Henceforth He Is the Moonlit Guest, I the Heavenly Sun

The night before the fall team-building party, the company broke out a find your match mystery-box game.

Whoever drew your name had to spend the day as your pretend couple.

My boyfriend, Dean Gilbert, picked up a slip. My name showed faintly through the back of the paper.

But the next second he set it down and reached for another one instead.

"I drew Amanda."

Smiling, he took her hand and led her up on stage for the cheek-kiss round.

The whole crowd laughed as she got kissed until her knees went weak, and the teasing started up again.

"Mr. Gilbert makes VP and walks off with a beauty too. Living the dream."

"Mr. Gilbert gets promoted, brings Amanda back to headquarters. Marriage and kids next, right?"

Amanda Fox looked up at him, shy and pleased.

We'd agreed we would go public once he was promoted.

But he avoided my eyes.

Suddenly I didn't feel like confronting him anymore. I sent my brother, the CEO, a message:

"Kill Dean Gilbert's promotion. I'm coming back to take over."

Headquarters had sent the transfer order long ago, calling me back to the group as Vice President.

Since he'd chosen his old flame,

then I'd take back every bit of light I'd ever shone on him.

From now on he could stand under the moon. I'd be the sun in the sky.

...

Catching sight of how pale my face had gone,

Dean Gilbert instinctively slid over to sit beside me.

He raised his glass, hiding his lips behind it, and explained in a low, gentle voice:

"That was just to keep things above suspicion. Don't read into it."

My chest felt tight and choked.

I opened my palm to show five slips of paper.

Every one had Amanda Fox's name written on it in his own hand.

This year's fall event was held at the water park.

There were five rounds of couple games,

not just the cheek-kiss round but a whole day as a pretend couple too.

So he'd prepared ahead of time, just so he could swap in Amanda Fox for every round.

Out of all five, not one had my name on it.

"Keeping things above suspicion, or planning this all along?"

His throat bobbed.

"Amanda's my mentor's daughter. She doesn't know anyone here, so of course I should look out for her."

"So that makes it okay to get cozy with someone else's boyfriend?"

"She doesn't know we're together."

"She doesn't know. Did you forget too?"

Something unnatural crossed his face.

"It's just a game. Don't blow it out of proportion."

I picked up the slip he'd tossed carelessly on the floor.

My name was covered in footprints.

This was the one I'd secretly slipped into the box after writing it myself.

The one time he drew it, he threw it away like trash.

He never knew

that what he'd thrown away wasn't just his secret girlfriend,

but the heiress of Gill Group.

Five years ago I hid my identity and started from the ground floor.

That same year he was brought in as a high-end hire, parachuted in as VP.

When we first got together, he was the one who raised the idea of keeping it quiet.

He worried people would say I'd risen by leaning on him.

And I was just as afraid that one day his own ability would be written off as nepotism.

So without a word between us, we kept the relationship underground.

He stayed above suspicion. I stayed hidden.

We were only waiting until we'd found our footing to go public.

And now he was about to rise to VP,

but the woman he'd always carried a torch for had arrived too.

His brow furrowed, his tone edged with the irritation of being caught out:

"You're that desperate to get married?"

"The promotion isn't even confirmed, and you're already forcing me to go public?"

My head snapped up.

Before, his caution had been about protecting me.

Now it had become his backup plan, his way out.

He caught that he'd said too much and gave my palm a secret squeeze:

"I know you get jealous."

"I've already set up dinner with my parents tomorrow night, the whole family."

"Come on, don't be like this?"

Against my will, my heart softened a little.

But the next second he shot to his feet

and draped a towel over Amanda Fox's shoulders,

covering every inch of her in her swimsuit.

A male coworker couldn't resist a crude joke:

"Never took Mr. Gilbert for the jealous type."

"Girlfriend's got a body that hot, of course you keep her behind closed doors for yourself."

His eyes went dark all at once, and he snapped out a warning:

"If you can't talk right, you can donate the mouth."

The coworker rushed to apologize to Amanda Fox.

The sight of him shielding her churned my stomach.

Back when I complained to him about coworkers spreading crude rumors about me,

he'd brushed it off and told me to keep my distance from men.

Now a few words about her, and he wanted to tear the man's mouth apart.

So real love really can't be hidden.

My phone buzzed. My brother had finally replied:

"A mature, healthy love is one you can hold hands in broad daylight."

"Come home, find someone who's your equal, and love out in the open."

The knot in my chest loosened a little.

I put the slips away and stood.

There really was no reason to keep shortchanging myself.

"Edna, this is the prize Dean and I won together. It's for you."

Amanda held out a swimsuit set, right up to my face.

I didn't take it.

Her eyes reddened on the spot.

"That was thoughtless of me. I forgot you don't like joining group activities, Edna."

Before she finished, her team members were already leaping in to defend her.

"If she doesn't swim, why come to a team outing? Who's she trying to seduce?"

"Somebody has good intentions and gets treated like dirt."

Dean's voice dropped a notch.

"Show some team spirit. Don't make a special case of yourself."

I stared at him in disbelief.

Five years ago I'd fallen into the water by accident, on the edge of drowning,

and he had thrown himself in to save me, nearly losing his own life doing it.

Ever since, I'd had a phobia of water.

He swore he'd be my personal lifeguard for the rest of my life.

Only last night he'd held me and coaxed me.

"Think of the outing as a fall date. With me there, no one would dare let you near the water."

Now he lowered his voice and pressed me.

"Don't give everyone something to laugh about. Swimming isn't scary. I've got you, whatever happens."

"Besides, you've got the anti-drowning bracelet."

He fastened the bracelet on my wrist without asking.

It was the first time in five years he hadn't kept his careful distance,

and he did it to save face for his precious first love.

I looked down at the bracelet.

"It hasn't been tested yet. You want me as your live data sample?"

His fingers paused. He explained,

"You're the lead designer on the product. It needed a real wearer for testing anyway."

"Today just happened to line up. Don't read so much into it."

The weight on my wrist was slight,

but it pressed the breath out of me.

I pushed him away, my face cold.

"Dean Gilbert, we're done."

Then I turned and walked off.

Amanda stuck out her foot on the sly, and I pitched into the pool.

Panicking, I grabbed at the bracelet's pull cord,

but it wouldn't open.

On instinct I cried out to Dean for help.

At last he forgot his careful distance and swam toward me in a panic.

Halfway there, Amanda called to him, crying.

"Dean, my leg's cramping."

He hesitated for half a second, then turned around.

Despair came down over me like a dome, sealing me in.

Three minutes passed,

and the bracelet valve that was supposed to release didn't respond.

Everything in front of me went black by degrees.

The water closed over my head, and a voice cut through the surface and reached my ears.

I couldn't make it out clearly.

"Ten minutes. The valve's open. Pull her up."

Soon a lifeguard jumped in and dragged me onto the deck.

I dimly saw someone kill the timer.

When I woke again, I was in a hospital.

The moment I opened my eyes, the terror of drowning was still lodged in my throat.

I gulped for air.

Dean threw his arms around me, his face full of dread over what had almost happened.

"Edna, don't be scared. It's all right now."

The thought of him abandoning me surged up, and the hurt with it.

I put everything I had into slapping him hard across the face.

He held his cheek, a flicker of shock in his eyes.

"I saved her because I was closer to her."

"You had the bracelet. It would release and get you help."

"So it was a few minutes late and you swallowed some water. What's there to sulk about?"

A few minutes.

For someone drowning, one second late can mean death.

I had struggled underwater for a full ten minutes.

I'd barely survived, and he thought I was making a fuss.

I shut my eyes and forced the words out.

"Get out. I don't want to see you again."

He froze, then clamped a hand around my wrist.

His palm landed right on the red welt the bracelet had cut into my skin.

He heard me suck in a sharp breath, and softly blew on the sore spot.

For that instant, I drifted back to before.

Even a single hangnail on my finger,

and he'd rub in hand cream dozens of times.

But now, with all that tenderness still in his eyes,

the words that came out were colder than the pool water.

"When you've cooled off, apologize to Amanda."

"She ended up in the hospital because of you, in tears the whole time, sick with guilt."

"Clear it up in the company group chat that it had nothing to do with her."

The absurdity of it swept over me.

They forced me into the water and I nearly died.

And because she shed a few crocodile tears,

he wanted me to swallow it all.

My throat wouldn't stop trembling. I said it one word at a time.

"I'm not apologizing. And another thing, we're breaking up."

His breath hitched.

"You know I can't stand to hear you talk about breaking up, and you're using it to threaten me?"

Being ignored turned his face black as ink.

But he collected himself quickly and tucked the blanket around me.

"It's all in the past. Rest up first. Once the promotion's confirmed, we'll make it official."

After he left, my brother came to the hospital with a legal team to take me home.

I handed the bracelet to the lawyers to lock down the evidence and open an investigation.

The broken pull cord, the tampered auto-release timing

there was no way it was a simple coincidence.

My phone erupted, buzzing without a break.

The big group chat was busy sharing every sweet moment of his day playing boyfriend to Amanda Fox.

Sunrise at the beach. Painting couple's mugs at the pottery studio.

A movie at the theater. A full day at the fall festival.

Even a family holiday dinner with his parents.

Every one of those wishes, we'd written into our shared notes together, late at night.

He used to say his whole world was work and me.

But today he'd walked another woman openly through every stop on the itinerary I'd built for the two of us.

One by one, checking off my private love plan.

The last photo was the two of them at the very top of the Ferris wheel, making a wish at the moon.

Amanda's caption read:

The bright moon that shone then once lit my radiant cloud home again.

The full moon was bright. Brighter still was the beaded bracelet on her wrist.

That was the keepsake Dean Gilbert had given me.

Years ago, when I lay unconscious and near death,

he, who had never believed in any god,

knelt up all ninety-nine steps at the chapel, pressing his forehead to the stone until it bled,

begging the monk to bless the bracelet, begging me to wake.

I'd worn it every single day, never taking it off,

and he'd handed it to Amanda while I was in the hospital.

So after everything, her moon still lit her way home.

The chat overflowed with people wishing them a lifetime together.

I left the group, and I unlinked the couple's shared notes.

Dean's soothing message came right after:

"Don't take the jokes in the group seriously. It's a holiday, people just want a little fun."

"Playing along with her was just for the game, and it makes up for what I owed you. Don't get petty and jealous and say things you don't mean."

I had no interest in arguing with him anymore.

This game he'd hidden for five years, this thing that couldn't stand the light, I was out.

I organized every screenshot into a file and sent it to corporate HR.

HR replied in seconds:

"Received. He's been added to the termination list."

"Per your request, we've also held off on publishing his promotion announcement."

I didn't set foot in the office again until the product rehearsal.

Only to be told

the bracelet project had been handed to Amanda Fox on short notice.

The core team was now her people too.

My breath caught.

I've never been able to beat my fear of water.

But I know better than anyone what a drowning person needs most.

So I forced myself through the fear, two full years of it,

before I designed this SOS bracelet.

Every parameter, every algorithm carried my blood and sweat,

and now they'd claimed it all as their own.

I called my lawyer at once.

He wrote back:

"The project patent authorship is already signed. Ownership of the parameter source files is frozen."

Then he attached screenshots of the backed-up project source files, and a photo of the patent authorship confirmation receipt.

With that assurance in hand, I walked calmly into the meeting room.

"Who gave you permission to touch my project?"

Dean frowned at me.

"Your design wasn't rigorous enough."

"Three minutes is too short. The false-trigger rate runs high."

"Amanda iterated on your base and pushed the threshold out to ten minutes."

My head snapped up.

"Ten minutes means the rescue almost certainly comes too late and the person drowns."

"You turned out fine, didn't you?"

He shot it back on reflex, then fell silent the moment it left his mouth.

My throat felt packed with broken glass, the pain of it fierce.

"I was racing the reaper for every second,

and you sat there with a stopwatch, helping her collect the extreme limit values?"

His face showed something like genuine confusion.

"Other testers know they're being tested. They anticipate, they react, the data's skewed."

"You happened to fall in, with no conscious interference. It's the most perfect simulation of an extreme drowning state."

"What exactly is your problem?"

Amanda cut in too.

She looked at me, her smile heavy with meaning.

"Edna, a flexible threshold gives the product much more room to iterate and upgrade."

"We can put out multiple versions based on user feedback and demand."

"It generates more revenue too."

"Mr. Gilbert is thinking about the company's interests."

"You're the lead designer. Shouldn't you be even happier with this result?"

Their words came down like ice water over my head.

So his saving Amanda had never been a split-second choice made in a panic.

He'd been calculating my threshold to death, working out how much money it could convert into.

In those ten minutes, my fear, my suffocation, even my life,

were worth nothing next to his profit and his prospects.

I looked at him, and all I felt was how far he'd fallen.

The man in front of me now, eyes full of calculation,

had nothing left of the clean, earnest one who'd pulled someone from the water when we first met.

Meeting my cold stare, his tone softened with a little concession.

"Seven minutes, then. That works, doesn't it?"

Then he had his secretary hand over two documents.

"Sign, and I'll have Amanda keep your co-creator credit."

The agreement demanded I license my base data for free and turn the design over to Amanda for iteration and production.

The other was a nondisclosure agreement on the flexible threshold data.

I finished reading, and a sense of the absurd crawled through me until it was almost terrifying.

Steal my design, then cover my mouth, and drag me along to profit off my own blood.

I looked Dean straight in the eyes.

"And if I don't sign?"

His brow furrowed, genuinely confused.

"It doesn't affect your return to headquarters."

"For you, the project is a nice bonus. For her, it's a lifeline."

"Leaving your name on it is already giving you a way out."

A way out.

I suddenly remembered the first year, when a project I'd led fell through,

and I couldn't sleep for nights on end.

He had comforted me the same way back then.

"Don't be scared. You still have me. I'm your way out."

Now he'd convinced himself he had the means to catch me when I fell.

He'd helped himself to my project to give his precious girl a foothold,

then handed me the slot to return to headquarters as his plus-one, like a favor.

He was certain I couldn't leave him, that I'd follow him like before,

and whatever he demanded,

I would swallow every grievance in silence.

I gave him a calm, level look.

"Dean, if I sign, my competitiveness for the return to headquarters gets cut down."

"So why are you still so certain I'll definitely make it back?"

He hinted at it.

"I have my own arrangements. We can discuss personal matters privately."

"Are we the kind of people who chat privately?"

His face shifted slightly. He pressed his lips together and said nothing.

The conference room broke into whispers at once.

"If they really are a couple, then why would he steal his girlfriend's project and hand it to Amanda?"

He clenched his back teeth, and when he spoke again his tone came down hard.

"It's nothing more than a working relationship."

"Talking privately was to spare you some dignity."

Amanda cut in quickly.

"Mr. Gilbert is considering the company's bigger picture and fairness. There's nothing personal involved."

He turned his face away, his voice stiff.

"Amanda took your early contributions into account and offered a compensation plan on her own."

"Sign it, and you can still keep the credit as co-designer."

"Don't sign, and you and your team walk away with nothing."

"Supervisor Gill, don't get too hung up on personal gain and loss."

I almost couldn't help laughing.

First he and Amanda seized everything I'd poured myself into, all dressed up as high principle,

then pinned on me the reputation of a woman greedy for credit who cared nothing for others.

And finally they played the good guys to win people over.

Quite the psychological game.

A pity that for all their calculations, the one thing they never accounted for was who I really am.

Meeting his eyes, so full of certainty, I curved my lips into a mocking smile.

"Since you're willing to stake your whole future on her,

then I hope that when the product launch comes, neither of you will regret it."

His pupils shrank.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

I couldn't be bothered to waste more words. I pulled the licensing agreement away and walked straight out.

They wanted to climb to the top on my shoulders.

So I would wait until they were one step away from success,

and let them fall from that height, hard.

The day of the product launch.

The moment I arrived at the company, I was told I'd been barred from entering.

Dean's assistant slipped me a dress and a card on the sly.

The card read:

"The promotion notice goes out in an hour. Wait for me at the hotel."

"Everything you wanted, I've already prepared."

I dropped the card into the trash,

and pushed open the doors of the venue with my brother at my side.

Amanda had just finished the product overview,

and Dean was presenting her with a bouquet of red roses in congratulation,

the room erupting in thunderous applause.

Then it cut off dead the instant they saw us.

Dean's pupils tightened, almost imperceptibly.

He rose in a hurry to greet my brother.

My brother spared him one cold glance,

then went straight to the head seat and sat down.

Dean froze where he stood, his expression awkward.

My brother tapped the proposal with his fingertip and put a question to Amanda at the podium.

"How did you arrive at this seven-minute upper limit?"

Her face changed slightly. She set down the bouquet

and stepped back up to the podium.

"We ran multiple rounds of live drowning-simulation tests and locked in the extreme value after repeated verification."

She accidentally pressed the clicker,

and the screen instantly popped up a parameter analysis chart, backed by a video link.

She scrambled to close it,

but my brother, the CEO, ordered her to open it.

The next second, the pool surveillance footage began to play, and in an instant it stunned the entire room.