A Girl’s Heart - Chapter 6

Chapter 6

Suddenly, I understood why she had never been able to stay with anyone for very long.

Exactly. Never work with beautiful women. Working with them will always bring you bad luck.

For the first time, I felt sorry for her foolish old lover.

How could he not understand something so simple?

“So did you quit right then?”

“Not yet. I still cared about him. At that time, he had run out of money and had to borrow money at high interest just to pay the workers. I took the last eighty million dong I had and lent it to him.

“See? I loved him wholeheartedly too.

“And that’s not even counting the fact that I worked for him for eight months, and he only managed to pay me 400.000 USD.”

“Wait! Why did he have to pay you?”

At my question, she looked genuinely surprised.

“Why wouldn’t he? I was working for him, so of course I had to be paid!”

“But didn’t you say the two of you were business partners? You split the profits three ways—he got two shares and you got one.”

She replied as calmly as though she were stating an obvious fact.

“Well, I still had to live, didn’t I? If the business lost money, that was his responsibility, not mine. Five million dong a month was ridiculously little. Someone like me could earn seven or eight million anywhere.”

“So where are you working now?”

For a moment, I noticed a hint of awkwardness in her expression.

“I’m not working anywhere. Why would I work for someone else? I take on design projects from home.”

“Does it pay well?”

I asked sincerely. Her face brightened.

“Quite well. Just two months ago, I took on a house-foundation design project. I finished it in one evening while chatting online at the same time, and they still paid me 200.000 USD.”

“That’s wonderful! You really are lucky. I graduated in construction three years ago, and I only make five million dong a month. I’ve tried to find extra work, but there’s nothing available. Whenever you have too much work and can’t finish it all, send some my way. By the way, what are you designing now?”

“Last month, a friend and I took on a project to design an additional floor for the National Academy of Public Administration. We spent so much time on it, and in the end, we couldn’t even get the construction permit. All that work was for nothing. See? I really am cursed with this White Ox fate. I got so fed up that I came up here for a little getaway.”

Now I understood why she had managed to stay so young for so long.

For a woman to remain young and beautiful, perhaps the secret was simply to take life lightly and not worry too much. Eight months of working for a company that made losses but still paying her forty million dong—and one month of unpaid work—could sit side by side, yet she simply refused to dwell on either of them.