They had eight days of wedding leave. They took two weeks.
The day after the wedding, their suitcase wasn't even fully unpacked when Liu Ruping started filling another one. Ye Chen stood in the bedroom doorway and watched her fold clothes one by one and press them in, moving with the same efficiency she used on the assembly line.
"We leave tomorrow," she said, not looking up. "Road trip. Around the whole island."
"Tomorrow?"
"What are we waiting for?"
Ye Chen thought about it. He couldn't come up with an answer.
The route was Liu Ruping's to plan. But her planning style wasn't like anyone else's—she had no route.
"We drive until we stop, eat until we're full, see whatever looks good, sleep wherever we end up." She sat in the passenger seat with her feet propped on the dashboard, window down, hair whipping in every direction. "If something looks worth stopping for, we stop. If something smells good, we eat it. When we're tired, we find a place to sleep."
Ye Chen kept both hands on the wheel and thought that this sounded nothing like a plan. But he'd already learned one thing about being with Liu Ruping—you didn't need a plan. She was the plan.
The first day they drove south along the western coast. Passing a small fishing harbor, she suddenly slapped the dashboard. "Stop! There's a woman drying fish over there. I want to look."
He pulled over. She jumped out and ran across, and spent ten minutes talking to the old woman tending the fish. When she came back, she was carrying a bag of dried fish and two jars of homemade pickled vegetables.
"She says it's best with congee," Liu Ruping said, tossing the bag onto the back seat. "We'll get congee tonight and try it."
The second day they crossed the mountains to the east coast. The highway curved along the shoreline—cliff face on the left, the Pacific on the right. Sunlight bounced off the water and made it hard to keep your eyes open. Liu Ruping pulled down the visor and squinted at the sea.
"Look," she said, pointing at a bright spot far out on the water. "What's that?"
"Probably a boat."
"Doesn't look like one. Too bright."
"Then it's probably a reflection."
"You're so boring," she said. "Why can't it be a mermaid?"
He glanced at her. She had her head tilted, watching him, a smile at the corner of her mouth, something lit up behind her eyes.
"Fine," he said. "It's a mermaid."
She turned back to the water, satisfied.
The trip around the island took about a week. Ye Chen couldn't remember afterward how many places they'd been. What stayed with him were a handful of images—her standing on a hilltop with her arms spread wide, spinning in a slow circle; her at a roadside noodle stall, eating until she'd drunk every drop of the broth; her crouching at the edge of a rice paddy to take a photo and saying, "Look at that color, it's beautiful"; her asleep in the passenger seat with her head against the window, mouth slightly open, breathing slow and shallow.
He kept his speed down. He didn't want to jostle her.
They got home from the road trip and the suitcase wasn't even open before she started packing again.
"Korea," she said. "I already booked the flights."
Ye Chen blinked. "Abroad?"
"It's a honeymoon. Of course we're going abroad."
He had never been on a plane.
He didn't say that out loud, but Liu Ruping figured it out. The way she figured it out was simple—at the airport, Ye Chen stood in the departure hall with his eyes moving around the space, searching for something he couldn't name. He checked the flight information board three times. He checked the gate signs twice. Then he turned to her and asked, "Which way do we go?"
She laughed. Not mockingly—it was the kind of laugh that meant *I knew it.*
"Just follow me," she said, and reached over and took his hand. "You don't have to think about anything."
But right before they were supposed to leave, Liu Ruping's body had other ideas.
It wasn't serious, but her color was off. Ye Chen saw it in one look—he recognized that expression. Her stomach was hurting. The gallstones had been removed, but her body was like a machine that had been repaired in one place only to start rattling somewhere else.
"Do you want to cancel?" he asked.
She shook her head. Hard. "Everything's already booked. It'd be a waste."
They worked it out with the tour group and switched to the following day's departure. Liu Ruping agreed, assuming Ye Chen would take her home to rest. He didn't. He drove straight to the hospital and checked her into the emergency room.
"What are you doing?" she asked in the car.
"Getting you looked at."
"I'm fine."
"We'll see after the doctor looks."
She gave him a sharp look but didn't say anything else.
The ER found nothing serious and sent them home with medication. Early the next morning, they headed to the airport directly from near the hospital.
Ye Chen's first time on a plane.
During takeoff he gripped the armrest until his knuckles went white. Not fear exactly—more like his body not knowing what to do with the sensation. The engine noise came up through the floor, the seat pressed into his back, and the ground outside the window shrank and receded until it looked like a jigsaw puzzle laid flat.
Liu Ruping was sitting beside him. She glanced over, then reached across and laid her hand over his on the armrest.
"Relax," she said. "It's like being in a car."
It wasn't. Not even close. But after her hand settled over his, his fingers loosened a little.
The Korea trip was a group tour.
Liu Ruping fit in immediately—she was never shy around strangers. By the end of the first day on the tour bus, she'd already talked to everyone within two rows in every direction. Ye Chen sat beside her like a piece of luggage she'd brought along.
On the second day, Ye Chen noticed a couple in the group who looked familiar. He leaned close to Liu Ruping and said quietly, "Look at those two. The guy looks like someone from my work. The woman looks like someone from yours."
Liu Ruping looked. Her eyes lit up. "You're right, they do."
She walked straight over and asked. Ye Chen watched from behind as she crossed the room in a few strides, opened her mouth, and both couples broke into identical expressions of surprise—they actually knew each other.
"What are the odds!" Liu Ruping was grinning when she came back. "Two honeymoon couples on the same tour."
After that, the four of them became their own little group within the group—eating together, shopping together, taking photos together.
Near the end of the trip, something funny happened.
A foreign man in the group—an older gentleman—came up to Ye Chen with his wife. His Mandarin wasn't smooth, but he was sincere. He said he hoped they could stay in touch.
Ye Chen and Liu Ruping were both surprised.
The man explained. His nephew, he said, looked just like Ye Chen. So much so that when he'd first spotted Ye Chen on the bus that first day, he'd thought his nephew had somehow ended up in Korea too.
"Really, the resemblance is remarkable," the man's wife added. "We've been watching you for days. The more we look, the more alike you seem."
They exchanged contact information, laughed, and said their goodbyes.
On the flight home, Liu Ruping leaned against Ye Chen's shoulder with her eyes closed.
"This was a good honeymoon," she said. Her voice was already going soft with sleep.
"Yeah."
"We're going abroad again someday."
"Okay."
She didn't say anything after that. Her breathing slowed and deepened. Ye Chen turned his head to look at her. In the cabin light, her lashes cast a small shadow, and the corners of her mouth were turned up slightly—like she was smiling in her sleep.
He didn't move. He was afraid of waking her.
The plane flew on through the night sky for a long time. He sat there and let her lean against him, all the way until they landed.
The honeymoon ended. Ordinary life resumed.
But ordinary life was sweet too.
They bought a small house. Nothing big—two bedrooms, one living room, a south-facing window that let in a wide band of afternoon sun that fell exactly on the couch. Liu Ruping loved that light. In the afternoons she'd curl up on the couch with her feet tucked under her, watching TV or scrolling her phone. The sun would fall across her and turn everything warm.
Ye Chen brought his father-in-law to live with them. The older man was quiet, not unlike Ye Chen himself. The two of them could sit in the living room for an entire hour without speaking, each watching his own program, and the silence wasn't awkward—it was comfortable. Liu Ruping would poke her head out of the kitchen while she was cooking, take one look at them, shake her head with a smile, and disappear back inside.
They still went out. They commuted together, took day trips together, and the two-days-on, two-days-off schedule made the weeks go fast.
About a year of that kind of happiness passed.
Then the financial crisis hit.
The financial crisis didn't arrive all at once. It crept in.
First the orders thinned out. The warehouse shelves went from full to half-full, then from half-full to empty. The numbers Ye Chen counted each day got smaller. The shipping manifests got thinner. On the production floor it was the same—machines started going offline in rotation, some of them down for a full day at a stretch.
Then the layoffs started.
When the first round of names came out, Liu Ruping's was on the list.
The day she got the notice, her face was calm. She folded the paper and put it in her pocket, said goodbye to her coworkers one by one, and then walked to the warehouse. She stood outside the plastic strip curtain and looked at Ye Chen.
"I'm heading out," she said, in the same tone she used when she dropped off a delivery. "Take your time."
Ye Chen nodded. He wanted to say something, but his throat felt like it was packed with something solid.
She turned and left. Still in her work uniform, she walked out through the factory's front gate just like that.
Ye Chen was in the last round. He stayed on a full year after Liu Ruping left, responsible for processing and handing off everything in the warehouse. Every day he faced shelves that grew emptier, like sorting through a dead person's belongings.
On his last day, he turned off the warehouse lights and stood in the doorway looking back.
Empty. All of it empty.
He closed the door and walked away.
After leaving the factory, life had to start over.
But there was something more pressing than finding work—starting a family.
Ye Chen was the third of three brothers, but the first to get married. His older brothers were still single, so the expectation of carrying on the family line fell squarely on him and Liu Ruping. The elders in the family never said it outright, but the looks they gave, the way they asked *so, any good news yet?*—that was heavier than saying it directly.
Liu Ruping wanted children too. She'd never said so, but Ye Chen could tell. She'd linger a beat too long when she saw someone else's kid. She'd stop in front of baby supply stores when they were out shopping, then move on quickly, as if she didn't want to be caught looking.
They tried every day, without any precautions.
It didn't take long before there was good news—she was pregnant.
Liu Ruping stared at the two lines on the test for a long time. She held it up to the light and turned it one way, then another, as if she was afraid she'd misread it.
"Is this real?" she asked.
"Two lines," Ye Chen said. "It's real."
She smiled. Not the way she usually smiled—not just the corners of her mouth lifting. This was her whole self lit up from the inside. She set the test down on the table and wrapped her arms around Ye Chen, pressing her face into his chest. Her shoulders were shaking, but she wasn't crying. She was too happy—happy enough that her body didn't know what to do with it.
But two months later.
Liu Ruping was in the shower one evening. Ye Chen was on the couch watching TV when he heard a sound from the bathroom. Not a cry—more like the sound of someone whose throat had closed around something, who wanted to call out but couldn't get the sound through.
He got up and went to the bathroom door. "What's wrong?"
The door opened.
Liu Ruping stood in the doorway wrapped in a towel, hair wet, water still dripping from the ends onto the floor. One hand was held open, palm up. In her palm was something very small.
Almost too small to see.
Tears ran down her face, mixing with the water still on her skin. There was no way to tell which was which.
"The baby's gone."
Four words. Each one like a stone dropping out of her mouth, hitting the floor, hitting Ye Chen in the chest.
He looked at the tiny thing in her palm. That was their child. That was the two lines on the test, the night she'd laughed and held onto him, every hope and every imagined future—all of it compressed into something almost invisible in the center of her hand, and now gone.
He didn't know what to say. He reached out and pulled her into his arms. Her body was wet and cold, the edge of the towel catching against his arm. She buried her face in his shoulder and cried without making much sound, just her shoulders shaking.
All he could do was hold her.
It happened again. And again after that.
Each time the same sequence—hope, careful watching, then loss. The two lines on the test became a cruel thing, because they gave hope, and every time the hope was taken back.
The second time, Liu Ruping cried through the entire night. The third time, she didn't cry at all—she just sat on the edge of the bed with her hands on her knees, staring at the floor for a long time. The fourth time, she came out of the bathroom, walked up to Ye Chen, and said in a flat voice: "Gone again."
That word *again* was heavier than any tears.
After a while they got used to it. Not really used to it—they just learned not to let their hopes climb so high. They told themselves: maybe it's just not meant to be.
Liu Ruping was not the kind of person who stayed down.
If her body wouldn't cooperate, she'd put her energy somewhere else. She decided she wanted to open a restaurant.
She had her own way of doing things, shaped by years of watching her mother and helping out at her aunt and uncle's restaurant. She had real experience. She went to her aunt and asked if she could open a branch under the same name.
Her aunt said yes without hesitating.
"I trust your cooking," her aunt said. "Take the name. Make it work."
Ye Chen went with Liu Ruping to buy everything they needed. Pots, pans, bowls, tables, chairs, a sign, a menu—they picked out every item together. They rented a small storefront near their house, nothing big, room for five or six tables, kitchen in the back separated by a half-wall.
Opening day was chaos.
Liu Ruping ran the kitchen alone, managing three burners at once. One pan stir-frying, one pot simmering soup, one wok of oil for frying. Her hands never stopped—left hand working the pan, right hand seasoning, eyes on the heat, ears tuned to whatever the customers out front were calling for. Ye Chen worked the floor: greeting customers, running food, clearing tables, handling the register. The two of them moved like two gears locked together, turning.
It was hard going, but it turned.
It took about two weeks to go from chaos to second nature. After those two weeks, Liu Ruping could run the whole place by herself—kitchen, floor, register, all of it, without breaking a sweat. When she cooked, she had a rhythm, the same rhythm she'd had on the assembly line—fast, precise, no wasted motion.
Business was good.
Good enough that one customer came in four days out of every seven. He was a foreman from a construction site nearby. He always ordered the same dish, always drank the last of the broth, and always told Liu Ruping on his way out: "Boss, this tastes exactly like my mom's cooking."
Liu Ruping would smile when he said that. There was pride in that smile, and something else underneath it—she knew where her cooking came from. It came from her mother's hands. The mother who had left in the middle of the night when her heart stopped, leaving behind a lifetime of flavor pressed into her daughter's fingertips.
Every time Liu Ruping stood at the stove—firelight on her face, smoke curling above her head, her hands moving almost like dancing—Ye Chen thought she was radiant.
But it couldn't last.
The physical problems had never really gone away. The ongoing stress of trying to get pregnant had brought back the old stomach trouble, still without a clear diagnosis. Sometimes in the middle of cooking she would suddenly bend forward, both hands braced on the counter, face gone pale. When the pain passed, she'd straighten up and keep going.
Ye Chen saw it happen more than once. Every time he wanted to say *stop, just stop,* but he knew it wouldn't do any good. She wouldn't stop.
After nearly a year, her body finally gave out.
Liu Ruping made a decision—she would close the restaurant.
When she told the regulars, a lot of them were genuinely heartbroken. The foreman who came four days a week stood at the counter for a few seconds, not saying anything, and then said: "Boss, where am I supposed to eat when you're gone?"
Liu Ruping smiled. "Go home and eat your mom's cooking."
On the last day of business, she cleaned the kitchen until it was spotless. Wiped down the stove, washed every pot, went over the counter three times with a cloth. She stood in the empty kitchen and looked around once, then turned off the light.
Ye Chen was waiting at the door.
When she walked out, she didn't look back.
After the restaurant closed, she stayed home to rest.
But Liu Ruping's determination hadn't changed—she was going to give Ye Chen a child.
Ye Chen ached for her, but he knew he couldn't stop her. That was who she was. Once she'd made up her mind, nothing on earth could pull her back.
This time they decided to let things happen naturally. No pressure, no tracking, no stacking their hopes so high each time.
But the result was the same.
She still couldn't hold on.
Liu Ruping's health went back and forth. On good days she'd smile, cook, pull Ye Chen out for a walk. On bad days she'd lie in bed all day without speaking, face turned toward the wall, blanket pulled up to her shoulders.
Ye Chen wanted to take some of the pain from her. He had no way to do it.
The only thing he could do was get in the car after work every day and drive her around. Nowhere specific—just driving. Along the country roads, past fields and temples and the roads they'd taken on trips years before. Windows down, wind coming in, her hair blowing loose. She didn't bother fixing it.
Sometimes she'd say out of nowhere: "We came here once."
Sometimes she said nothing and just watched out the window.
Her temper got shorter. She'd flare up over small things—a bowl not washed clean enough, laundry hung wrong, the TV too loud. When she got angry her voice went sharp, like a needle pushed into the air.
Ye Chen didn't argue back. She'd yell; he'd listen. She'd throw something; he'd pick it up. She'd cry; he'd hand her tissues.
He let her take it out on him. No resentment.
Because he understood. She wasn't angry at him. She was angry at her own body, angry at all the pregnancies that hadn't held, angry at the illness that no doctor could explain. Her anger wasn't aimed at him—he just happened to be standing closest.
So he stood there. Let her hit, let her yell, let her pour every bit of grief and frustration onto him.
When she wore herself out, he'd set a glass of water down within reach.
Sometimes she'd pick it up and drink. Sometimes she wouldn't. But the water was always there.
*In those years, he learned one thing—* *Loving someone doesn't mean keeping her from pain.* *It means still being there when she's in it.*
*He didn't know yet that this* being there *would become his deepest regret.*