pretending otherwise, was the truth about the man she had loved for fifteen years. He had another woman and had had her for some time. Fu Siyan wanted the arrangement kept exactly as it stood, the marriage intact on the surface and the other relationship untouched, and he had no intention of giving up either half. Su Zhixia refused to live in that shape. She signed a contract to have herself declared dead, and set the date for the wedding day, so that he would stand at the front of the hall and watch this thing he had built come to its end in front of every guest.