Chapter 172: A meeting
Dawn was breaking. Through the second-floor bedroom of Tian Tian's townhouse, past the crowns of the plane trees outside that rose almost level with the window, she could see clouds like cotton wool.
The sun had not yet risen.
Tian Tian lay in bed, her heart a tangle of conflicting feelings. As though counting sheep, she counted the dried petals in the vase beside the 2.2-meter bed, which felt far too big for one person no matter how she used it, murmuring, "Get up, don't get up, get up, don't get up..."
There had originally been a 1.8-meter bed here. Since they moved in, it had kept her company for at least six or seven years. She had counted love letters on that bed and spent countless days beside it studying for her secondary school and university entrance exams beneath a tiny pool of lamplight. But two months ago, her mother had replaced it with this enormous bed. In her mother's words, she would need a big bed sooner or later.
She was not even married yet, and they were already pushing her out the door.
The business with Xu Dong's family was always being discussed, encouraged, arranged, and calculated by women of her mother's generation. No one in her family was more enthusiastic about her eventually marrying into the Xu family than her mother, while Xu Dong's mother had long since made it clear that she wanted no other daughter-in-law.
In the past, Xu Dong's mother had given her a thousand yuan in New Year's money every year. Even among the gifts Tian Tian received each year, that was a substantial sum from one person. She had always wondered why Xu Dong's mother gave her so much. Now that she was grown up, she finally