"My Ex-Boyfriend" The length of an egg retrieval needle: 30 centimeters. The age that defines an advanced maternal age: 35 years old. The diameter of a diamond ring: I’ve never measured it. The weight of 50 million dollars: he could calculate that. The weight of a woman reclaiming herself: I don’t know. He said it was fiction. Fiction is such a convenient word. Like the white sheets in a hotel—lay them out, and everything looks clean. The first time I met him, he wasn’t as much of a tycoon as I had imagined. He was more like a kid eager to show off his homework. Bananas, crypto, Buffett, planes, hotels, magazine covers. He could turn every single thing into a legend. When he spoke, the world felt like a price list that could be refreshed at any moment. I asked him, "What if that banana rots?" He paused for a moment. At the time, I thought that pause was kind of cute. Later, I realized some people aren’t incapable of answering. It’s just that in their lives, they rarely need to deal with "what happens after it rots." He liked to book out a lot of things. An entire floor of a hotel. A private cinema. A plane. A quiet stretch of beach. He thought that was called protection. Maybe it was. But sometimes, I felt it was more like a display. A place left empty because of me. A group of people waiting because of me. A sum of money spent because of me. And then all these things could, one day, be neatly put back into the ledger. Men remember what they’ve spent. Women remember what they’ve believed. These two kinds of memories never seem to match up in the end. To be continued.