"Clara, you done yet?"

With her back to the desk, Iris Navarro was already undoing the buttons of her white coat, her long fingers moving fast.

They had pulled two all-nighters in a row. Her eyelids were practically glued together, and all she wanted now was to face-plant onto a bed.

"Just a little more. If you're wiped, Senior, you can head out first."

The girl's soft, mellow voice drifted through the empty lab, gentle enough to make people pause.

If anyone listened closely, though, they would catch the obvious fatigue underneath it, the kind that came after being tired for way too long.

"It's fine. We'll go together."

Iris shook her head, trying to stay awake, then turned to look at her junior, who was still bent over the desk, writing nonstop.

Clara Whitfield was wearing the same spotless white coat.

Her dark, silky hair was tied into a high ponytail with a plain hair tie, and it swayed lightly every time she reached over to flip through her notes.

Her skin was fair and smooth, almost unreal, like a freshly peeled egg. Under a wispy set of airy bangs sat a pair of round, watery eyes.

A pair of black square-framed glasses rested on her slightly upturned nose, covering nearly half her tiny face, while her pink lips pressed together a little.

She looked serious and proper, but there was also a trace of unhappiness there, which somehow made her seem... soft and adorable.

In a crowd like theirs, doctors known for being strict and precise, the word adorable probably sounded a bit out of place.

But Clara looked too soft.

Just going by her face, she was exactly the kind of girl people would assume was easy to bully at first glance.

Iris had to admit it—every single time she looked at her junior, she still got hit with that same flash of amazement.

Someone with a face like that could totally coast through life on looks alone, yet she had gone and become ridiculously accomplished while still so young.

Top scorer in the science track on the Jingshi college entrance exam. Perfect marks in math and science. Straight through a top-tier university from bachelor's to PhD. And in her freshman year, she had already become the one and only final student personally taken by Professor Ashton, a giant in the medical field.

Iris was two years ahead of her, and even then, she barely qualified to help out around the edges. Seriously, comparing people like this was enough to make anyone want to cry on the spot.

Still, she wasn't jealous at all.

Getting carried by a boss-level genius really felt insanely good.

Just last month, the surgery theoretically led by Clara Whitfield had gone down as a once-in-history success in the medical field. It brought their lab close to a hundred million in funding with basically zero stress, and their professor even used it as a model case in class.

She was still so young, yet she was already making waves.

A lot of people were saying that twenty-three-year-old Clara’s future in medicine would probably be no less impressive than her mentor’s—and her mentor was already pretty much the ceiling.

And this time, if the Dawn Project proposal they’d stayed up all night rushing to finish got approved by the university and officially launched—

that would be a huge highlight on all their resumes.

And every bit of that had everything to do with the girl standing right in front of her.

She looked soft and harmless, like some fluffy little lamb.

Seriously, Iris Navarro could never figure out how someone with such a naturally gentle, non-threatening face had ended up choosing surgery of all things.

Because everyone knew surgery was brutal—exhausting, high-pressure, and absolutely not for the weak.

Iris yawned, then thought about how this same girl, once inside the operating room, moved with crisp precision, blade in hand, never hesitating for even half a second. Her mind wandered, looping back to another thing that had shocked her before.

With a future this bright, why had her junior gotten married so early?

They’d known each other for two years, and Clara’s husband was mysterious to the point of being unreal. Forget meeting him—Iris had never even seen a normal text from the guy.

He was like some invisible extra. Present or not, who could even tell?

If she hadn’t happened to see Clara’s personal info when she joined the lab, no one would’ve guessed that someone this outstanding was actually a married college student.

Smart people don’t fall in love.

Marriage is a graveyard, and her junior had jumped in kinda early.

"I’m done, Senior."

Clara sorted the important files by her hand, locked them neatly into her drawer, then took off her white coat in one smooth motion. Clean, quick, practiced. After that, she left with Iris.

When the two of them walked out of the lab building, the sky was just starting to pale. A thin wash of morning light slipped through the light clouds and scattered softly across the campus.

Daybreak had only just arrived. At that hour, aside from a few students out for morning runs, the university was almost completely empty.

Clara Whitfield found her little scooter tucked away in a corner, dropped Iris Navarro off at the dorm, then rode straight toward the school gate.

She didn’t live on campus. She lived off-site.

In Jingshi, where every inch of land cost a fortune, there was a more-than-three-hundred-square-meter luxury flat in Tinglan Huafu, all floor-to-ceiling windows and wide-open views, registered under Clara’s name by Nathan Caldwell.

When Clara got home, she pulled a bottle of mineral water from the fridge, twisted it open with one hand, and gulped down half of it in one go. As she drank, her eyes swept over the empty marriage home around her.

Three years of marriage.

The number of times Nathan Caldwell—her husband—had actually come here could be counted on one hand.

It wasn’t a broken marriage. It wasn’t some cold war or living separately because they didn’t get along.

It was just that Nathan Caldwell had gone overseas on a peacekeeping mission. He simply had no time to build a relationship with the wife he’d been married to for three years, who still somehow felt like a newlywed left on read by life.

He had always been the brightest, most outstanding golden boy in the compound. Once he set his mind on something, he never cared about obstacles. Step by step, he followed his own plan and turned himself into exactly the man he wanted to be.

Like his grandfather.

A hero.

Something crossed Clara’s mind. She took out her phone, opened WeChat, found the contact marked “Second Brother,” and sent a message she wasn’t even sure he’d ever see.

“Today is Mom’s birthday.”

With a soft ding, the message went through.

Clara scrolled up through the chat history. It was basically all her talking to herself.

Only three or four messages in total, spaced out across years, then months, and the most recent one was the one she had just sent.

She waited a few minutes. Same old story—nothing.

Total silence, like the message had sunk into the sea without a ripple. On the rare occasions he did reply, it was always short, just a few words, like he’d typed them in the middle of something urgent.

Most of the time, Clara didn’t even get texts. She waited for his calls instead—encrypted numbers she couldn’t call back.

As a qualified military wife, she should understand that. She should support her husband’s work.

Clara took a deep breath, then let it out hard. The bitterness and restlessness in her chest eased by about half, but not completely.

She lowered her head and went into the bathroom, took a quick shower, set her alarm, pulled the blanket over herself, and fell asleep fast.

When the alarm rang, Clara still wasn’t fully awake. She dragged herself up in a daze, sat on the bed spacing out for a while, then slowly got herself together. After that, she picked up the carefully wrapped wooden box from the living room and took a cab back to the compound.

In the garage, Nathan Caldwell’s big G sat under a thin layer of dust, and Clara Whitfield had never once thought about driving it.

She didn’t even have a license. There were way too many cars in Jingshi, and honestly, the traffic scared her.

The cab got stopped right at the entrance of the compound. Left with no choice, Clara paid, got out, and walked in by herself.

Luckily, the Caldwell residence wasn’t far from the gate. It wouldn’t take long on foot.

As she made her way down the road, she spotted plenty of cars lined up on both sides. Quite a few license plates looked familiar.

It wasn’t like she had some weird hobby of memorizing plates. She just happened to remember anything she saw once.

And besides, those cars showed up in front of her often enough that forgetting them was basically impossible.

Like that absurdly bright pink Porsche.

It belonged to the person she hated most in the compound—Serena Holloway.

On a day like this, her showing up wasn’t surprising at all.

Serena’s favorite thing in the world was buttering up Mrs. Caldwell while taking cheap shots at Clara on the side.

As for why, the reason was simple enough.

Because Clara had married into the Caldwell family.

Because of Nathan Caldwell.

"Auntie, why isn’t Clara Whitfield here yet? Don’t tell me she forgot what day it is today. Unlike us, we rushed over first thing in the morning."

"And Nathan too—he flew back from overseas last night." The young woman’s spoiled, showy voice drifted out from inside the house.

"Can you say less for once..." came another voice, someone from the compound who was close with Nathan.

Clara stopped outside the door. Her head lowered slightly, lips pressed together, the unhappiness plain on her face.

There was another major reason she couldn’t stand Serena.

That woman had the kind of voice that could blow the roof off. Every sentence had to be loud enough for the whole world to hear, and it gave Clara a headache every single time.

Still, annoying as she was, Serena had just let something pretty interesting slip.

Nathan Caldwell was back.

Except apparently, the only person who didn’t know was his wife.