Mei Zhen went white and then red in the face upon hearing Tang"s casually delivered words. How could this have happened? She had been extremely careful. From the time that she had moved out of the Xie mansion, her only aim had been to bring shame and misery to the Xie family. She had intended to delay the divorce for as long as she could and extract her pound of flesh by adding unreasonable demands to the divorce agreement. After the heartache and humiliation suffered at the hands of the Xie family, this was the least she was ent.i.tled to.
Bitter in her current situation, she hadn"t expected to encounter romance again in her life so soon. It was by sheer luck that she had run into her current suitor few weeks ago. He had been her compet.i.tor for purchasing the hotel in Beijing. This was the family owned hotel which she had visited with her father, the same place where she had run into Fu, all those weeks ago. Though she had been not been attracted to the man at the time, he had pursued her with full vigour.
Enamoured by her beauty, intelligence and att.i.tude, he had broken her resistance, bit by bit with his continued efforts. It didn"t matter to him that her outlook towards love was cynical, to say the least. He had been buoyed and doubled his efforts after she had mentioned to him that she was in the process of getting a divorce from her husband.
He didn"t care about the circ.u.mstances surrounding her current marriage but it was apparent to him that she was unhappy there. That fact was enough for him to hope for their happily ever after.
"What do you want from me, Xie Tang?" she asked him, resignation in her voice.
"I want you to leave my world peacefully and I promise to let you live in your own, happily," he said and pushed a bunch of legal papers in front of her.
Scanning through them quickly, she looked up, "but…but these are not the terms which we negotiated last week."
She pushed them back towards him.
"These are the original divorce papers which state that none of us owes the other person anything. I don"t think that you are in any position to negotiate anymore with me. But I have still let the condition stay, which states that you are the one seeking this divorce instead of me. This is to give you face in front of your current beau. Take it as my parting gift. Should you still choose to resist and pull more stunts as you have been doing in the past three months, I shall simply go ahead and leak these pictures. I wonder what would your morally upright parents say about their married daughter indulging in such interesting activities," he delivered the words with quiet steel in his voice.
Mei Zhen"s face blanched even further. After a quick consultation with her lawyer, she quietly pulled the papers back towards her and signed them.
"I hate you, I always will," throwing those words at him, she walked out.
Tang released the breath which he had been holding since this meeting had started.
"Did you have this ace up your sleeve, all this time, Mr. Xie? By the end of last week, I had nearly resigned myself to you signing that terrible contract with some crazy clauses in it, as suggested by Mrs. Xie. This was some smart thinking on your part," his lawyer gushed.
But Tang wasn"t paying much attention to his narrative. He took out his phone and sent a "Thank You" to his father"s mobile. He then expressed his grat.i.tude towards his lawyer and asked him to file the papers ASAP.
"Mr. Ming, please get ready to mobilise all your resources. I need you to find someone for me," he spoke in the phone, just as he got out of the lawyer"s office.
York, Britain
It was late in the evening by the time Hui wrapped up his interaction with the students and staff and finally with the dean. He had not visited them post the initial opening of the university, three years ago. Though Jia Li had accompanied him to all meetings today, she hadn"t needed to contribute much to the conversation.
Ying Hui was his usual reticent self but he answered almost every question posed to him, with utmost sincerity. His words were absorbed by the eager students and staff alike. Despite her having read his diary, the impact was way more when she heard him deliver those ideas in his usual serious tone. The students seemed to be hanging onto each and every word uttered by him.
The interaction had gone on for a few hours, with the entire auditorium listening in attentively.