Chapter 17 The Final Signature
Because of Ruoyu, other problems at Zhou Group were dragged into the light as well.
Tax gaps. Sky-high breach penalties. An artist pushed toward suicide.
One piece of bad news about Zhou Group after another arrived like a chain reaction.
Overnight, a company that had been hot and bright in the industry one second saw its stock crash the next.
Tens of billions in market value vanished.
It looked like a decline no one could pull back.
Some Zhou Group shareholders saw the danger and fled in a hurry.
Other senior shareholders and directors had long shown open dissatisfaction with Zhou Yang’s model of clinging to a single stream of traffic.
Ruoyu’s collapse gave them the perfect excuse to press the issue.
In the days that followed, they tripped him up at every turn.
Without Ruoyu as his pillar, Zhou Yang had no authority left.
He lost ground step by step among those calculating directors and shareholders.
In the end he was kicked out and left with a total defeat.
Of course, during that stretch I did not forget to drive one more blade in.
When I brought a lawyer team and a prepared Divorce Agreement to him again, he no longer fought me.
He signed without hesitation.
In fact, from the first time he had stalled on signing the Divorce Agreement, I had already started the lawsuit process.
Back then, the court had rejected my petition on the grounds that the marriage had not broken down and divorce would not be supported.
After that, Zhou Yang kept contacting me without pause.
First he sent gifts. Then he flew all the way out, squeezing time just to see me.
He fixed up the little courtyard. He even found me a new pet rabbit.
Only that rabbit died again in transit and never reached my hands.
Aside from aching for the rabbit, I ignored all of it.
I knew Zhou Yang’s nature, and I knew that scrap of pride he carried.
Before, he had refused to divorce me because he still believed he had the power to give me everything good.
Now he had nothing left, so of course he no longer wanted to drag me down with him.
Still, the moment we walked out of the civil affairs bureau with the papers, he asked me one more question.
“If everything started over, and Ruoyu had never been between us, would you still have been willing to love me?”
I said, “If everything started over, I would rather never have known you at all.”
In that moment his eyes reddened a little. His lips trembled.
Something that looked like a knife-edge of pain seemed to spill from his gaze.
He stood silent for a long while before he finally forced out one line.
“All right. I understand.”
That was the last time I ever saw Zhou Yang.
Because the next day, he jumped from the rooftop of the Zhou Group building he had once lived by.