Chapter 12 - The Hospital Room
The next morning, St. Mary’s Private Hospital looked entirely different through the windows of a luxury Maybach.
The fifth floor VIP suite didn't smell of bleach or old cabbage; it smelled of fresh lilies and sterile air. The room featured a private sitting area, a leather sofa, a sixty-inch television, and a wide balcony overlooking the hospital's private rose garden.
Lin Meihua—Lin Chen's mother—sat in an electric armchair near the window, a fleece blanket over her lap. Her face, which had been gray and sunken for six months, had regained a faint tinge of color. Her dark hair was brushed back neatly, and an IV drip was running smoothly into her left forearm from an automated German pump that clicked like a quiet watch.
When the door opened and Lin Chen walked in with Lu Zongheng, the old woman set down her cup of tea.
"Chen'er," her mother said, her voice weak but clear. "Who is this gentleman?"
Lin Chen looked at Lu Zongheng, who was wearing a dark, double-breasted gray suit and carrying a basket of imported white peaches. He looked so far removed from the man under the dumpling shop awning that it felt like a dream she had imagined.
"Mother," Lin Chen said, stepping forward and kneeling beside her mother's chair. "This is... this is Zongheng. Lu Zongheng."
Lin Meihua looked at the tall man standing near the door. Her old, tired eyes swept over his expensive suit, his immaculate hair, and finally came to rest on the heavy gold band on her daughter's left ring finger.
"Lu?" her mother asked softly. "From the logistics company?"
"He works in management there, Mother," Lin Chen lied smoothly, using the script they had agreed upon in the car. "We... we got married yesterday at the Civil Affairs Bureau."
Lin Meihua didn't smile immediately. She looked at Lu Zongheng for three long, agonizing seconds.
"Come here, young man," her mother commanded quietly.
Lu Zongheng set the fruit basket on the table and walked over, stopping beside Lin Chen. To her complete shock, the powerful Chairman of Dami Technology—a man who made provincial governors wait in his anteroom—bent his long frame and knelt down on one knee right beside her on the linoleum floor.
"Mother," Lu Zongheng said respectfully.
Lin Meihua reached out her thin, bruised hand—the skin scarred from hundreds of dialysis needles—and took Lu Zongheng's large palm. She turned it over, feeling the calluses on his knuckles from his early years in his grandfather's machining shop.
"You have work hands," the old woman noted softly. "A man with calluses on his knuckles knows how to build things. He doesn't just tear them down."
"My father was a machinist, Mother," Lu Zongheng said truthfully. "He taught me how to use my hands before he taught me how to read a balance sheet."
Lin Meihua's eyes filled with quiet, unshed tears. She looked at her daughter, then back at the tall man kneeling on her floor.
"My Chen'er has had a hard life," her mother whispered, her voice trembling. "Her father died early. I've been a burden to her for six years. She has worked three jobs, eaten cold rice, and taken insults from her uncle just to keep my medicine running. If you are good to her... I don't care if you live in a mansion or a shack. But if you hurt her..."
May you like
"If I hurt her," Lu Zongheng interrupted, his dark eyes locking onto the old woman's face with an absolute, terrifying sincerity, "you may take my life, Mother. I swear it on my father's memory."
Lin Chen looked at him, her chest swelling with a feeling so intense, so profound, that it made her throat ache. She knew it was part of their arrangement—a show for her mother's peace of mind—but the look in his eyes wasn't the look of an actor playing a role. It was the look of a man who had made a vow he intended to keep until his bones turned to dust.
