Chapter 1 001 She arrived seven years in the future.
"So..." the woman's voice on the phone drifted and sounded somewhat incredulous, "your memories have regressed to seven years ago?"
Meng Ran stared at the wedding ring on her ring finger and sighed resignedly, "Yes."
"This is too much..." The person on the other end was speechless.
Meng Ran chimed in, picking up where her friend left off: "It's too unreal, like it was made up!"
"……Um."
Meng Ran twitched the corner of her mouth.
"Believe me, when I first woke up in the hospital, I also thought I was hallucinating because my mind wasn't clear."
Meng Ran clearly remembered that she was sitting in a private room of a high-end restaurant, celebrating her upcoming twenty-third birthday with her boyfriend Zhao Yanzhou.
In the blink of an eye, when she opened her eyes again, she was lying in a hospital room.
After lengthy conversations with medical staff and a man claiming to be her housekeeper, and faced with overwhelming evidence, Meng Ran was forced to accept a fact—
She arrived seven years in the future.
Life seems to have been fast-forwarded; she was originally in her early twenties, but in the blink of an eye, she has aged seven years and will soon turn thirty.
What's even more frightening is that she is now married with a daughter who is in kindergarten.
According to the housekeeper, she married her current husband when she was 23 years old, gave birth to a daughter, and then mysteriously disappeared when her daughter was less than six months old.
Five years have passed, and just when everyone thought she was long gone, she was found near the suburban park where she disappeared in the early hours of this morning.
She was found in a blind spot of the surveillance cameras, and no one knows how she got there or how long she had been lying there.
Witnesses, seeing her unconscious, kindly called the police, who confirmed her identity through fingerprint and DNA comparison.
It is said that when she was found, she looked exactly the same as she had five years ago, with her clothes neat, all her belongings intact, and even the wedding ring on her ring finger still had its shine.
Meng Ran was then taken to a private hospital, where her condition was diagnosed as amnesia caused by brain damage.
After a series of physical examinations and procedures, she was brought here again, to her "home" before she disappeared.
The old cell phone that was found with her couldn't be turned on, so the housekeeper gave her a new one.
Meng Ran used the new phone to call her friend Jiang Yuqing. After twenty minutes, she finally convinced Jiang Yuqing that she was Meng Ran.
On the other end of the phone, Jiang Yuqing spoke again.
"Ranran, what are your plans now?"
Meng Ran: "No matter what, I need to find out what happened in these past seven years. You're the only person I can trust right now..."
"No need to say anything more!" Jiang Yuqing interrupted. "Here's what I'll do: when I'm done with my work and back at the hotel, I'll write down everything important I can remember in a memo and send it to you!"
For a moment, Meng Ran felt as if she had returned to her school days, when Jiang Yuqing also liked to arrange their schedules in such an unquestionable tone.
Meng Ran pursed her lips slightly, and her nose suddenly felt a little sore: "Thank you, Yuqing."
"So what!" Jiang Yuqing said, "Whether you fall into a spacetime rift or encounter a deity, the position of my eldest daughter will always be reserved for you!"
Meng Ran was taken aback: "嫡 (di) what?"
Jiang Yuqing smiled and said, "You mean best friend? I forgot, your internet speed is still stuck seven years in the past."
After exchanging a few jokes, Jiang Yuqing suddenly asked, "By the way, Ranran, you said you were home alone? Then your husband... isn't here?"
The word "husband" almost gave Meng Ran goosebumps.
She looked again at the wedding ring at the base of her ring finger, hesitated for a moment, then took the ring off and placed it on the bedside table.
It's as if this gives me some psychological comfort.
Meng Ran: "The housekeeper said he was originally abroad on business and is now on his way back. We don't know when he will be back."
Jiang Yuqing responded with an "Oh".
Meng Ran: "He..."
I couldn't bring myself to say either "my husband" or "my husband's wife," my tongue stammered, and in the end I just used "he" instead.
Jiang Yuqing guessed what Meng Ran wanted to ask: "You want to ask about Chen Sulin, right? Go ahead and ask. But I've never officially met him, and you've rarely mentioned him to me since you got married, so I probably don't know much..."
Meng Ran subconsciously said "It's nothing," but then felt like something was off.
When she first woke up in the hospital, everyone around her called her "Mrs. Chen," and she thought they had mistaken her for someone else.
It took Meng Ran a long time to accept the fact that she had gotten married seven years later.
The housekeeper told her, "Mr. Chen is already on his way back from London to see you."
Clearly, this "General Manager Chen" is her husband.
Meng Ran had no recollection of ever knowing "President Chen," so she concluded that she and her current husband must have met during the period when her memory was blank.
Judging from the respectful attitude of the people around her when they mentioned this "General Manager Chen," she guessed that he must be a very wealthy boss.
This aligns with her criteria for choosing a partner. Long ago, Meng Ran made up her mind: either she wouldn't get married, or if she had to, she would find a rich man.
After hearing this, Zhao Yanzhou joked with her, "Luckily, I'm quite rich, otherwise you would have filtered me out."
Meng Ran wanted to ask more questions about who this "General Manager Chen" was, what kind of business he was in, how the two met, how they started dating, and when they got married.
However, the butler seemed to be acting on someone's instructions, and his words were somewhat reserved. Meng Ran was quickly distracted by the fact that she also had a daughter.
In short, Meng Ran didn't get much useful information, and she couldn't even remember her husband's full name.
When Jiang Yuqing mentioned that name again, Meng Ran suddenly felt a sense of familiarity.
Meng Ran frowned: "Could you say it again? What's his name?"
"You said your husband's name?" Jiang Yuqing asked, somewhat puzzled, but still answered, "Chen Sulin."
Meng Ran murmured and repeated the three words several times before her body suddenly stiffened.
When she was dating Zhao Yanzhou, he often mentioned that he had two childhood friends with whom he had grown up and had a very close relationship, one of whom seemed to be surnamed Chen.
However, when Zhao Yanzhou mentioned this childhood friend, who was rarely called by his full name, Meng Ran couldn't recall him immediately.
After Meng Ran remained silent for a long time, Jiang Yuqing asked worriedly, "Ranran, are you alright?"
Meng Ran suddenly realized: "No, um, Yuqing, have I ever told you why I'm with Chen... Chen Sulin?"
Jiang Yuqing pondered and said, "He mentioned it a little. It seems he was originally Zhao Yanzhou's friend. After you broke up with Zhao Yanzhou, he helped you with some things, and you gradually became closer."
Meng Ran closed her eyes and exhaled deeply.
It wasn't that she remembered it wrong, nor was it a coincidence of having the same name.
It really was the Chen Sulin she knew.
She was Zhao Yanzhou's childhood friend, whom he described as having a very close relationship with someone he had only met once in his memory.
When Meng Ran opened her eyes again, she asked, "Do you know why Zhao Yanzhou and I broke up?"
.
The Rolls-Royce cruised smoothly along the highway, with the president's special assistant, Zhou Cheng, sitting in the passenger seat, occasionally glancing at his boss's expression in the rearview mirror.
First, there was a ten-hour flight from London to the North City, and after landing, we immediately got on the airport expressway.
After a long and tiring journey, Zhou Cheng managed to doze off for a little over four hours in first class, while President Chen reportedly didn't close his eyes at all the time.
Including the non-stop meetings and client meetings before boarding the plane, Chen Sulin had not rested for more than 20 hours.
Zhou Cheng wanted to say a few words of advice, but seeing the gloomy face of his boss in the back seat, he ultimately didn't dare to speak.
Having served as Chen Sulin's assistant for nearly five years, Zhou Cheng had never seen his boss show such a stern expression, even when the company faced a life-or-death crisis.
The car was eerily quiet. On the screen of the tablet in Chen Sulin's hand, surveillance footage from the hospital was playing.
The woman's voice came through the Bluetooth earphones clearly.
"Is this a hospital? How did I get here?"
"Mrs. Chen, please don't get agitated, and don't rush to get up. I'll explain the situation to you slowly."
"What Mrs. Chen? You've mistaken me for someone else. I'm not Mrs. Chen. My name is Meng Ran."
“Chen… cough, Ms. Meng, your current condition is rather special; you may have suffered some memory damage.”
"What? Wait, can you tell me how I got to the hospital? Did Zhao Yanzhou bring me here?"
"Mr. Chen arranged for someone to bring you here."
"Which Mr. Chen? No... Where's Zhao Yanzhou? He's the man in the black suit, about 1.85 meters tall. Didn't he come to the hospital with me? I was just with him."
...
In just five minutes, she mentioned Zhao Yanzhou seven times.
After realizing that Zhao Yanzhou was unlikely to appear, she finally stopped mentioning his name, but she would still correct the medical staff when they called her "Mrs. Chen".
She forgot she was his wife, but remembered another man clearly.
The screen went dark in the last second of the video.
Chen Sulin locked the tablet screen expressionlessly, his voice cold and deep: "Zhou Cheng."
Assistant Zhou was startled and quickly replied, "President Chen, please speak!"
Chen Sulin: "I have personal matters to attend to for the rest of today, and no one is allowed to disturb me. Work will proceed as I previously instructed. If there are any things I'm unsure about, we can discuss them when I arrive at the company tomorrow."
Assistant Zhou agreed to all of them.
For the next while, the car was completely silent.
The black sedan drove off the highway, passed several traffic lights, entered the luxury residential area, and stopped in front of a villa.
.
Meng Ran held her phone tightly, while on the other side, Jiang Yuqing was trying hard to recall what happened seven years ago.
"At the time, I was so busy with my mother's illness that I couldn't even celebrate your birthday with you. It was on the day you came to the hospital to help that I noticed something was wrong with you, and that's when I found out that you and Zhao Yanzhou had broken up a long time ago."
“You must have been really heartbroken back then. It was the first time I’d ever seen you so visibly haggard, like you’d just gone through a ordeal.”
“I originally thought you might get back together with Zhao Yanzhou. He’s such a good catch, and you seemed really reluctant to let him go. But unexpectedly, about a month later, you suddenly told me that you were going to marry someone else.”
“I asked you if you had really thought it through, and you said you had, and that marrying Chen Sulin was your best choice.”
"As for why you and Zhao Yanzhou broke up, I asked you once, but you didn't say. You just told me not to worry and to take good care of my mother. Seeing your expression, I couldn't bear to ask any further. Later, you got married quickly, and I felt that there was no need to ask about the past anymore."
Jiang Yuqing tried her best to sort out what had happened in the past, but too much time had passed and her memory had become blurred. She had to carefully recall many details.
At this point, Jiang Yuqing asked worriedly, "You really can't remember anything about what happened between you and Chen Sulin? What are you going to do then? I mean, he's still your husband. Even if you have amnesia, you still have to live together, unless..."
Jiang Yuqing hesitated and didn't finish her sentence, but Meng Ran understood.
“I know what you mean,” Meng Ran replied. “Actually, I have thought about divorce.”
Living under the same roof as a man who is almost a complete stranger is enough to send chills down your spine.
Meng Ran: "But even if we really have to divorce, it can't be now."
She may look like a rich wife now, but wealthy people usually have prenuptial agreements when they get married. If she gets divorced like this, she might not get a single penny.
Given her current situation of being out of touch with society for so many years, she is unlikely to rush into a divorce before finding a stable source of income.
“Moreover,” Meng Ran pursed her lips, “he and I have a five-year-old daughter.”
After those words were spoken, both people on the other end of the phone fell silent.
Yes, how could I just abandon my own daughter?
Suddenly, there was a burst of noise on the phone. After several seconds, Jiang Yuqing said, "I'm sorry, Ranran, my boss is calling me. I have to go right away."
Meng Ran: "Then you should go quickly. You've stayed with me long enough."
Jiang Yuqing: "Okay, I'll send you the memo I promised you once I finish writing it. We'll contact each other then!"
The person on the other end hung up the phone in a panic.
Meng Ran slowly put down her phone, looking dazed.
She has always been strong-willed, and even in front of her closest relatives, she is used to hiding her negative emotions very well.
So in Jiang Yuqing's view, her reaction could be described as calm, but only Meng Ran herself knew how panicked she really was.
It wasn't until the bedroom door behind her slammed open several times that Meng Ran finally snapped out of her daze.
It seems that she had been alone in the room for too long, and the housekeeper or doctor was worried and came to check on her.
Meng Ran composed herself and called out, "Come in."
With a soft click, the door was slowly pushed open.
As dusk settled, the last rays of the setting sun shone through the floor-to-ceiling windows, outlining the man's tall and imposing silhouette.
He stood quietly by the door, gazing at her in silence.
For a moment, Meng Ran's heart almost stopped beating.
A note from the author:
----------------------
Warning: The male lead is not a good person in the conventional sense and will hide things from the female lead for his own selfish reasons. If you mind this, please do not read.
(I've written too many good characters already; this time I want to write about a different kind of gloomy male protagonist.)
----------
Next book in the pipeline, feel free to add it to your favorites if you like [kiss emoji]:
[Orange Heart] "Traveling Back to High School with My Boyfriend's Brother"
[Heart] "My Boss is My Daughter's Father"
[Blue Heart] "A Heartbreaking Romance Novel About Transmigrating into a Wealthy Family with My Boyfriend"
[Purple Heart] "Brother, you're dressed up as a rich man too?!"
Continue read on readnovelmtl.com