My Chongxi Husband Is Faking His Coma novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Third Bow
At a chongxi wedding beside a comatose heir, Lin Zhi reads the uncle's sneaked-in clause aloud and crosses it out in front of thirty relatives; that night his husband's fingers close on his wrist and a hoarse voice says he missed page six.
Lin Zhi bowed to a man who could not see him.
It was the third bow, the one for husband and wife, and he gave it to a hospital bed.
The groom lay under a white sheet with a red ribbon knotted around the rail.
Thirty relatives in black stood along the wall of the private ward and watched.
The groom's Second Aunt wore pearls and a look of tight disgust.
Her son, a handsome young man in a pale suit, caught Lin Zhi's eye and smiled at him warmly.
A nurse in a red sash read the vows for the groom, because the groom could not.
"Do you take this man in sickness and in health?" she asked.
"I do," said Lin Zhi.
The monitor beside the bed beeped at its slow, steady pace, and Lin Zhi tried not to look at it.
His husband was Xie Zhaoran, twenty-nine years old, heir to the Xie Group, and nineteen months asleep.
The family called this a chongxi, a joy marriage, and the family's old fortune-teller swore it would pull the sleeper back to life.
Lin Zhi did not care what it pulled.
At eight that morning, one point eight million yuan had left a Xie account.
It had landed with the men who had been camped outside his mother's noodle stall.
His father's gambling debt was gone.
All it had cost him was the rest of his life, and a red jacket that was a size too big.
"Sign here, and we're done," said the lawyer.
He was a tall man in a grey suit, and he had been standing at Lin Zhi's elbow all morning.
He set one last page on the bedside table, with a pen laid neatly across it.
Lin Zhi picked up the pen and then picked up the page.
"Is this the same contract I read on Tuesday?" he asked.
"It's a formality," said the lawyer. "A small rider. Everyone is waiting."
Lin Zhi read it anyway.
He read slowly, because he had dropped out of law school for money and not because he was stupid.
Then he read it out loud, so the whole ward could hear it too.
"If the patient is declared incapacitated by the family board, the spouse hands every decision about his care and property to that board."
Nobody in the room moved.
"That isn't a formality," said Lin Zhi. "That's a sentence that says I can't stop you from doing anything to him."
"Mr. Lin," said the lawyer.
"I'm his husband. For three million yuan and about five more minutes, I'm the only person here who can say no."
He drew a line through the whole rider, and initialed the margin, and slid the page back across the table.
A man at the head of the room laughed softly and clapped three times.
He was the groom's Second Uncle, who had run the company since the crash.
He smiled warmly at everyone.
Beside him, the Second Aunt's mouth went thin.
"Good eyes," he said. "Cross it out, of course. We only wanted you to be careful."
Behind him stood his mother, small and straight, with a jade pin in her white hair and a black cane in both hands.
The old woman said nothing.
She watched Lin Zhi and did not blink.
Then she turned her cane and walked out, and the thirty relatives followed her, one by one, until the ward was nearly empty.
The nurse took off her red sash.
"The family says the bride stays beside the groom tonight," she told him. "It's bad luck to leave. I'll be at the station."
"Thank you," said Lin Zhi.
The door clicked shut, and for the first time in nine nights he was alone with his husband.
He sat down on the edge of the bed, hard, and pulled off the red jacket.
"Well," he said. "We did it, Mr. Xie. I'm your wife. Or your husband. I'm honestly not sure what the paperwork says."
The monitor beeped.
It was a one-sided conversation, but he had grown used to that.
Every night for nine nights, the fortune-teller had made him sit here and talk, so the groom's soul would learn his voice.
So he had talked.
Lin Zhi picked up the long, pale hand that lay on top of the sheet.
It was warm, and a little dry, and the nails had been trimmed by someone careful.
"You have the best hands in this building," he told it. "That includes the surgeons."
"It's a waste. Nobody should lie in a bed for nineteen months with hands like these."
He ran his thumb over the knuckles, to see if the skin would warm up under it, and the skin did.
"I'm going to be honest with you, since you can't tell anyone," he said.
"I almost didn't cross it out. I almost signed, because my hands were shaking."
He laughed at himself, quietly.
"Then I thought, he'd hate that. I don't even know you, and I thought, he'd hate that."
The monitor beeped.
Lin Zhi sat there in his undershirt, holding a stranger's hand, and for a while he didn't say anything at all.
Then the fingers closed around his wrist.
They were not weak.
He tried to pull back, and they tightened.
From the pillow came a dry, rusty whisper that had not been used in a very long time.
"You missed one," said Xie Zhaoran. "Page six."
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