“What what what?” Brian Hill felt as if a bolt of lightning had struck down from above the hall, turning all his layers of fat into sizzling barbecue, oil crackling. “No way, you—you took the young master of the Jiao family as a stand-in? How could you do that!”

“He knows it himself.” Ethan Bolton sneered, clinking glasses with Brian Hill.

He knows it himself? Crack crack boom—

An even bigger bolt of lightning struck, reducing Mr. Hill to ashes.

After the reception, Ethan Bolton accepted an invitation from an acquaintance to play squash at the club. Ryan Carter declined to go along and drove home alone.

The villa was empty and echoing. Afternoon sunlight streamed in through the floor-to-ceiling windows, but brought no warmth. The butler was outside with a crew repairing the fence, the clanging of their tools the only sound.

Ryan Carter sat on a single armchair in the basement, staring at a tightly closed door in front of him. It was a storage room he had never opened before, Ethan Bolton’s private space, hiding the secrets of that man’s youth.

He knew that Ethan Bolton hadn’t grown up in the best environment and had things he didn’t want others to know.

Ryan Carter had always respected him. In seven years of marriage, he had never once entered this room. But now, he wanted nothing more than to go in and take a look.

He hadn’t eaten lunch, and now his stomach cramped with pain. Ryan Carter curled up on the sofa, face pale, and couldn’t help but shed a couple of tears. If all these years of gentle care had been nothing but a lie, how was it supposed to end?

Money and time given could be counted, but how do you take back the love you gave?

His fingertips trembled as he reached for the keypad on the door. The small storage room felt like a Pandora’s box, the consequences of opening it impossible to predict. Ryan Carter took a deep breath, wiped his face, and pressed the code with gritted teeth.

It was a four-digit code, but he didn’t know what it was. He tried a few commonly used family codes, but none worked. In desperation, he entered “0826.” Beep beep beep—the door opened.

“……” A room hiding the secret of a white moonlight, unlocked with the current partner’s birthday—something about that felt off.

Ryan Carter twitched the corner of his mouth and pushed the door open.

The room was a bit messy, filled with all sorts of odds and ends. An old discarded computer, a bicycle missing its handle, a fruit knife with a chipped blade, and a bail receipt from a detention center. The only relatively tidy spot was a desk, where a photo of Ethan Bolton as a child with his mother sat, along with a rimowa aluminum-magnesium alloy suitcase. The suitcase was custom-made, with a line of German engraved on the outside—“My Love.”

The suitcase wasn’t locked and could be opened easily.

Ryan Carter pressed his hand on the lid for a long time without lifting it. He didn’t know what was inside, but he was sure it was something he didn’t want to see—the truth.

Maybe it was hundreds of unsent love letters, maybe a photo of that white moonlight, maybe something even more unbearable. The once beautiful life suddenly felt like a suspenseful horror film, birdsong and flowers ready to collapse into a swamp at any moment.

“Click.” The suitcase opened.

There was no eye-burning “evidence of crime,” just a bunch of random, trivial things. A broken fountain pen, an eraser with a missing corner, an old photo album with a cartoon cover…

The pen and eraser looked familiar. Ryan Carter opened the album and saw a photo of himself from high school.

The photo was clearly cropped from a promotional picture on the school’s official website, with a chunk missing from the side. Ryan Carter remembered that back then, the school needed a boy and a girl for the website’s promo photo. He’d been inexplicably chosen, and took a back-to-back shot with a girl he didn’t know, rumored to be the school beauty.

That silly photo was still on the school’s website. The part cut out in the album was the girl.

A wave of almost absurd unreality surged up. Ryan Carter kept flipping through the album—every photo in it was of him.

Some were cut from the school’s honor roll, some blown up from the graduation photo, others were candid shots from sports meets, basketball courts, and so on.

Ryan Carter finally remembered what happened with that fountain pen. He’d used it in his second year of high school. It was so pretty that the girls in class fought to see it, and it accidentally fell from upstairs, bending the barrel. The pen itself wasn’t a big deal to him, but the girls, feeling guilty, all went downstairs to look for it—yet it mysteriously vanished.

“Ha? Hahahaha…” Ryan Carter didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. So, this Zhang bastard had known him since high school. That so-called first love male god was actually him, back when he was still called Blake Carter.

All these years, this guy hadn’t let slip a single word—impressive.

Ryan Carter stood up and walked around the room, finding even more interesting things. Homework notebooks he’d written in, a school uniform he’d thrown away after it got muddy, and even a high jump bar…

Picking up the red-and-white striped high jump bar, Ryan Carter’s face instantly darkened. He remembered this slightly bent bar very clearly. Back at the school sports meet, he’d been forced to enter the high jump. He’d failed to clear the bar in a “graceful” leap, ended up straddling it, and the bar had smacked him right in the crotch, leaving him sprawled on the mat for ages before he could get up.