Lu Rowan's Penthouse - Evening - 7:30 PM

The apartment felt different when Lu Rowan returned from work.lt was quieter, somehow, despite Mei moving around the kitchen preparing dinner. She'd been emotional all day since lunch with his grandmother. He could see it in the careful way she arranged dishes, the slight tremor in her hands as she served the braised pork belly she'd spent hours perfecting.

"How was your announcement?" she asked, not meeting his eyes as she set his plate down.

"Direct. Effective. No one will make you feel uncomfortable at the company again." He studied her profile, noting the tension in her shoulders. "What's wrong?"

Mei settled across from him, picking at her food rather than eating. The silence stretched until she finally looked up, her eyes bright with unshed tears.

"Your grandmother was so kind to me today. So protective." Her voice caught slightly. "I kept thinking... This is what family feels like. Real family."

Lu Rowan waited, sensing there was more.

"It made me realize how much I want that. Not just protection, but..." She took a shaky breath. "A real family of my own someday. Children who feel safe and loved the way your grandmother makes me feel."

Something cold settled in Lu Rowan's chest. He set down his chopsticks, his appetite vanishing.

"Mei—"

"I know we agreed on being married for three years," she continued, the words tumbling out now. "But seeing how things had progressed between us and how your family operates, how they care for each other... I can't help wondering if maybe we could have that too. Eventually."

The hope in her voice cut through him like glass. Lu Rowan felt his defensive walls slamming into place, the same automatic response that had protected him through childhood dinner tables where his presence was tolerated rather than welcomed.

"That's not what this marriage is about," he said carefully.

"But why not?" Mei leaned forward, her eyes searching his face. "We care about each other. We have consummated our marriage . Why couldn't we—"

"Because that's not what we agreed to." His voice was sharper now, panic making him cruel. "Children change everything. They complicate everything."

Mei flinched as if he'd slapped her. "Complicate what, exactly?"

Lu Rowan stood abruptly, pacing to the window. The city lights blurred below him as his mind raced through images he'd buried years ago—his father's empty chair at the dinner table, his mother's cries and distracted smiles when she remembered she existed, the hollow echo of a house too big and too quiet for a child who desperately wanted attention every one was in their own worlds that didn't include him.

"This arrangement works because it has boundaries," he said, his back still to her. "Clear expectations. No unrealistic fantasies about what we can become."

"Fantasies, l was fantasizing?" Mei's voice rose slightly and she sarcastically laughed a laugh that sounded more forced . "Is wanting a family with you really so unrealistic?"

He turned to face her, and something in his expression made her shrink back slightly.

"Do you honestly think you'd be a good mother?" The words came out harsher than he'd intended, designed to wound before she could wound him first. "After everything you've been through? The trauma, the years of abuse, the way you shut down when things get difficult?"

Mei's face went very pale.She felt her cheeks getting hotter of embarrassment.

"You think because you feel safe now, because my grandmother was nice to you, that somehow erases twenty years of damage?" Lu Rowan continued, his voice clinical and cutting. "It doesn't work that way, Mei. Trauma doesn't just disappear because you want it to."

She was staring at him as if he'd become a stranger.

"You can barely handle normal adult relationships. You spent our first weeks together flinching every time I touched you. You still have nightmares. You still freeze up when you're overwhelmed." Each word landed like a physical blow, and he watched her shrink further into herself with each one. "What makes you think you could handle the responsibility of a child's emotional wellbeing?"

The silence that followed was deafening. Mei sat perfectly still, her hands folded in her lap, her breathing shallow and controlled. When she finally spoke, her voice was barely above a whisper.

"I see."

"Mei, I didn't mean—"

"No." She stood slowly, her movements mechanical. "You meant every word. You think I'm way too broken . Too damaged to ever be a mother or anything to you"

Lu Rowan felt the first stirrings of regret, but his defensive anger was still too strong to let him take it back. "I think you're romanticizing something you know nothing about based on one afternoon of feeling accepted."

Mei's laugh was hollow, devastating. "One afternoon. Yes, I suppose that's all it was."

She moved toward the hallway, then paused at the edge of the dining room.

"You asked why I married you," she said without turning around. "I married you because I thought you saw something in me worth nurturing . Worth building a life with." Her shoulders sagged slightly. "But you just see someone useful enough to keep around for three years pleasing you right?"

"That's not—"

"Then why did you marry me, Rowan?" She finally turned, and the pain in her eyes made his chest tighten. "If I'm so fundamentally broken, if the idea of having a real family with me is so unrealistic, why did you choose me at all?"

The question hung between them like a blade. Lu Rowan opened his mouth, then closed it, realizing he had no answer that wouldn't confirm her worst fears or reveal his own.

Because the truth was too complicated to untangle in this moment of raw hurt. Because he'd married her precisely because she was broken in ways that matched his own brokenness. Because she'd never expected the kind of emotional intimacy that terrified him, never pushed for declarations of love he wasn't sure he was capable of giving.

Because she was safe. Because she wouldn't leave him the way his parents had left him he was emotionally deprived , if not physically. Because she understood survival in ways that someone who'd grown up truly loved never could.

But he couldn't say any of that. Not when she was looking at him like he'd just shattered something precious she'd been carefully rebuilding.

"I married you because we needed each other," he said finally. "That hasn't changed."

Mei studied his face for a long moment, searching for something she didn't find.

"Need," she repeated softly. "Yes, I suppose that's all it's ever been."

She walked away then, leaving him standing alone in the dining room with the remains of a dinner growing cold and the echo of words he couldn't take back.

Mei's Bedroom - 9:45 PM

Mei sat on the edge of her bed, staring at her hands as Lu Rowan's words replayed in her mind. The casual cruelty of his assessment cut deeper than any physical blow she'd endured at the Liang house.

You can barely handle normal adult relationships.

What makes you think you could handle the responsibility of a child's emotional wellbeing?

You're romanticizing something you know nothing about.

Each phrase was a surgical strike against the fragile hope she'd been nurturing. The hope that maybe, despite everything, she could have the kind of family she'd always dreamed of. The hope that her past didn't have to define her future.

But Lu Rowan was right, wasn't he? What did she know about being a mother? Her own parents had died when she was too young to remember them. Mrs. Liang had shown her only what motherhood looked like when it was poisoned by resentment and manipulation.

She thought of the children she'd occasionally seen in parks and restaurants, their easy laughter, their unconscious trust in the adults around them. How could she possibly provide that kind of security when she still startled at unexpected sounds, still woke from nightmares, still carried the weight of twenty years' worth of casual cruelty in her bones?

The tears came slowly at first, then harder, until she was sobbing into her hands with the force of dreams dying. She'd allowed herself to believe, for just a few hours, that she could be more than a survivor. That she could be someone who created life instead of simply enduring it.

But trauma didn't work that way, did it? It followed you everywhere, coloring every interaction, poisoning every hope for normalcy. Lu Rowan had simply stated what she should have realized herself that some kinds of damage were permanent, that some people were meant to remain alone.

Lu Rowan's Bedroom - Same Time

Lu Rowan sat in his chair by the window, a glass of whiskey untouched in his hand as he stared out at the city. The silence from Mei's room was worse than tears would have been. It was the silence of someone retreating so far into herself that she might never come back.

He'd handled it badly. Spectacularly badly. Instead of explaining his own fears, his own convinced certainty that he'd be a terrible father, he'd turned his panic into a weapon and used it against the one person who'd never tried to hurt him.

The irony wasn't lost on him; he'd accused Mei of being too damaged for parenthood while demonstrating exactly the kind of emotional cruelty that had shaped his own childhood. His parents had never screamed or hit, but they'd perfected the art of casual indifference, of making a child feel like an inconvenience to be managed rather than a person to be cherished.

And tonight, he'd done the same thing to Mei . He'd taken her vulnerability and used it to maintain his own emotional safety, just like his parents had always done.He felt like what he had done was worse than what the Liangs had done to her

The whiskey burned his chest when he finally drank it, but not as much as the knowledge that he'd become exactly what he'd spent his life trying to avoid.

Living Room - 11:30 PM

Neither of them could sleep. They found each other in the kitchen , Lu Rowan standing by the windows with his back to her.

"I'm sorry," he said without turning around. "What I said about your ability to be a mother... that was cruel and unfair."

"Was it untrue?" Mei's voice was hoarse from crying.

Lu Rowan finally faced her, taking in her red-rimmed eyes and the careful distance she'd put between them.

"I don't know," he said honestly. "I don't know what kind of mother you'd be, just like I don't know what kind of father I'd be. But I had no right to use your past as a weapon against your dreams."

"Maybe it wasn't a weapon. Maybe it was just the truth I needed to hear."

"Mei—"

"No Mr Lu, you were right. I am damaged. I do shut down when things get difficult. I do still have nightmares and panic attacks and days when I can barely function." Her voice was steady now, eerily calm. "I was being naive to think any of that would change just because I felt safe for the first time in my life."

The clinical way she catalogued her perceived flaws made Lu Rowan's chest ache. This was what he'd done to her: he had taken someone who was beginning to hope and convinced her that hope was foolish.

"Your past doesn't disqualify you from having a future," he said quietly.

Mei looked up at him with eyes that held no warmth. "Doesn't it? You seemed pretty convinced a few hours ago."

He had no answer for that. Because part of him was scared, the defensive part that had learned early that emotional safety meant keeping people at arm's length and still believed it. Still believed that people like them, people who'd been shaped by neglect and abandonment, were better off not risking the same patterns with children of their own.

"This is what we are," Mei said finally. "Two people who need each other but can't actually love each other. Not really. Not the way people in real marriages do."

"Mei—"

"It's okay, Mr Lu . I understand now." She stood, moving toward the hallway. "Three years. A business arrangement with some physical comfort. I won't confuse it for anything else again and don't worry l will continue doing my wife duties including to please you l wouldn't stay in someone's life and add nothing to it… wouldn't l?”

She paused at the edge of the room.

"Thank you for the reminder about what I am. It's better to know the truth than to live in fantasy."