Chapter 1: A Strange Contract

Đỗ Diệu My, twenty-six, a marketing manager at a media company, was facing the very real threat of being dragged back to her hometown by her mother for her fifth blind date of the year. In the middle of that dead end, she ran into Vũ Thành Đạt again: the young CEO of a tech startup, and her sworn enemy from university, because he had always come second to her in every academic competition.

As fate would have it, Thành Đạt had the same problem. His grandmother, who held a crucial stake in the family company, had announced that she would pass the inheritance to his cousin unless Đạt “settled down” before her seventieth birthday, which was only three months away.

“We have the same problem. Why not solve it together?” Thành Đạt proposed at a class reunion neither of them had wanted to attend, his eyes as confident as they had been back then. “You play my girlfriend for three months and meet my grandmother. In return, I’ll play your boyfriend whenever your mother calls to check on you. A fair contract. When it expires, we go our separate ways.”

Diệu My narrowed her eyes at him, suspicious and calculating at the same time. She couldn’t deny it was a reasonable solution, as long as they kept it strictly professional and didn’t let real feelings get involved.

“Fine,” she said, holding out her hand. “But let me be clear. I don’t do clumsy acting.”

“Don’t worry,” Đạt said with a crooked smile, one that made her heart skip a beat, which surprised even her. “Neither do I.”

They signed a simple handwritten “contract” on a café napkin, full of ridiculous terms: no genuinely liking each other, no jealousy without reason, and most important of all, when the contract ended, they would “break up” peacefully, with no messy drawn-out goodbyes.

Neither of them imagined that this joke of a contract would be the start of a journey that slowly changed both their hearts.