Chapter 31: 2Love on Paper

The phone remained facedown on the table, but the vibrations continued. Once, then again, then a third time.

Lian closed her eyes and reached for it without much interest, assuming the latest notification was another work message. It wasn't.

An anonymous account. No profile picture, no name, nothing but a few short lines.

"If you were a real woman, your husband wouldn't have run away from you."

Lian's breathing caught for a moment. Before she could even process the message, another appeared.

"Win your husband's heart first. Then think about drawing."

Then a third.

"A woman who can't make her husband stay doesn't deserve to call herself a woman."

Lian stared at the screen. She didn't cry, and she didn't get angry. Instead, a cold emptiness slowly spread through her.

How strange it was that people who didn't know her could judge her so easily. They didn't know what she liked to be called, what her favorite color was, or how many nights she had spent crying. They didn't know the truth at all.

She calmly closed the phone and placed it back on the table before turning toward her tablet.

Her heroine was still standing on the same page, waiting for the person writing her story to give her a happy ending. Lian moved the stylus across the screen and whispered, "It's so easy for people to judge a life when all they know is its title."

She paused, remembering something she had said only days ago.

"I'm tired of being a character in a story other people write."

A small smile touched her lips, but this time there was no sadness in it. There was something stubborn instead, a quiet refusal to let other people decide who she was.

She opened the dialogue box in her comic and deleted the line she had written for her heroine. In its place, she typed:

"A woman's worth isn't determined by the man who stays or the man who leaves."

She stared at the sentence for a long moment, then pressed save.

For the first time, she wasn't answering the messages. She was answering them through her work.

Lian turned off her phone and took a long breath before slowly letting it out, as though she were trying to release the words that had attempted to settle inside her heart.

When she finally raised her head, her eyes fell on the painting hanging in front of her desk.

It was one of the first paintings she had ever made, and she had never put it up for sale.

An ancient city filled the canvas, its walls cracked and its towers leaning at dangerous angles. Gray smoke covered the sky, as though the war had ended long ago but left its smell behind.

At the bottom of the painting stood a lone woman in a white dress, too small to face the destruction surrounding her. She wasn't running or screaming. She simply raised her head, watching enormous stones tumble from the upper walls as though the entire city were about to collapse on top of her.

At the far edge of the painting, a knight rode a black horse. A long sword rested at his side, and his armor still shone beneath the gray sky.

But he wasn't riding toward the city.

He was fleeing from it.

He glanced back only once before urging his horse onward. He carried no banner of victory and bore no wounds of defeat. All he carried was the burden of leaving behind the people he had chosen not to save.

Lian had always loved that painting because she had never seen it as the story of a fallen city. To her, it was the story of two people.

One remained beneath the collapsing walls, standing her ground as the ruins fell around her.

The other chose to save himself, even if it meant leaving everything behind.

A faint smile touched Lian's lips as she continued looking at the woman in white.

"Maybe..." she whispered.

"Maybe she wasn't waiting for someone to save her."

"Maybe she was only waiting for her heart to stop waiting for the man who had run away."

She lowered her eyes and returned to her stylus.

Because she had come to understand that paintings, like the people who created them, sometimes said the things their creators couldn't bring themselves to admit.