Chapter 37 Glacier "...Do you know how worried I am about you?"...
Tang Yi took the shopping bag from the sales assistant, thanked her, and turned to leave.
When Tang Yi walked out of the mall, it wasn't too late. She took out her phone to hail a taxi, and the screen flashed—Zhang Minglang's call came in.
Tang Yi glanced at the exquisitely packaged tote bag in her hand, then looked at the words "President Zhang" on her phone and answered the call in a good mood.
"Mr. Zhang, what are the arrangements?"
However, the other side remained silent for a long time.
The area around the mall was bustling with activity. Tang Yi thought she hadn't heard it, so she took the phone off her ear to check that she hadn't answered the wrong call, and then put it back.
She frowned: "President Zhang? Can you hear me?"
A faint rustling sound of clothing came from across the street. After a long pause, someone finally spoke: "Book tickets for tonight, back to City A."
His voice was hoarse, as if it had been sanded, sounding particularly deep and tired.
Tang Yi keenly sensed something was wrong.
But she didn't say anything, only glanced at her watch, and said hesitantly, "It's around five o'clock now, it might take..."
"Never mind that, book the tickets."
Zhang Minglang's voice rang out again, but before Tang Yi could say anything more, the microphone went dead.
Tang Yi had no idea what he had gone through that afternoon. Feeling vaguely uneasy, she quickly hailed a taxi to the hotel while urgently booking tickets on the app.
All the WeChat messages Tang Yi sent to Zhang Minglang went unanswered. Tang Yi grew increasingly anxious and went straight into the hotel lobby as soon as she got out of the car, her high heels clicking crisply on the marble floor.
"Tang Yi".
Suddenly, she heard a familiar voice calling her name. She stopped her hurried steps and turned around.
A few meters away, on a sofa in the waiting area, Zhang Minglang was sitting there watching her, with a black suitcase standing beside his legs.
In just a moment, Tang Yi could read the confusion, bewilderment, anger, and a hint of...heartache in his eyes.
The unease she felt manifested as a rapid heartbeat, thumping like a drumbeat.
Zhang Minglang glanced at her only once before lowering his eyelashes. Tang Yi also tried hard to hide these inexplicable emotions.
"What’s wrong with you?"
She stepped forward and stood in front of him, her voice softer than ever before, a softness even she herself didn't recognize.
Zhang Minglang shook his head, not glancing at her again. His tone was flat, revealing nothing else: "Go upstairs and pack your things, we're going to the airport."
Tang Yi glanced at him worriedly, but still turned around and walked upstairs to her room.
"Tang Yi is a good girl. She is very strong and calm. When Chairman Zhang and I tried to persuade her not to say those things that year, she nodded and agreed without any emotional fluctuation."
Zhang Minglang looked up at Tang Yi's tall, receding figure, and the words that President Lin had said to him a few hours earlier flashed through his mind.
"As you know, these negative news stories have a significant impact on the company's stock price! As the leaders at the time, Chairman Zhang and I naturally had to consider the overall situation."
After hearing President Lin's high-sounding words, Zhang Minglang was already seething with rage. His eyes were burning, as if they had been scorched by anger.
"The bigger picture? For the sake of the so-called bigger picture, Junmao Group is going to cover up the crimes of its employees and make an innocent victim bear all the responsibility?"
Zhang Minglang's tone was cold and hard, his words filled with agitation: "You say Tang Yi is calm, but do you know that's not calmness, that's heartbreak!"
His every word, along with his bent fingers, slammed heavily onto the conference table, leaving General Manager Lin speechless.
"Do you know how grateful she is to you and to Chairman Zhang for his years of trust and cultivation? She mustered up so much courage to ask you for help after suffering such serious workplace sexual harassment, and what did you do?"
Zhang Minglang became more and more excited as he spoke.
In an instant, the jumbled connections in his mind went live, and they all connected.
Tang Yi's decisive act of throwing a drink at the harassing man in the bar, her forceful shoving of Zhao Linrui's hand at the banquet, and her always nonchalant dismissive chatter among colleagues...
Everything stemmed from that thorn that was deeply embedded in her heart and that she could never remove.
The perfect secretary standing before him now, how many injustices and how much helplessness did she endure in the darkness, all by herself?
He couldn't imagine it, much less dared to imagine it.
He wondered if, two years ago, when she had struggled to seek fairness and the truth, only to be ultimately blackmailed by her superior with so-called gratitude and morality, and even threatened with her future, she had tossed and turned in tears at night.
Because her heart had been dead for two years, but on that day, it was suddenly and accidentally rekindled by him.
After all, only those who have been abandoned in darkness for a long time, so long that they have become completely accustomed to it, will grasp at a ray of sunlight as if it were a lifeline, with all their might.
"Mr. Zhang, I'm all packed. Let's go."
Tang Yi's sudden voice interrupted Zhang Minglang's recollection.
He looked up at her; her expression remained calm, just as it was when she stood in front of her desk reporting on work progress—nothing was different.
But in his eyes now, everything is different.
Because he had briefly touched seven-eighths of her glacier, which was hidden beneath the water's surface.
On the way to the airport, the two remained silent for a long time.
In fact, Tang Yi really wanted to say something, wanted to ask something, but every time she tried to turn her head away, she was held back by some invisible force, making it impossible for her to make up her mind to speak.
They got off the bus and went through the ticket check in silence until they boarded the plane. Zhang Minglang turned his head to one side, as if he didn't want to say another word.
Tang Yi wisely refrained from asking any further questions, and simply pushed the handbag beside her into the shadows.
It was already night when we arrived in City A, but the airport was still bustling with activity. Pedestrians hurried along, dragging their suitcases, and hundreds of taxis were parked outside the airport. The drivers chatted loudly in twos and threes, occasionally glancing at the door for any customers that might come their way.
Tang Yi pushed her suitcase out of the airport gate and called the company car to confirm her location.
Zhang Minglang looked at her profile in the light and finally reacted, leaving Tang Yi's hand empty. She turned her head and saw that the phone in her hand had been snatched away by the man behind her.
"I am Zhang Minglang."
"No need to send a car."
"Hard."
After saying just a few words, he shoved the phone back into her hand.
Tang Yi looked at the disconnected call on her phone screen, her brow furrowing slightly: "What's going on...?"
Zhang Minglang lowered his eyelashes and fiddled with his phone: "I'll call you a taxi."
Tang Yi quickly reached out to stop him.
Zhang Minglang felt a chill on the back of his hand. He looked down and saw Tang Yi's fingers gently resting on his skin.
"What do you mean, 'call me a taxi'? It's so late, aren't you going home?"
Tang Yi's tone was somewhat hurried, clearly unaware of the detail of their skin touching. She glanced at his haggard face, her voice full of worry.
However, Zhang Minglang simply shook his head, seemingly without any intention of explaining.
Tang Yi had never seen him look so dejected. Besides feeling a strange pang of sympathy, she also felt a surge of inexplicable annoyance.
If you have something to say, just say it. Why keep quiet and not speak up?
For the first time in her life, she got angry with her boss.
Tang Yi pursed her lips, nodded twice, then tapped the screen a few times and turned the phone over to show him.
"Mr. Zhang, my car is ready."
Before Zhang Minglang could even make out what was happening, she quickly put her phone away, raised her chin slightly, and stared into his eyes, saying each word clearly, "I don't know what happened to you this afternoon that made you so upset and unwilling to explain. Although I'm just your secretary and have no power or position to comfort you, you should at least let me know what happened, right?"
Tang Yi spoke very quickly. She scrolled through their WeChat chat history from that afternoon and showed it to him one message at a time.
"You make a call and then turn off your phone. You don't answer calls or reply to WeChat messages. You know me..."
Tang Yi abruptly stopped speaking.
After a two-second silence, her voice suddenly dropped, becoming as soft as a breath: "...Do you know how worried I am about you?"
Her words, as light as a feather, brushed against Zhang Minglang's heart. He abruptly looked away from his phone screen, his gaze meeting hers.
Zhang Minglang's hands, hanging by his sides, clenched silently in the darkness, then relaxed slightly.
He tilted his head and chuckled. When he looked at her again, his eyes were filled with a kind of sorrow.
"I didn't explain because it happened so suddenly, I didn't know how. And what about you?" His voice trembled slightly. "What have you been hiding from me?"
Tang Yi's pupils contracted sharply, feeling as if she had been struck hard in the heart, making it hard to breathe.
What did he find out?
How could he possibly know that?
She looked at his face in the darkness, opened her mouth as if to say something, then slowly closed it again.
Zhang Minglang noticed all her subtle expressions.
He laughed self-deprecatingly: "In the end, you never truly trusted me, did you? Now that I know, you still don't intend to tell me?"
A taxi approached from a distance, flashing its lights at the two of them. The sudden light made her squint, and she inadvertently caught a glimpse of a glistening tear in the corner of Zhang Minglang's eye.
He cried?
Tang Yi felt even more panicked. But before she could respond, the driver impatiently honked his horn.
"I have to go now. Take care of yourself."
She lowered her head, swallowed the words she didn't know how to say, hurriedly said goodbye, and got into the car.
The car sped away, and Zhang Minglang watched as the headlights went from large to small, from clear to blurry, and finally disappeared into a small dot around the corner.
What's going on, Zhang Minglang?
I had clearly decided not to make things difficult for her.
She went through so much, and it wasn't what she wanted.
She concealed so much, which was not what she expected.
She had kept her pain hidden for many years; how could she be willing to tell others so easily?
Besides, right now, he's just her boss.
Zhang Minglang looked at the full moon on the horizon and suddenly felt all his strength drain away, a sense of powerlessness he had never felt before welling up in his heart.
But he put aside his emotions for the time being and hailed a car.
He had one last thing to confirm.
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