The manager barely looked up before waving Xia Xinghe away.
She had already heard enough excuses to know what was coming. Too old. Not presentable enough. Customers preferred younger faces. After another failed interview, she stepped back onto the crowded street wondering how much longer she could keep pretending everything would somehow work itself out. A few years earlier she had been the young mistress of the Xi family. Now even finding work as a waitress had become difficult.
Life had a habit of dragging her back toward people she wanted to forget.
An unexpected encounter places her directly in front of Xi Mubai, the man she once called her husband. Standing beside him is Chu Tianxin, the woman everyone believes will soon become the next Madam Xi. Their clothes, their confidence, even the way people greeted them belonged to a different world, while Xinghe could only hope nobody paid too much attention to the worn-out woman standing across from them.
Mubai is just as surprised.
The divorce should never have left her in this condition. Years ago, enough money had been arranged to ensure she could live comfortably even after they separated. Looking at the woman in front of him now, none of it makes sense. Xinghe refuses to explain, Mubai cannot stop asking himself where everything went wrong, and the answers never seem to match the memories either of them still carries.
Then an accident changes something neither of them expected.
Fragments that had remained buried for years begin surfacing, bringing back pieces of a past Xinghe can barely recognize as her own. The quiet woman struggling to survive discovers that the person she used to be possessed abilities few people could match. Those forgotten talents do not return overnight, but once she starts rebuilding them, the people who dismissed her soon realize they had judged her far too early.
Her path back is anything but smooth. Old enemies are still around, hidden motives have not disappeared with time, and the Xi family remains tangled in problems that extend well beyond a broken marriage. Every answer Xinghe uncovers seems connected to another secret waiting underneath it.
By the time her name begins circulating again, it is no longer because she was Xi Mubai’s ex-wife. It is because an exceptional hacker with an unsettling ability to solve impossible problems has quietly appeared, forcing powerful people to ask the same question, where had Xia Xinghe been hiding all these years, and why does it feel as though someone wanted her forgotten from the very beginning?
