Yan Lie climbed up onto the window ledge and sat sideways on it, holding up a red plastic bag like a prized find: “Little Mu took me to the village general store — they had so many snacks I’d never seen before!”

He tore open a packet of what appeared to be candy and tossed some to Fang Zhuo.

Fang Zhuo managed something like a smile — or so she thought. She wasn’t entirely sure. She had no particular mood right now, and as a result the muscles of her face had gone stiff and unresponsive, beyond her control.

Yan Lie studied her for a moment, then dropped down from the window ledge. Before long he came running back, sat with his back to her on the outer sill, cupped something to his lips, and blew a long, wavering note on it.

The sound was a bit sharp, a bit muffled — barely able to form different pitches. Fang Zhuo looked over at the sound.

Yan Lie turned around, pressed one hand on her desk, and held up a green onion stalk, smiling slyly: “I picked it from Uncle’s garden. Don’t tell him.”

Fang Zhuo fixed him with a look of growing pity and spoke slowly: “You do know that in the countryside, people often use fully natural fertilizer on the things they grow, don’t you?”

Yan Lie visibly shuddered. He turned back around, hiding his expression from her. But Fang Zhuo could imagine it perfectly well — at this moment, his face was almost certainly written over with the words the world is ending.

She pressed her advantage and added, with relish: “Do you know what fully natural fertilizer actually means?”

Yan Lie cried out: “I know! Stop talking!”

Seeing him take the bait, Fang Zhuo felt her mood lift for no particular reason.

Yan Lie gathered himself and thought it through. Something didn’t add up. He turned back and slapped the desk — not in anger, but with good humor: “That’s impossible. There’s an indoor toilet in the house. Where would the natural fertilizer even come from? And it’s just a green onion — why would that need any fertilizing at all? You tricked me!”

Fang Zhuo huffed: “That’ll teach you not to go eating whatever you find.”

“Fine, I learned my lesson!” Yan Lie said.

He swung his legs on the outer sill while Fang Zhuo sat inside, staring into space. The night was very quiet for a moment.

After a little while, Yan Lie tore open a bag of potato chips. Amid the sound of rustling packaging, he spoke, his voice unhurried and even: “When I was small, I lived near a river. Not far from the door, there was a very wide stretch of river.”

Fang Zhuo brought her wandering thoughts back and watched his silhouette.

“People used to go there to bathe and fish. The kids my age all loved to go play in the water — but my grandmother wouldn’t allow it. Every year there were news reports about drownings, and she felt that if something happened to me in the water, she wouldn’t be able to save me.” Yan Lie tilted his head back. “But I always preferred the sea I saw in illustrated books more than any river. So my grandmother promised me that once I was grown up, she’d let me go to the seaside. It’s just that, in the end, the chance never came.”

Yan Lie shifted slightly and turned his head: “Will you come with me someday?”

Fang Zhuo looked at him with suspicion: “Can’t you go on your own?”

“No,” Yan Lie said with great stubbornness. “Someone has to come with me. That’s the rule.”

He spoke like someone throwing a small tantrum, and after a while Fang Zhuo said: “Alright. Whenever I have time.”

Yan Lie was not satisfied with the phrasing. He muttered: “When is ‘whenever you have time’?”

Fang Zhuo had no good answer to that.

The night wind blew steadily. Both the window and the light were on. Fang Zhuo spotted the last surviving mosquitoes of the season drifting in from the dark, industrious and eager.

She went and turned off the room light, then asked Yan Lie to switch on the courtyard lamp. Then she climbed up onto the desk with her notebook and sat back-to-back with him.

The light was now quite dim. She pressed her fingers to the edge of the notebook pages and flipped from the middle toward the back.

The pages that had once been damp with tears were noticeably uneven. Fang Zhuo found the spot with almost no effort.

She saw again the line that had made her tremble.

“I’d rather I never had this child.”

After that line, there was a long stretch of empty space.

Perhaps Ye Yaoling had been gathering herself. Perhaps she hadn’t yet known what she wanted to write next.

By the dim yellow glow of the courtyard lamp, Fang Zhuo read on. The old pages showed an even older kind of wear. She noticed that when Ye Yaoling wrote this entry, she may not actually have been driven by hatred or anger — just as Ye Yuncheng had said, she was calm.

“I have not given her a good home — not even what you could call a normal home. And yet I am about to leave. What is to be done?”

Fang Zhuo turned to the next page.

The writing that followed was denser, though what it recorded was scattered and fragmentary — thoughts jotted down as they came.

“Today I went to sweep the graves of my parents. Looking at the names carved into the stone, I felt strangely distant from them. After so many years without seeing each other, the image of them I carry in my mind has grown blurry — yet I have never forgotten what it looked like when they didn’t love me.

“That is a frightening thing. Remembering those moments is more painful than hearing the news of their deaths was.

“Now I too am a mother. Perhaps I will become something worse than they were. Will Zhuozhuo one day say to me, ‘the pain you gave me outweighed the joy’? I don’t want her to be that disappointed in me.”

Fang Zhuo saw her own name, and read the passage over and over many times. Even in so small a thing, she could feel the weight Ye Yaoling had placed on her.

“This is truly my fault. I placed so much hope in Fang Yiming, believing that he loved me — and then discovered he was not the person I had imagined.

“His love was perhaps only a passing impulse. I was not the most singular one.

“Perhaps what I felt for him was not entirely real either. All that hope had been for myself. Once all the illusions were stripped away, I had to admit that Fang Yiming was the most ordinary of ordinary men.

“He lit my life like a match — but after the burning, he left only ash. So when he chose a different path, what I felt was more disappointment than grief.”

Fang Yiming really was no good of a man, Fang Zhuo thought, reading this far.

“I have chosen avoidance out of fear of the future, cowardice out of fear of responsibility, and coldness out of fear of loss. What a failure I have been — but Zhuozhuo must never become this way.”

Ye Yaoling seemed to have made some great resolution. Even her handwriting had grown more forceful.

Through the raised impressions on the back of the page, Fang Zhuo could sense the conviction behind each stroke as it was made.

“I am going to seek a divorce.”

“I can no longer go on pretending not to know, and let Zhuozhuo grow up beside Fang Yiming. To beg for affection that is never given is something that causes great suffering. I hope she will grow into someone strong — even cold, if it comes to that — but never as diminished as I have been.

“I hope she will not miss me. I also hope I can be there to guide her myself — to leave every person who does not love her behind in yesterday, because yesterday is a place that will never come back. She need not grieve for her own yesterdays.”

“I am her yesterday. I love her — but I cannot be with her much longer.”

What came after was some words Ye Yaoling had left for Ye Yuncheng. Mostly guilt — for leaving so suddenly, and for not having understood, until too late, the loneliness and helplessness he had lived with.

Fang Zhuo went back to the beginning and read through the whole thing again, carefully, missing nothing. Then she closed the notebook, set it on her knees, and pressed her forehead against it.

Behind her was the warmth of Yan Lie’s body — blazing hot, as if he were on fire. Even the notebook in her hands seemed to catch, something deep inside her beginning slowly to ignite, a flame spreading from a single spark, until it burned through everything — all her indignation, all her grief — and turned them to ash.

And through the ash, the same fire scorched through to something else entirely.

— I love her.

Fang Zhuo turned the words over slowly in the silence of her mind.

Her heart ached for Ye Yaoling’s life, and yet she could not suppress the small, quiet flicker of something like joy.

She remained in yesterday. So yesterday was not entirely without worth.

Fang Zhuo shifted her shoulders slightly. In that moment she wanted, more than anything, to hear Yan Lie speak. She called his name softly, twice — and both times, the person behind her didn’t respond.

He had let more than half his weight lean against her, his head tilted back and resting against her shoulder, breathing slowly and steadily.

Fang Zhuo listened to his even breathing and realized he had fallen asleep. The back of his head was making the side of her neck a little itchy.

She woke him and asked: “Are you really that tired?”

Yan Lie still held up a defense: “No, I’m not.”

“You fell asleep,” Fang Zhuo said.

Yan Lie was a bit dazed. He didn’t have trouble sleeping on a normal night — how could he possibly have fallen asleep in such a bizarre position?

He rubbed his bleary eyes, then glanced at Fang Zhuo and saw that she was now bright and alert, practically overflowing with energy — nothing like the deflated version of herself from before. So he said: “I’m going back to sleep.”

Fang Zhuo’s hand moved faster than her mind and caught hold of his clothes.

Yan Lie looked at her with a questioning expression.

She hadn’t yet figured out what to say. She borrowed a line from somewhere she’d been reading and delivered it with all the weight of a philosophical declaration: “Leave the people you don’t like in yesterday.”

Yan Lie was still half-asleep and didn’t quite follow, but responded on instinct: “Shouldn’t you air them out while it’s still warm?”

Fang Zhuo: “…?”

Yan Lie rubbed the back of his head: “Never mind. Why are you saying that?”

But Fang Zhuo had already climbed down from the desk, and stood for a moment with her brow furrowed in thought. Then she looked up and caught his eye for a brief instant.

Well, who could say he didn’t have a point?