Lu Rangchen left early in the morning.

The phone call came out of nowhere. He had just stepped out of the bathroom when he received a call from the live-in housekeeper.

She said Cheng Liru and Lu Dingzhong had gotten into another fight.

Cheng Liru hadn’t slept a wink all night, and when she woke up the next morning she was crying, saying she had dreamed of Zhitao and wanted to go to the cemetery to visit her.

The housekeeper knew about Cheng Liru’s chronic condition and was afraid her illness might relapse again, so she quickly called Lu Rangchen.

The flight ticket was bought last minute.

It was urgent.

Lu Rangchen could only hand over his things to Zhu Yunque before he left.

But the girl either didn’t know she was asleep, or had woken up and was deliberately ignoring him. By the time he arrived in Nancheng close to noon, Zhu Yunque still hadn’t responded.

Once in the car, the driver, whom he hadn’t seen in a long time, made small talk with him.

Lu Rangchen glanced at his phone a couple of times. Whether it was because of Cheng Liru’s condition or because a certain someone hadn’t replied to his messages, he was clearly distracted.

He chatted absentmindedly for a bit.

Lu Rangchen’s gaze swept over and landed on the driver. “Why did those two fight?” he asked.

In the rearview mirror, the driver’s expression stiffened slightly, and he said awkwardly, “Well, did no one tell you?”

The pair of long, narrow eyes beneath the black brim of the cap were cold.

Lu Rangchen stared expressionlessly at the rearview mirror. In the shifting light, his strikingly handsome features — the high brows and deep-set eyes — appeared even sharper.

The driver found it quite difficult, but still told him the truth.

He said Cheng Liru had been acting paranoid lately, convinced that Lu Dingzhong was seeing someone on the side. She had tried to sneak a look at his phone in the middle of the night but had been caught in the act.

The two of them had gotten into a fierce argument over the whole thing.

In a fit of anger, Lu Dingzhong had simply moved to the apartment near the university.

Perhaps feeling awkward about it all, the driver laughed and said, “How could that be? Professor Lu is an academic — he wouldn’t do something like that. Besides, couples are like that; my wife and I fight too, but we make up within a few days.”

He went on to offer some words of comfort.

But Lu Rangchen said nothing throughout.

He just gazed at the flowing street scenes outside the car window, his eyes dark and unreadable, lost in his own thoughts.

……

Zhu Yunque returned to campus after having breakfast at Lu Rangchen’s place.

Before leaving, she had even taken the time to clean out the litter box for that chubby orange cat.

After the heavy rain, the temperature in the capital had dropped.

Fortunately, the school’s electrical network had already been repaired. Since Zhu Yunque had to go work at the library that afternoon, she headed back to the dorm first to change her clothes.

Back in the dorm, Liang Tian was in bed watching a drama.

Hearing her voice, she sat up right away, surprised. “How come you’re back?”

Zhu Yunque smiled faintly. “Why can’t I be back?”

Liang Tian blinked. “But aren’t you dating Lu Rangchen?”

Zhu Yunque hugged her change of clothes and went into the bathroom, saying as she closed the door, “Dating someone doesn’t mean you have to be glued together all the time.”

Liang Tian replied with a sheepish “fair enough.”

“……”

“I really admire your self-control though. You can actually tear yourself away from a guy that handsome. If it were me, I wouldn’t get anything done — I’d just be clinging to him all day.”

Zhu Yunque’s hands paused slightly on the buttons she was fastening.

She said nothing.

When she came out with her clothes changed, Liang Tian had gotten bored of lying in bed too and climbed down to snack on something.

She saw Zhu Yunque sitting at the desk with her head lowered, looking at something. She leaned in and rested her chin on Zhu Yunque’s shoulder, staring at the black box in her hands. “What’s this?”

“A jade Guanyin.”

Zhu Yunque opened it to show her.

Inside the small square box lay a translucent, lustrous half-figure jade Guanyin pendant, exquisitely carved with extraordinary attention to detail, and with a particularly fine clarity to the stone.

Liang Tian didn’t know much about jade, but even she could tell this thing was valuable. “Wow,” she exclaimed. “Who gave this to you? It seems really expensive.”

Zhu Yunque said, oh, is it really that expensive?

Liang Tian said of course — her mother had something similar, which cost over twenty thousand yuan, and the quality wasn’t even as pure as this one.

At that price, even for a jade Buddha pendant that wasn’t particularly large, it was of course expensive by ordinary standards.

Zhu Yunque thought for a few seconds, then said, “Lu Rangchen gave it to me.”

Liang Tian was startled for a moment, then burst out laughing. “Why is he so typically clueless when it comes to romance? Who gives their girlfriend something like this?”

Zhu Yunque said nothing.

She looked at it for a few seconds, then shook her head. “I don’t know.”

In the end, she didn’t put on the jade pendant after all.

It was locked away in her drawer just like that. She didn’t know what to do with it.

The start of the semester was approaching.

The library was getting busier.

Zhu Yunque had been busy there for quite a while before she thought to check her phone. There were a few messages, but none of them were from Lu Rangchen.

It seemed like everything unrelated to him had lost its appeal.

So this was what being in a relationship felt like.

It seemed even more tormenting than that secret crush she used to harbor.

Zhu Yunque couldn’t quite figure out what she was thinking, so she simply put her phone in the drawer and stopped looking at it.

The next time she took it out was because the senior student working with her got annoyed by all the vibrating and just handed the phone to her directly, saying, “It must be one of your admirers again — hurry up and answer it.”

Zhu Yunque felt a sudden flutter in her chest at those words.

She took the phone and sure enough saw “Lu Rangchen” displayed on the screen.

The corner of her mouth gave an almost imperceptible twitch.

She told her senior colleague, “I’m going to step out to take this call.”

The senior gave her a knowing look. “Go on quickly — this phone has been vibrating forever. Your man must be about to lose his mind waiting.”

That last line was clearly teasing her.

Yet somehow it didn’t feel irritating at all.

Zhu Yunque’s heart gave a wild flutter, and she ran out to a quiet spot in the corridor before pressing the answer button.

Lu Rangchen’s deep, rich voice traveled through the line and settled close to her ear, low and unhurried. “What are you up to?”

His tone was hard to read.

You couldn’t quite call it anger — it sounded patient enough. But you couldn’t call it patient either — there was a hint of displeasure mixed in somewhere.

Zhu Yunque’s heart rate quickened without her noticing.

She looked out at the view beyond the library and said, “Working at the library.”

Lu Rangchen gave a short, amused laugh. “Stop pretending with me.”

Zhu Yunque: “……What am I pretending?”

“What else could you be pretending,” Lu Rangchen said in that infuriatingly smug tone of his, “pretending not to care, of course.”

A few words and he had already seen right through her.

Zhu Yunque pressed her lips together and said nothing.

After a beat of silence, Lu Rangchen’s voice softened, carrying a slightly rough, husky quality that seeped warmly into one’s heart. He said, “Still upset with me?”

It took Zhu Yunque a while before she replied, “No.”

Lu Rangchen just laughed. “You’re stubborn.”

He didn’t bother arguing with her about it, his tone breezy and unapologetically straightforward. “Anyway, I missed you.”

Zhu Yunque: “……”

Something that had been stubbornly holding firm somewhere inside her suddenly gave way, going soft.

Her lashes dipped. Her voice came out very quietly. “If you missed me, why didn’t you send a message?”

Lu Rangchen had been waiting for exactly that.

He laughed low in his throat, in that drawling, deliberately unhurried way of his. “I just wanted to see if you’d look for me when you woke up this morning.”

“……”

“Turns out you really didn’t.”

Zhu Yunque caught the faint edge of jealousy in his tone and couldn’t help saying, “You’re acting like a child.”

Lu Rangchen gave a light laugh without engaging, and turned the question back on her. “What about you? Did you miss me?”

His voice was deep and magnetic, almost coaxing — as if the two of them hadn’t been in touch for days.

When in reality, it had barely been one morning.

Even now, Zhu Yunque could still recall yesterday, the two of them on the rooftop — that kiss, lips and tongues entwined.

The corner of her mouth curved slightly. She deliberately tried to provoke him. “No.”

Lu Rangchen gave a soft, amused sound.

Whether he believed her or not was impossible to tell. He changed the subject. “Have you put on the pendant?”

Zhu Yunque said no.

Lu Rangchen asked her, “Why not?”

Zhu Yunque paused for a moment, then said softly, “Waiting for my boyfriend to come back and put it on me himself.”

She was like that — she looked pure and well-behaved on the surface, but she wasn’t entirely without a mischievous streak.

Like right now, for instance.

She knew perfectly well that he was away and couldn’t come back, yet she went ahead and teased him like that anyway.

Lu Rangchen’s mouth curved in a smile that said he knew exactly what she was doing. “Then your boyfriend will try his best to come back sooner.”

Zhu Yunque pressed him, “And how soon is that, exactly?”

At that moment, Lu Rangchen was leaning idly against the doorway of the consultation room, listening to the faint sound of conversation drifting from inside.

After a brief silence, his tone turned coaxing. “Give me a couple of days. Let me wait until my mom’s situation stabilizes.”

“……”

Zhu Yunque hadn’t expected that his return home was connected to Cheng Liru. Thinking back to what Lin Zhi had told her before, she felt a delayed sense of guilt.

After a pause, she said, “Since Auntie isn’t well, don’t rush then. Being with her and keeping her company is what matters most right now.”

Her tone was earnest and sincere.

Lu Rangchen didn’t need to think hard to guess exactly what expression she was wearing in that moment — she must have looked impossibly well-behaved.

A warmth rose in his throat. He thought of their affectionate good morning kiss earlier that day.

She had been wearing his shirt, lying in her own blanket, still half-drowsy with sleep, her eyelashes lightly trembling, her whole body carrying his scent.

And yet even in that half-asleep state, she had known to respond when he kissed her — she had wrapped her arms around his shoulders like that, her fingertips touching his skin.

Her lips and tongue were both soft and sweet.

Thank goodness it had been the morning, and he still had things to take care of — otherwise, what might have happened next was anyone’s guess.

Lu Rangchen thought relationships were a strange and remarkable thing.

They could effortlessly transform a person into someone unrecognizable, and make you slip beneath the surface without even noticing.

He laughed quietly to himself, then said, “The way you are, I’m almost tempted to have her meet you sooner.”

Every word was sincere, each one landing like a precise shot straight to the heart.

An accelerating heartbeat was the most immediate response.

Zhu Yunque pressed her lips together, suddenly not knowing how to reply, and did what Lu Rangchen had done earlier — she changed the subject.

She said, “Why did you give me a jade Guanyin?”

“I prayed for it at a temple.”

Lu Rangchen said easily, “Don’t you like it?”

Zhu Yunque was mildly surprised. “When was this?”

Lu Rangchen replied casually, “That day after I went to confront Lin Zhinian, I followed Deng Zhe to Dabei Temple.”

Deng Zhe’s father knew someone there.

Knowing his friend was coming to pray for a consecrated pendant, the contact had set aside a particularly fine piece. As it happened, the best available piece at the time, the one most suitable as a gift, was this jade Guanyin.

At this point, he continued unhurriedly, “I wanted to experience the same feeling you had when you gave me that safety amulet.”

Those three words — safety amulet — left Zhu Yunque completely speechless.

It took her a long while before she could squeeze out a single sentence. She said, “……You knew about that.”

Lu Rangchen replied with a soft “mm.” “I’ve known for a while.”

“When did you find out?”

“Not long after you gave it to me.”

“……How did you know?”

“The wrapping on that safety amulet matched the packaging on the gift Auntie Feng sent my mother.”

“……”

Zhu Yunque closed her eyes briefly, genuinely exasperated with herself.

After all that careful planning, she had actually forgotten about the packaging.

Lu Rangchen laughed. “Later, when you came to have the cord re-braided at the counter, the look on your face just confirmed it.”

Zhu Yunque said quietly, “The braided cord you cut off was one I made myself.”

This time it was Lu Rangchen’s turn to fall silent.

He clicked his tongue. “Why didn’t you stop me at the time?”

Zhu Yunque’s lips parted, about to explain, when the senior student came rushing out from behind her with a pack of tissues, urgently calling to her, saying she needed to use the restroom and asking Zhu Yunque to go cover the counter for a moment.

Zhu Yunque snapped back to attention and responded automatically.

A moment later she heard Lu Rangchen teasing her. “What, is the girlfriend about to go back to her part-time shift?”

Zhu Yunque: “……”

She didn’t think she was quite used to that term yet.

But she steeled herself and answered, “Yes, I need to go now. You take good care of Auntie Cheng.”

Lu Rangchen’s tone was surprisingly compliant. “Alright.”

He paused, then added with mock gravity, “Remember to reply to my messages.”

The anxious mood that had been stirred up earlier was somehow soothed into an unexpected warmth by those few words.

Her lips curved upward. Zhu Yunque told him she would, and said the same to him.

As it turned out, Lu Rangchen might have looked unruly and unpredictable, but when it came to relationships, he was genuinely quite obedient with his girlfriend.

For the remaining days of the National Holiday, the two of them stayed in close contact.

From morning to night, they exchanged messages on and off throughout the day. Lu Rangchen would share what he was seeing and doing there, and Zhu Yunque would send him photos of the coffee she’d made or whatever sky she happened to be looking at.

In the evenings, Lu Rangchen would call her on video.

But because Liang Tian was in the room, and because it was Zhu Yunque’s first relationship, she found it hard to be completely at ease.

Saying sweet nothings was even more out of the question.

Sometimes, when she could tell Lu Rangchen was gearing up to say something suggestive, she would hang up the video call on the spot.

Lu Rangchen found it genuinely exasperating, yet somehow he also quite enjoyed the feeling.

Before she knew it, several days had gone by.

School had resumed its regular schedule, when Zhu Yunque suddenly learned from a phone call with Feng Yanlai that the family’s elderly grandmother had suffered a sudden cerebral infarction and been hospitalized.

Feng Yanlai had never been particularly fond of this mother-in-law of hers, but she wasn’t cruel about it either — she just sighed, saying it was a difficult life for that whole family, old and young alike. She also mentioned that Ye Tian had recently gotten into another fight at school, and Zhu Ping’an was short on money to sort things out for him, which might well lead to his expulsion.

Zhu Yunque fell silent upon hearing this.

Just as Feng Yanlai was about to move on to another topic, she said suddenly, “Mom, why don’t you help Ye Tian? He’s still young — he can’t drop out of school.”

Feng Yanlai was a little surprised, but didn’t refuse outright.

She said honestly, “I don’t actually know the details of what’s going on over there. Your dad hasn’t brought it up with me himself, and Deng Jiali probably won’t want to come asking me for help either.”

Zhu Yunque pressed her lips together and said, “Then I’ll talk to Ye Tian directly.”

“You’ll talk to him directly?”

Zhu Yunque said yes. “My classes are few and not that important these next couple of days — I could ask for leave and go back.”

Feng Yanlai was genuinely surprised. After all, Zhu Yunque hadn’t gone home for the entire seven-day National Holiday, yet now she was suddenly planning to return.

Zhu Yunque’s voice was slightly tense. “Ye Tian and I are very close. I treat him like a real younger brother. I can’t just leave him to deal with this alone — and he listens to me.”

Feng Yanlai thought about it and couldn’t find a reason to say no. So she agreed.

And so that very evening, Zhu Yunque booked a flight back to Nancheng for the following day.

Around noon the next day, she arrived in Nancheng.

Feng Yanlai drove to pick her up herself. The two of them had barely gotten on the highway when Feng Yanlai noticed Zhu Yunque constantly looking down and fiddling with her phone.

Feng Yanlai shot her a glance. “What is this — are you in love or something? The moment you get in the car you’re glued to that phone. Can’t you have a proper chat with your mother?”

Zhu Yunque put the phone away and looked out the car window at the passing scenery. “It’s Ye Tian.”

Feng Yanlai said “mm,” then added, “We should also prepare ourselves to go see your grandmother first. Whatever the situation may be, she’s still your father’s mother — we can’t make a scene with the formalities. As for Ye Tian, you can arrange to see him separately.”

Zhu Yunque nodded and said alright.

Then she turned to look at Feng Yanlai and said sincerely, “Thank you, Mom.”

Feng Yanlai laughed with a touch of irony. “Don’t thank me — if I weren’t in a good place these past few years, I wouldn’t have had the spare money to deal with this kind of thing.”

That was the truth.

Feng Yanlai’s life really had been going quite well lately.

So when Zhu Yunque asked her to put up a bit of money to help smooth things over for Ye Tian, she hadn’t hesitated long before agreeing.

Though in truth, Zhu Yunque also didn’t quite understand how Feng Yanlai’s business had grown so well these past few years — she had even expanded to a shop near the university, where there were plenty of students with real spending power, and her selection of styles was attractive, so naturally the business thrived.

On that note, Feng Yanlai went on to say, “After we visit your grandmother, I’ll take you by the shop to pick out a few clothes to take with you. It’s getting cold — you can’t have nothing to wear.”

Zhu Yunque came back to herself and nodded in agreement.

The drive from the airport to the city center was about an hour.

To visit the elderly woman, the moment they entered the city, Feng Yanlai went straight to the shopping district to pick something up for her.

When it came to visiting someone in the hospital, the gift options were always more or less the same anyway.

Feng Yanlai was far too lazy to put much thought into what to buy for that sharp-tongued old woman, so she simply took Zhu Yunque to the supermarket, planning to pick up some fruit, milk, and some decent nutritional supplements for elderly people.

It was quite a large supermarket, and a great many of the goods were imported.

Browsing the aisles was enough to make your eyes swim.

Zhu Yunque didn’t know much about any of it, so she just picked out some fruit and loaded it into the cart.

She was thinking of grabbing some snacks when, from ahead, Feng Yanlai suddenly let out a surprised “oh!” followed by a broad smile. “Liru-jie, what a coincidence — what are you doing here——”

At the sound of that name, Zhu Yunque’s footsteps nearly stalled.

She looked up, and there ahead were two very striking figures.

Cheng Liru carried herself with elegance and beauty at all times, and her smile was nothing like Feng Yanlai’s bright exuberance — she looked gentle and poised in every way.

The same could only be said doubly for Lu Rangchen, who stood behind her pushing the shopping cart.

Broad shoulders, long legs — tall and unhurried in his stance.

His face was coolly handsome with that air of casual defiance, beautiful from every angle, the kind that drew the instinctive attention of the opposite sex wherever he went.

He struck you as a thoroughly unconventional person, yet in front of his mother, that sharp edge of his was reined in and softened.

He truly hadn’t expected to run into Zhu Yunque here either.

After exchanging greetings with Feng Yanlai, Lu Rangchen’s gaze stilled. Those cool, deep-set, narrow eyes narrowed instantly.

In the moment their eyes met, it was as if his heartbeat missed a step.

Zhu Yunque stood frozen where she was.

It was Feng Yanlai who pulled her forward to greet both Cheng Liru and Lu Rangchen. With a laugh, the woman said, “You know, I used to envy you — but now look, my daughter’s back home keeping me company too.”

Cheng Liru smiled as well. “That’s wonderful. Being on your own is really no fun at all. If you ask me, when you get older, having your children around is what really makes you happy.”

As she spoke, she glanced over at Lu Rangchen, about to say something, when she noticed that her son was staring fixedly at the other woman’s daughter.

She wasn’t sure if she was imagining it.

His gaze was very cold — cold with a thread of displeasure woven through it, as if he wanted to consume the person whole.

“……”

Cheng Liru assumed the two of them had some kind of conflict in the past, and gave him a gentle nudge. “Why aren’t you saying anything? Don’t you recognize an old classmate?”

At the sound of that phrase, Lu Rangchen gave a barely perceptible pause. He glanced sideways at Cheng Liru, and suddenly laughed — a laugh born of exasperation and something else entirely.

Cheng Liru and Feng Yanlai looked at him, completely baffled.

Lu Rangchen simply shifted his gaze to Zhu Yunque’s small oval face, staring down at her from above with a force of presence that was almost suffocating.

It was this face — lively and guileless — that had haunted his dreams for the past few nights without respite.

Tormenting him until he’d had to get up in the middle of the night to take a cold shower just to settle himself down.

And what had she done?

She had come back just like that, without a single word to him.

Thinking of this, Lu Rangchen gave a short, humorless laugh, his tone carrying unmistakable displeasure. “It really has been too long.”

“……”

A tingling sensation shot straight to the top of Zhu Yunque’s head.

Lu Rangchen kept his eyes fixed on her, his expression hovering between gritted-teeth restraint and a smile that wasn’t quite a smile. “I almost didn’t recognize you.”