After breakfast, Gou An sat in He Jinxing’s office for a while. Not long after, Secretary Liu came with a grand offering—somehow he found the cell phone that she had lost last night.

After charging and turning on the phone, the first thing Gou An saw was dozens of missed calls from He Ran…

Thinking about how this guy grabbed Lu Wan and fled without looking back last night, interpreting the idiom ‘Husband and wife (vomit) are birds of the same forest, but when disaster strikes, they fly away separately’ oh so accurately that it even included punctuation marks—Gou An curled the corners of her lips and cursed ‘idiot’ in her heart.

On WeChat, she skipped He Ran altogether  and reported her safety to all the friends and relatives who had left her messages. After being busy for a while, she finally put down her phone and sat patiently, waiting for He Jinxing to come back and clear her out of the way.

As a result, when the man came back, he didn’t even look at her. He sat back at his desk and continued to work.

……. Hello?

There is another person here??

C’mon, throw me out if you can.

Gou An wanted to say something several times but stopped herself; she still didn’t dare to ‘not know how to be grateful¹’, so she simply sat stupidly on the sofa on the top floor of the He’s Building and played with her phone for the whole morning…

Three hours later, the man behind the desk finally shut down the computer.

With a ‘pop’, the person sitting on the sofa—who already had PTSD—raised her head and looked at him in confusion and bewilderment.

“Let’s go,” He Jinxing said as a matter of course, without showing any expression of ‘why are you still here?’. “I’ll take you home.”

“…”

“You’re not going?”

“… Going.”

There’s nothing wrong with me going.

But what’s with you acting like you want to go with me??

The thing was, vicious female supporting characters were never very smart. Gou An herself didn’t know how superficial she was—superficial here didn’t mean anything particularly derogatory; it just meant that whatever she was thinking was basically written on her face.

In the face of her not-so-hidden resistance, He Jinxing did not show his displeasure. He loosened his tie and glanced at her calmly, “It’s lunch break… In your eyes, do I not need to eat?”

“Of course not.”

Liar.

Of course, she thought so.

After all, the King of Hell only needed to sit back, be worshipped, and receive incense.

… …

Sitting again in the back seat of the car, which was so new that it still smelled of leather, Gou An couldn’t help but glance at the person sitting beside her a bit frantically.

The man beside her seemed tired after being busy all morning. He didn’t say a word the entire time. It was about half an hour’s drive. He was leaning against the car door to relax. When Gou An peeked at him for the fifteenth time, he found that he had fallen into a light sleep…

Or perhaps he simply closed his eyes to rest.

The tall bridge of his nose seemed almost transparent under the sunlight shining through the half-lowered car window. Half of his face melted into the sunlight. His brows were slightly frowned out of habit because of the glaring sunlight, but the relaxation at the corners of his lips showed peace.

Gou An was a little dazed, and then she slowly remembered that although there was a generation difference between them, He Jinxing was not much older than He Ran. He even shamelessly said that they were all around the same age, just in their twenties.

Since he dozed off, his head would shake slightly with the movements of the car, little by little.

In the end, Gou An even stopped fiddling  with her phone. Although she had muted the keyboard typing sounds, she was afraid that the sound of her fingertips tapping on the screen would wake him up.

As the car entered the residential area, the Stupidly Brave Gou² poked the man’s elbow with a finger.

He Jinxing opened his eyes immediately.

This person’s emotions were really stable. Even when he was just waken up, he didn’t lose his temper or get impatient. However, his dark pupils were darker than usual, and his gaze on her was a bit unfocused.

“Young Uncle, we’re home,” Gou An said lightly. Then, lumping together a series of events that happened this morning, she said, “Thank you for this morning.”

He Jinxing seemed not to have fully woken up from his sleep, so his answer was still a simple monosyllable.

“Um.”

A non-offensive look.

The white Rolls-Royce stopped at the door of Gou’s house with familiarity. When Gou An bent down to get out of the car, she heard the man behind her calling her name. She held the car door and looked back in surprise.

“Next time, if you have any problems, you can call me, no need to make yourself so embarrassed.”

“?”

Gou An was stunned for a few seconds.

Then she asked an even dumber question.

“But I don’t have your phone number, how can I call you?”

He Jinxing was stunned for a moment, then rubbed his nose and laughed softly.

Gou An’s face was heating up quickly, and she realized that the other party might just be being polite…

Love from elders or something like that.

Damn.

“Then what should I do? I forgot to bring my business card.”

He spoke slowly with a smile, in that kind of artificial, interesting, regretful tone.

Okayy, bye!

As the favorability level above He Jinxing’s head flashed to the number ’27’, Gou An’s face turned red like a tomato and she climbed out of the car and fled.

… … translated by Maela @ whitemoonlighttranslations.com

The family was already at home, and lunch was just about ready. Ade was about to set the table with a pot of winter melon and pork ribs soup.

At this time, Gou An had changed into new clothes and shoes, and her face was clean, without any trace of the embarrassment she faced as she fled from Zhaipu District this morning.

No one would ever know about this, about her dark history of personally feeding the black-eyed bodyguard with her sincere heart——

A Permanent Seal (X).

[Jiao Jiao: It is indeed very tragic.]

Gou An: Shut your cat mouth.

“An’an, you’re back. Come to see if your little brother has grown taller again.”

Jiang Yuan’s voice always sounded so soft. At this moment, she was standing by the sofa, warmly inviting Gou An to come and comment on her son (??).

Gou An’s younger brother Gou Xun was eighteen years old this year. He has a spiky haircut and was about 1.8 meters tall, strong and sturdy. He was at the age of being an annoying and restless teenager.

At this time, the boy was sitting on the sofa playing games. He was wearing a pure white short-sleeved T-shirt and black sports shorts. He had perfectly inherited all the advantages of his parents, so he looked quite good…

Unfortunately, his IQ was beyond the scope of what should be acceptable to the Gou family. He was just an idiot.

Hearing Gou An’s footsteps, this rude child raised his eyelids and made a ‘tsk’ sound.

This just happened to correspond perfectly with Gou An’s eye roll.

Gou Xun studied in the best high school in Jiangcheng and lived on campus most of the time, so he basically had no time to go home.

In the past few years, he failed to be educated well and his grades were always at the bottom. But Gou An heard that he somehow made rapid progress in this opening exam, jumping up dozens of places.

Gou An thought this was nothing strange. After all, generally, key high schools like these would have one or two classes allocated to rich second-generation kids with brain stem defects. Gou Xun’s improvement in ranking was probably just going from ‘a blank paper with only his name filled in’ to ‘filling in a few multiple-choice questions after filling in his name and luckily choosing the right ones.’

But his parents were very satisfied, and Jiang Yuan was so moved that she almost cried when she saw all the reds on his report card.

“Mom, you make me feel that your crying over my top-ranking report card a few days ago was a fake act. Is this all you ask of your children? If you had told me earlier, I wouldn’t have studied so hard.” Gou An sat down on the sofa and picked up a grape. “Stop crying, okay?”

During the whole process, she ignored Gou Xun who was sitting on another sofa.

They have never gotten along well with each other and usually quarreled whenever they meet.

Gou Xun had just finished a game, and he glanced at her coldly, “What right do you have to say anything bad about me when you didn’t come home last night? How old are you that you’ve learned to stay out all night in a nightclub?”

There was no [I See the Ebb and Flow of His Love] display function on the top this boy’s head who was now barking at the microphone. It seemed that the system has a very positive view in life. It was obviously a green Jinjiang Literature product. Orthopedics was certainly not allowed.³ His existence should purely be to annoy people.

His words made Gou An pause in chewing grapes. She suddenly thought of the ‘tune-up party’ active on the Internet, who summarized the facts in a few words with outrageous words, and made it sound like something completely different.

“I didn’t come home last night, were you walking down the street with a loudspeaker, calling my name to look for me. What’s wrong?” Gou An asked, “Why are you so resentful?”

Gou Xun made another ‘tsk’ sound, turned away, and started the next game.

“Say less,” Gou Yu walked through the living room with a teacup in his hand. “Gou Xun, you can’t talk to your sister in that tone. There was a big mess at Endless Night last night. It’s a blessing that your sister is okay.”

When Gou Xun heard this, he paused playing the game and turned his head to look at Gou An.

Seeing that she was sitting there intact with a mocking look on her face, he slowly withdrew his gaze.

Jiang Yuan sat down next to Gou Xun and patted him on the shoulder, “Tell me how your grades improved?”

Gou An was free to look through his physics test paper—it was now spread out on the coffee table— and she could see that he actually wrote something down; it was not all guesswork…

It meant that if there were ten knowledge points in a book, Gou Xun must have mastered two or three of them. He could correctly answer all the related questions correctly.

She held the test paper in her hand and said in a loud voice, “Are you in love?”

Gou Xun’s cell phone fell from his hand.

From the Day the Engagement was Broken translated by Maela @ whitemoonlighttranslations.com

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T/N: I love their family dynamics ☺️

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Chapter 23.2 — You Go Away Too
Chapter 24.1 — Business Card
Chapter 24.2 — Business Card

FOOTNOTES:

1. During their first meeting under the heavy rains, Gou An lost 5 favorability points because ‘she didn’t know how to be grateful’. She didn’t want to lose points again. ↩︎
2. ‘Stupidly Brave Gou’. The phrase used here is ‘Gou Dan Bao Tian’ which means extremely daring or foolhardy, so it’s a play on Gou An’s name. ↩︎
3. Jinjiang Literature City or jjwxc is a webnovel publishing platform. The interface is green and they are very strict about banning R-18 content. It’s where this webnovel was published. Orthopedics is a euphemism for incest. So that section was quite funny if you know the context. ↩︎