Wasn't she going to perform the drum dance? Why wasn't she wearing her costume? Or her makeup? Could it be that she was going to dance like that?
Lu Jinnian furrowed his brows, then he heard the presenter ask, "Qiao Anhao, your last two performances were spectacular, what will you perform for us this time?"
"Well, actually, I originally prepared something special for everyone, but because of a few reasons, I changed it the last minute." Up on the stage, Qiao Anhao looked slim and elegant.
Changed the last minute? Was it because Lin Shiyi? Lu Jinnian suddenly froze.
The presenter asked, "What has Qiao Anhao changed her performance to in the last minute?"
She looked into a camera. "A story."
"A story?" the presenter put on a face as though he was really interested. "Alright, then the stage is yours. We're all looking forward to hearing your story."
Qiao Anhao was the only person left on stage. She stood there in silence for ten seconds before raising the microphone and saying the lines she memorized backstage. "He said he waited for me for thirteen years. Thirteen years. It's easy to say those two words, but behind those words are almost five thousand long nights. But he has no idea that the most memorable of those nights was the night he waited for me for sixteen hours. That night, we made plans to have dinner together, but I stood him up. It was raining that night, but he still stubbornly wouldn't leave. He sent me a lot of texts to reiterate that he was still waiting for me there, and he wouldn't leave."
When Lu Jinnian heard this, his expression instantly stopped still. He stared straight at Qiao Anhao on the stage.
The assistant whispered into his ear, "Mr. Lu, it seems like Miss Qiao is talking about you."
Qiao Anhao smiled. "At school, I would often see him through the window, sketching in class. At the time, I was really curious to know what he was drawing, but I never had the opportunity to ask him. After so many years, I went to go find him one day. In one of the rooms in his house, I saw a stack of papers with sketches of the same girl. They were all different. One of them were of her pushing a bike, another of her sleeping spread out on a desk, another of her biting a pen thinking about how to answer a question... That girl was me, when I was young."
So, she saw those sketches of her in Mount Yi villa.
Lu Jinnian couldn't help but follow Qiao Anhao's lead and curve the corners of his lips into a smile.
"There was one time during filming when I got into an accident. I fell from a cliff and rolled down into a river, then in the blink of an eye, I floated really far away. Back then, I really thought I was going to die, but I didn't want to die, so I worked hard to fight back. In the end, I fell unconscious. When I opened my eyes, I saw him completely drenched, and at that moment, I felt like I was the happiest woman in the world, because even whilst dying, I had someone by my side." When Qiao Anhao said this, her voice was gentle. She forced a smile onto her lips, but her eyes were filled with tears.
"Last spring, two friends took drugs. Coincidentally, I was quite close with one of them, so I innocently got dragged into the chaos. He was so hurt that I was being cursed by everyone, he stood up and leaked the fact that he was an illegitimate child. He exposed all the flaws and dark secrets of his life to the public just to protect me."