Chapter 32 – The Rose at Her Door
One evening, Xiao Xi returned to her dressing room after a draining twelve-hour shoot.
The room was cold, quiet, and profoundly lonely.
Then she saw it:
a single, perfect red rose lying in the exact center of her clean vanity mirror.
It was fresh, the petals soft and velvety, the color a deep, vibrant crimson.
A tiny, neatly folded note was tucked beneath the stem.
Take care of yourself. -G
Her hands began to tremble violently.
She recognized the elegant, authoritative script instantly.
He hadn't spoken to her in a week.
He hadn't texted, hadn't called, and hadn't appeared on set since their last confrontation.
He had honored her request for distance, enduring the brutal silence.
But he was still watching.
Still worrying.
Still, somehow, trying to breach the walls she had constructed.
The silent gesture spoke louder than any shouted confession.
She held the rose gently, pressing the soft petals to her chest, inhaling the clean, earthy scent.
A profound, aching warmth spread through her despair.
The system flickered softly, recognizing the immediate, genuine emotional response.
[Emotional resonance detected. Small Luck recovery: +10 Luck.]
[Current Luck: 4110.]
"Don't comfort me," she whispered to the invisible interface, her throat tight.
"It's just a flower.
It doesn't mean anything."
But the tears dropped onto the crimson petals anyway.
She was too tired to stop the grief, too exhausted to stop the hope.
At the exact same moment, across the city, Gu Yanzhou sat alone in the cavernous silence of his office.
He was staring, not at financial data, but at a twin rose—the second one from the small, exclusive florist he had paid a fortune to use.
This one was kept carefully in a crystal vase on his private desk.
He hadn't risked sending the message through his own system, fearing the hacker's interception.
He had driven halfway across the city and bribed a cleaning staff member to deliver the simple note.
"...She probably threw it away," he murmured into the silence, the sound of his own voice hollow.
But he still hoped.
He still sat there, waiting for some sign—a shift in the wind, a change in her publicly available schedule, any indication that she knew he was fighting the silence, too.