Chapter 53: Long Qi breaks up with Boss Xu (who is also known as Er Liu), the squad strikes...
Seeing Xu Zhiyu's current state, Shen Siqing realized that she was no longer listening to anything he said.
He got dressed and said, "I'll explain this to you in a few days when you've calmed down."
She said, "Get lost."
.
They all left, and she was finally all alone in the supermarket.
At this moment, Ah Yu, who had been holding on, suddenly deflated like a punctured balloon. She looked at the sticky notes scattered on the ground, at the messy warehouse, at the gentle Ah Qing and the hardworking Jing Jing, at the three people laughing and talking on the second floor, and at the dark and quiet supermarket.
She slowly squatted down, nestled among those memories of betrayal.
She sat slumped on the floor, leaning against the shelf, her eyes fixed on the wall of colorful sticky notes.
It turns out that wanting a peaceful and stable love is as difficult as climbing to heaven.
It turns out that this kind of thing can really happen to me.
What does it feel like to be betrayed?
It's probably true that one night can feel like ten years, making it hard to trust anyone around you anymore.
She didn't get up to pick up the fallen sticky notes, nor did she tidy up the mess they left in the warehouse. She simply sat there, without crying, until the light dimmed, carefully savoring the baptism of heartbreak amidst wave after wave of nausea, reflecting on herself a thousand times in her dry heaves and disorientation.
How could I be so stupid?
The exquisite blueberry cake tilted and collapsed, becoming muddy and rotten inside the transparent box. It could never have imagined that it, which was supposed to bear the weight of celebration and joy, would end up lying here so forlornly.
...
Daylight broke.
As the faint morning light shone in, Mr. Xu rubbed his numb thighs and generously placed an order for in-home cleaning on his phone.
When the cleaning staff arrived at 9 a.m., she smiled and instructed them to thoroughly disinfect and clean the warehouse inside and out, leaving no odor. She herself then tore down all the sticky notes on the wall outside the warehouse and replaced them with other oil paintings.
After doing all that, she went home to wash up and change her clothes.
While having breakfast at the restaurant, she opened her WeChat chat with Shen Siqing. She didn't intend to look at the messages, but her finger involuntarily swiped upwards.
With that slip, she saw that pathetic and laughable version of herself again.
She sent only two words, and then, without waiting for a reply, casually clicked "Delete Contact".
She ate her hot breakfast and responded to acquaintances as usual, acting so normally that no one could tell she had just experienced a heart-wrenching betrayal.
The day after being betrayed by her boyfriend and a former store employee, she came to the supermarket to work as usual.
Xu Zhiyu hasn't changed much, except that her Yunnan trip was canceled, and she's back to her previous single life, tending the shop during the day and playing cards at night.
She felt that she was doing very well and that it was normal. It was just a betrayal, just a breakup, and it didn't take up too much space in the long river of her life.
That's what she thinks.
But the neighbors around him didn't think so.
The afternoon after lunch wasn't too busy, so Bohe called Aunt Wang and Xiaomeng to her shop. They looked at Boss Xu, who was sitting behind the cash register in the supermarket across the street, lost in thought, and began to share their recent observations.
Aunt Wang: "Ayu said verbally that it was okay to break up with Xiao Shen, but I haven't seen her come out of the shop during the day since they broke up."
Mint: "Yes, who knew that these two kids, who seemed so close before, would suddenly break up for some unknown reason? Ah Yu has visibly lost a lot of weight, which shows how sad she must be after the breakup. She's such a sensible child, she must not want her parents to worry, so she's pretending to be okay."
Aunt Wang: "That's right. We used to chat outside all the time, but lately every time I look inside from outside, she doesn't play on her phone or computer. She just sits there in a daze, her face pale and her eyes lifeless."
Xiaomeng had a suspicion, but she had kept it to herself. Today, with everyone present, she said seriously:
"Do you remember the day before Ayu said she broke up with her boyfriend, the guy surnamed Shen came to Ayu's shop? Ayu even told us that they were going to Yunnan for a trip, but they didn't go."
Aunt Wang: "Yes, yes, I remember, she said she was going to Yunnan."
Xiaomeng: "That day, Ayu came to my shop to buy a cake. She happily said that she wanted to celebrate with the man surnamed Chen. But what happened? The two of them suddenly broke up the next day."
Mint: "You mean..."
Xiaomeng: "Don't you guys find it strange? What could possibly cause two people who were originally very close to break up suddenly? And right after she bought the cake, I heard Tiantian shout 'Get out!' loudly. They used to sometimes argue loudly when they played games in the store in the afternoon, but that time it didn't sound like they were playing games."
Hearing this, Aunt Wang suddenly remembered something and said nervously, "Wow, speaking of this, I once heard a strange scream coming from Ayu's shop. I thought something had happened to her, so I went in to check and found a 'Closed' sign on the door. But when I went in to ask, Jingjing was still in the warehouse! How could the shop be closed if someone was guarding it?"
Mint slowly sensed something amiss, and she covered her mouth in disbelief: "Do you two suspect something?"
Xiaomeng: "That's right. Because I've seen the guy surnamed Chen and that Tian Jingjing looking at each other strangely several times."
Aunt Wang: "Good heavens! Now that you mention it, I remember seeing colorful paper scattered all over the floor of Ah Yu's shop that time, and it was all dirty from being stepped on. She's the cleanest person ever, and she always makes sure the shop is cleaned up whenever it's dirty or messy! So when I saw it that time, I felt something was really wrong!"
Mint: "Oh my god, this is terrible. If what you're guessing is true, then I'm a sinner who has harmed Boss Xu! How sad she must be!"
Xiaomeng: "That's right! But we don't have any evidence right now, we're just guessing. It's not difficult to prove whether those two have betrayed Ayu, is it?"
Aunt Wang and Mint asked in unison, "How can we prove it?"
Xiao Meng said in a deep voice: "The surveillance cameras in Boss Xu's shop."
Xiao Meng's words were like a wake-up call.
The three of them whispered and discussed how to retrieve Mr. Xu's surveillance footage. In the end, they came up with a plan together.
The three dispersed.
Xiaomeng pretended to be in a hurry and ran to Ayu's supermarket to ask her for help.
Coming to her senses, Ayu tilted her head and looked at her: "How can I help you? Tell me."
Xiaomeng: "I have a spare phone, right? I can't find it. This morning, I was either in the store or I stopped by your store to sit for a while. Could you show me the security camera footage from your store? I suspect it might have fallen out of my pocket and landed around here."
Her fabricated story was full of errors, but fortunately, Ah Yu nodded without hesitation and said, "Okay, come in and I'll help you find it."
She went around to the back of the cashier, said the time she wanted to check, silently memorized the steps Ah Yu took to access the surveillance footage, and then memorized the password.
The password isn't very complicated; it's a fairly regular set of numbers, 666888, which is easy to remember.
The surveillance footage was retrieved, and both Ayu and Xiaomeng examined it carefully, but naturally, they couldn't find any results because Xiaomeng's backup phone was never lost.
Ayu: "The video recording looks normal. Did you bring a spare phone with you when you went to Aunt Wang's shop? Could you have left it at her shop?"
Xiaomeng: "I did go to her shop to look for it but couldn't find it. Since it wasn't lost on the road, maybe I remembered it wrong. I'll go back and look for it properly."
Ah Yu: "Okay, just let me know if you need my help again."
Xiao Meng: "Okay, thanks, A Yu."
As soon as Xiaomeng stepped out of the door of Tiantianlai, she exchanged hand gestures with Bohe, who lived across the street. Bohe immediately stood at the door and called out to Ayu in the supermarket, "Ayu—"
Ah Yu heard this and came out.
Mint: "Ayu, could you please pick up my niece from Sunshine Elementary School today? Yuanyuan's parents aren't home, so please have her wait at our restaurant."
Mint has a younger brother who got married early and has a daughter who is already in elementary school.
Mint and her younger brother live close by. When her brother and sister-in-law are busy with work, they ask Mint to take care of the children. However, Mint's shop is sometimes busy when the children get out of school, so she asks Ayu to help pick up Yuanyuan.
Ah Yu was naturally happy to help, because her shop had security cameras and self-service payment machines, so all she needed to do was keep an eye on things and didn't have to do anything herself.
So she asked Aunt Wang next door to watch the shop for her while she set off to Guangming Elementary School to pick up Yuanyuan.
Perhaps even the heavens couldn't stand by and watch this happen, because Xiaomeng and the other two's plan proceeded very smoothly.
After Ayu left, Xiaomeng, Bohe, and Aunt Wang quickly gathered around the computer at the cashier. Xiaomeng and Aunt Wang had already calculated the surveillance time they wanted to access, so everything went smoothly except for a little unfamiliarity with the operation.
Xiaomeng entered the correct password and first chose the time provided by Aunt Wang, which was in late July during the summer vacation. She chose around 3 pm.
In the high-definition nine-grid image, Boss Xu, Tian Jingjing, and Shen Siqing are all playing games on the second floor. Xiaomeng has selected speed up, and the characters' speech in the image is accelerated.
After the three finished playing the game, Boss Xu received a phone call, gave a few instructions to the other two, and then went out.
That's not important, the important thing is what comes next!
As soon as Mr. Xu left, he saw Tian Jingjing watching from the doorway for a while. After returning to the supermarket, she immediately turned off the lights, closed the door, and flipped the business sign on the handle. She glanced back at the surveillance camera in the corner of the supermarket, then walked towards the warehouse until she reached the wall with the sticky notes, where she could no longer be seen on the surveillance camera.
A short while later, Chen Siqing also went to that place.
Both of them went into a blind spot of the surveillance cameras, and it's unclear what they were doing.
Aunt Wang was furious: "Those two sons of bitches are definitely up to something shady! Sneaking around like that!!"
There was no one on the screen, and Xiaomeng felt that this was not enough to confirm whether the two had done that kind of thing, so she leaned closer to the computer screen and searched carefully. Sure enough, she found a button that could turn on the sound of the recording!
Without thinking, she immediately opened it.
Suddenly, unbearable noises blared from the supermarket's loudspeakers!
Aunt Wang, furious, put one hand on her hip and slammed her hand on the table: "Damn those filthy things! You son of a bitch! It's too good for them to die! Damn it, if those two bastards dare to step into Huainan Alley again, I'll chop them into mincemeat!"
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Author's Note: This week has been quite busy, so starting today I can only update once a day; I'll resume two updates next Monday.
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