The Beautiful Time With You

“What about you? Didn’t you have something to tell me too?” Lin Jiage stirred the cup of coffee before him as he thought that he should let Soft Bun talk first. “You can go ahead first.”

“Alright then…” Shi Yao didn’t stand on ceremony with Lin Jiage. She looked at Lin Jiage for a moment before continuing on, “I found out something recently, and that’s that Grandpa Lin has been feigning illness all this while. So, I’m thinking that we can go ahead and inform your family members about the annulment of our engagement…”

Grandpa? Feigning illness? Inform family members? Annulment of engagement?

As these terms registered in Lin Jiage’s mind, he suddenly fell into a daze, as if someone had smashed a bat into his face multiple times.

The frozen expression of his face still carried hints of dotingness and gentleness as he told Shi Yao to speak first. It took him a while before he gently blinked his eyes and asked with an uncertain tone, “What… are you talking about?”

Did I not express my clearly earlier? Or is he doubting what I said about Grandpa Lin feigning illness?

Shi Yao took a while to reconstruct her words before she spoke once again with the same soft tone as she did earlier, “A few days ago, I received a video of Grandpa Lin and Auntie Sun having a hot pot inside the hospital ward. In the video, Grandpa Lin was brimming with energy, completely unlike a patient…

“The person who sent the video was a person that I don’t really like, so I didn’t really trust her words. On the second day of the holidays, I went to pay Grandpa Lin a visit at the hospital. When I arrived at his ward, his condition didn’t look too good. He would go into a violent coughing fit from time to time, and his face looked a little swollen. Seeing that, I thought that the person who sent me the video was lying as usual, so I thought nothing much about it.

“Some time later, Grandpa Lin told me that he was tired and he wanted to rest, so I left the ward and began making my way down. However, just as I was about to leave the hospital, I realized that I left my train card back in Grandpa Lin’s ward, so I headed back to grab it. When I was about to enter the ward, I saw Grandpa Lin playing chess with another patient from the adjacent ward in his room. He was eating ice cream, and he looked to be overflowing with energy. It was then that I realized that Grandpa Lin has been feigning illness all this while.”

As Shi Yao spoke, she took out her phone and tapped into her Gallery. She tapped onto a photo before she pushed her phone toward Lin Jiage and said, “Look, these are the photos that I took that day. You’ll know that I haven’t been lying to you once you look at them.”

Shi Yao’s long speech left Lin Jiage in a dazed and confused state. He lay back on his chair quietly for a long while, as if he had been shocked by what he had heard. It took a while before his pupils finally rolled down to look at the screen of Shi Yao’s phone.

Just as Shi Yao had described, the photo showed his lively grandfather playing chess with another patient while eating ice cream.

Completely oblivious to Lin Jiage’s thoughts, Shi Yao continued speaking, “I thought of calling you yesterday night to inform you of this matter, but I recalled that we are going on a summer camp today, so I thought that it would be good for us to talk about this matter face-to-face.”

The screen of Shi Yao’s phone turned black due to the timeout function, but Lin Jiage continued to stare at it in a daze.

Shi Yao waited for a moment, but there was still no response from him. So, she spoke up again, “Weren’t we going to annul our marriage? We have postponed it thus far so as to not impact Grandpa Lin’s health, but he’s fine now. When do you think will be an appropriate time to raise this matter with your family members?”