Adored by Him: My Blissful Days as the Girl Next Door-Chapter 425 - 424: Seeing Thoroughly

The final exam dates were quickly set for the last three days of the month.

A week before the exams, to cram at the last minute, Zhao Meimei and Peng Hui both moved back to the dormitory.

At night, the three of them crammed vocabulary together, and after a while, Peng Hui couldn’t resist taking out her phone to send a message.

Zhao Meimei asked her, "Texting your sister?"

Peng Hui said, "Yeah, she’s alone in the hospital, so I can’t feel at ease."

Zhao Meimei consoled her, "It should be fine. Didn’t you say your sister can move around on her own now?"

Peng Hui replied, "That’s true, but with her big belly, I still can’t rest easy. I’m scared she’ll accidentally bump into something."

Zhao Meimei said, "Stop worrying, it will be fine. The exams are in two days. If you keep getting distracted like this, how can you remember the words?"

Peng Hui gave a soft acknowledgment, but after a while, she couldn’t help taking out her phone to send another message.

After the first day of exams, Zhao Meimei was desperately missing Shi Yang. As soon as she turned in her paper, she rushed home.

With Zhao Meimei gone, Peng Hui felt distracted too, and decided to take a taxi to visit her sister in the hospital.

When Peng Hui eagerly arrived at the hospital room, she noticed her sister wasn’t there. The bedding on the bed was still crumpled as if she hadn’t gone far.

Peng Hui was taken aback and turned to ask the family member of the pregnant woman in the adjacent bed, "Do you know where my sister went?"

The person said, "Your sister mentioned she went for a walk, and she’s been gone for half an hour."

Upon hearing this, Peng Hui hurriedly went out to search, but after a round of the floor, she couldn’t find her sister anywhere.

Peng Hui called her sister, only to hear the phone ringing in the drawer of the bedside table. Her sister hadn’t taken it with her.

Worried about her sister, Peng Hui didn’t know where to start looking, so she anxiously paced back and forth in the hospital ward, waiting.

At that time, she hadn’t thought, or even considered, that in the period she moved back to campus to study, her sister would take the elevator to the sixth floor every day, peeking into each room until she found the familiar figure in the deluxe room that she couldn’t forget.

The first to discover Peng Rui wasn’t Qu Chaozong, who was being peeked at daily, but Zhang Xin.

Zhang Xin happened to be returning from outside that day and saw a young woman in hospital garb walking toward her.

The sixth floor belonged to the internal medicine department, with only four deluxe rooms at the end of the corridor facing each other. The woman seemed to have just left that area.

Thinking she might be from the neighboring room, Zhang Xin took an additional glance.

Unexpectedly, the next day, she saw the woman again.

That time, Zhang Xin carried some clean clothes from home and, upon exiting the elevator, saw the young woman peeking through the glass at her grandfather’s room from afar.

Seeing the woman’s fair side profile, Zhang Xin immediately realized this must be Peng Rui, Qu Chaozong’s ex-girlfriend, hospitalized due to an unstable pregnancy position.

Zhang Xin stood still, watching Peng Rui intently.

Peng Rui, from outside the room, was staring unblinkingly at Qu Chaozong, who was sitting on the sofa inside.

Qu Chaozong, side facing the door, was engrossed in a chess game with the old man opposite him.

When someone is deeply mired in despair, no one can save them; the only person who can is themselves.

From childhood, Peng Rui’s will had been weak and she loved vanity, always feeling burdened by her family, yearning to live a wealthy life.

The reason she resolutely broke off with Qu Chaozong was not lack of love, but fear that if she stayed with him, her life would end up like her parents’, working hard to earn and support the family, living a life of poverty and despair.

Since sophomore year when she got with Sun Yingyu, until now, approaching thirty, divorced, and pregnant, a few years of youth only yielded a house and over a million in savings. In this high-cost provincial city, she couldn’t tell how long this money would last.

Nobody knew the psychological struggle and torment Peng Rui went through during this period. She desperately suppressed her emotional setbacks and failures, unwilling to acknowledge her depression and despair.

During her most painful time, she couldn’t help but recall those years with Qu Chaozong.

The happy days she abandoned without hesitation had now become her only cherished memory.

The more difficult life became, the more she longed to return to the past, repeatedly reminiscing on the times when Qu Chaozong doted on her.

Zhang Xin never mentioned Peng Rui’s daily visits to Qu Chaozong. She kept it to herself, paying close attention, even following Peng Rui to see which floor and room she lived in.

After figuring out Peng Rui’s infusion schedule, Zhang Xin began to seize the time when Peng Rui was free, dragging Qu Chaozong home to arrange their new place.

In matters of relationships, Zhang Xin was quite adept; she tolerated Peng Rui’s lingering near her domain because she trusted Qu Chaozong and didn’t see Peng Rui as a threat. On the other hand, she understood the adverse consequences of overreacting to Peng Rui.

Zhang Xin saw the situation clearly, avoiding typical jealous and foolish actions other women might make in anger.

However, having kept her dissatisfaction bottled up for too long, Zhang Xin occasionally vented her frustrations by "tormenting" Qu Chaozong in bed with different methods, leaving him painfully happy while deepening their mutual affection.

Zhao Meimei began her summer vacation in full swing, and Shi Yang’s early childhood education program officially launched.

Mu Guangping personally came to stay for a week, teaching and demonstrating alongside specialists he brought along, conducting lessons for early childhood educators. Six final selections were made from the fifteen hired teachers.

Today’s kids are incredibly precious; each child has six grandparents and parents working hard to give them the best.

Hearing early education can benefit a child’s intelligence, word spread quickly, and soon families were inquiring and seeking consultations. To accommodate these parents, Mu Guangping specifically brought along two outstanding staff members from the HQ’s publicity department to assist with parent communications.

On the opening day, all six early childhood classes were full, and parents who couldn’t enroll their kids still lined up daily hoping to get in.

Sitting down with Mu Guangping, Shi Yang decided to capitalize on this momentum, quickly securing three additional storefronts in the prime areas of the city’s other three major districts, hastening renovations with plans to open by October 1st.