Learning to Love Again

Su Lian smiles sarcastically at her words.

"What do you mean? This place is definitely not empty, especially with Su Mo Chou and her mother running around. If you ask me, it even seems too crowded."

Nanny Lai immediately frowns at the mention of their names. "Young miss, you shouldn't joke around. How can those two be compared with you and young master Qiong? A bratty bastard and a homewrecking mistress cannot even be taken out in public. Your father has only been temporarily blinded. I'm sure he will become clear about things very soon, but more importantly, he will be very glad to see you."

Su Lian raises an eyebrow at Nanny Lai's blunt words.

She isn't even hiding her hatred for them. She could only imagine the amount of drama that must have unfolded while she was gone.

When she lived here, it was a gigantic mess.

After her mother died and Qin Rong moved in, this place turned into a circus. Beautiful on the outside, but extremely ugly within.

With a mistress who didn't know her place and a servant who always tried to challenge her, the house became a war zone. A day could not go by without them fighting. They even clashed over the tiniest details.

It was almost like living in a palace drama set in ancient times. With chaos in the court and the emperor's harem and everyone being suspicious and throwing schemes at each other.

It made Su Lian feel overwhelmed and depressed.

Her father's unfaithfulness, her mother's death then Qin Rong moving in with all her dubiousness.

It was all too much for her to handle and so she broke down.

It took her a long time to adapt and get herself back together. But she still had trouble accepting things.

The only way she could manage to cope with it all was to forget reality.

She let her imagination run wild by reading books. She read all kinds. But she preferred fiction the most because they almost always had happy endings. Happiness that she could only wish for.

Along the line, she discovered art.

Paintings, sculptures, drawings, photography -she spent her days engulfed in all the different forms of it.

What had attracted her to art in the first place was its abstractness and the way it was so open to the viewer's interpretation.

With a painting, she could come to any conclusion she wanted. She could make up any background story for it. She could give the work its own identity. It was her choice, her decision to make.

For her, it felt fulfilling because it was the only thing in her life that she actually had control over.

She began living her life in an illusion, her own bubble. An isolated world of art and literature which she created for herself.

She had come to accept the fact that she would spend the rest of her life lost in a book or gazing at a work of art, but fate had other plans for her.

One night, when she was eighteen Nanny Lai and Qin Rong got into a heated argument over kitchenware. Her father wasn't home and things had escalated very quickly.

The household had divided into two with a group of servants standing on Qin Rong's side and another group stood behind Nanny Lai.

Not wanting to get involved, she took her week's savings and went to an art gallery.

It was that night.

That fateful night that she met 'him'.

She can still remember it like it was yesterday. He was standing in front of a beautiful painting wearing a plain white shirt and dark bootcut jeans...