A Girl’s Heart - Chapter 5

Chapter 5

I exclaimed in astonishment.

She turned toward me and nodded.

“Yes. He’s actually quite well-known online. Just type his name into Google and you’ll see.”

“And you still broke up with him? What a waste! If I were you, I’d buy a rope—no, a heavy-duty one—and tie him tightly to myself. So, what happened with the second project? Did that one fail too?”

“No. The second project made a profit.”

“How much?”

“I don’t really know. At the time, I needed money to buy a motorbike for my son. He knew about it, so he advanced me 300.000 USD.”

“So that project must have made nearly a hundred million dong in profit. How much did the house cost for the profit to be that high?”

“The total cost of the house was three hundred million dong.”

“A thirty-percent profit!”

I cried out.

“Forget it! When I get back tomorrow, I’m definitely quitting my company and going into construction contracting!”

Hearing me say that, she looked slightly stunned.

“Hmm, you’re right! I never really thought about it. He gave me the money himself; I never asked him for anything. And he really was unlucky. Just when the house was completed, the homeowner went bankrupt. There’s still fifty million dong that we haven’t been able to collect to this day. I told you, I was born under the White Ox, so wherever I go, bad luck follows.”

“So that means you made a profit while he took the loss. He really did turn losses into profits.”

I joked. Her face turned red.

“Yes. Sometimes when I think back on it, I really feel sorry for him. When we first fell in love, he had a few hundred million dong. But by the time we broke up, he was buried in debt. And it was his own fault. If money means nothing to you and the only thing you care about is appearances, of course you’re going to end up poor.

“Before that, I always thought writers and poets were weak, sentimental people. Turns out I was wrong. Those artists all have strong personalities. My man wasn’t just strong-willed—he was incredibly tough, too.

“The last time I was still working for him, our company won a tiling contract for the largest real-estate corporation in the country. At the beginning of the project, we lost nearly 500 USD. I told him:

‘Let’s just quit, honey.’

“He said to me:

‘Quit? What do you mean, quit? Let me ask you something. Was our failure this time because our contract price was too low, or because our management and construction organization were poor?’

‘Obviously, it was the management.’

‘If it was a management problem, then we have to look at ourselves and figure out where we went wrong so we can reorganize the operation. Why would we quit? Besides, we’ve already poured a huge amount of money into this project. How can you simply say we should walk away?’

“Listening to him made me shudder.

“Before that, when we worked on houses for private clients, I barely paid attention to anything. He handled everything. I wouldn’t even show up at the site until nine or ten in the morning. Whether I was there or not hardly mattered. I went mainly to keep him company rather than to work.

“But now we were working on a major construction site, and he insisted that I go there every single day. At the beginning, there were even days when I had to climb thirty-five floors on foot just to bring lunch to the workers.

“And look at me—I’m practically a flower.”

She said that and pulled up her sleeve, showing off her smooth, fair skin.

“Well, business can’t always be easy. Sometimes you have to work hard.”

Hearing me say that, she shook her head.

“It’s fine for men to work hard, but women are different. Don’t you see? So many women spend money on cosmetic procedures—skin treatments, breast augmentation, all sorts of things. They spend money trying to buy beauty, and sometimes they still don’t get it.

“So why would I sell my beauty just to earn money?”

I had met quite a few beautiful women. It seemed that most of them thought the same way she did. They were flowers. They wanted to be pampered. They wanted to be ornaments at parties, not decorations on chaotic construction sites under the blazing sun and surrounded by dust.