Fifteen Days Before Our Wedding, I Walked Away

"Lina spent ten years following the gifted researcher Arthur, from silently admiring him to becoming his fiancée. But she gradually realized that Arthur had only agreed to marry her out of guilt after the kidnapping case, while his true patience, closeness, and indulgence were all reserved for Mia, the daughter of his mentor. On the eve of the wedding, Lina applied for a transfer to the Western Research Center, sold the house under her own name, and for the first time explicitly refused to keep cleaning up Arthur’s life. When Mia passed off research results that Lina had helped complete as her own, Arthur not only publicly vouched for Mia, but also pulled Lina out of the venue and tried to buy her silence with a kiss. Lina ended the engagement completely, withdrew the data she had organized, handed the original records over to the research institute, and after completing the handover, left for the west alone. Only after the wedding was canceled and Lina disappeared entirely from his life and work did Arthur realize that he had long treated her devotion as a permanent given. In the west, Lina threw herself back into research and fieldwork, and gradually regained her self-respect and her life through the candid yet measured companionship of Leon, a geology researcher. After the research institute clarified the attribution of the paper, Mia was expelled, and Arthur traveled west to apologize and express his regret, but he could not change Lina’s decision. After enduring sandstorms, emergency equipment repairs, and a landslide rescue, Lina completely let go of the old relationship, built a new life of mutual growth with Leon, and reaffirmed the value of her career through her own desert ecology research."