Private Museum

Cheng Jianjun's situation was impossible to keep under wraps. Just as Han Chunming had said, the neighbors, relatives, and friends all knew what kind of person Cheng Jianjun was: petty and obsessed with saving face. Being absent for so long and never going home said plenty. Gossip had been flying everywhere for ages.

Still, this kind of attention could not last forever. Real-life buzz was just like online buzz—limited. It was only that in the internet age, information was so overwhelming that trends faded much faster. Compared with that, gossip in real life lingered a little longer.

Whenever people asked Cheng Jianjun's parents about him, they gave vague answers, saying only that Cheng Jianjun was busy. That kept the gossip alive even longer. People would casually speculate about Cheng Jianjun whenever they had nothing else to talk about. After smiling and greeting Cheng's father and mother, they would turn around and gossip with whoever they were walking with. Every word stabbed at Cheng's parents' hearts.

It was not until more than a year later that things gradually died down, with people only bringing it up now and then. It came up most often around the New Year. No matter how busy someone was, they could not possibly stay away for years without coming home for the holiday reunion. Not to mention that he had a child—he did not even come see the kid once. How hard-hearted did one have to be to do something like that? So everyone had quietly reached the same conclusion: Cheng Jianjun had probably gone back inside, and his sentence was likely not a short one.

Compared to Cheng Jianjun, who had once been filial but was now so absent that no one even knew whether he was dead or alive, Guan Ziqing and his wife—once