The band members witnessed the moment Luo Peiyin and his distant cousin recognized each other, and suddenly felt that the return journey wasn’t quite so boring after all.

Over the course of a meal, Gu Qiao had already learned from the others that Luo Peiyin had gotten into university at seventeen, that he currently played keyboards in the band — and was also the youngest member — and that last month they’d performed in Guangdong, only catching the train back yesterday.

After the meal, the band members invited Gu Qiao to join them for a card game. Someone in the nearby seats had just left, and there happened to be room for her to sit. Gu Qiao smiled and declined — she still had sachets to sell.

Her first customer on the train was Luo Peiyin.

Gu Qiao was startled. “Aren’t you allergic to this scent?”

“I’m giving it away.”

Gu Qiao absolutely refused to take his money. Luo Peiyin said, “If you won’t take payment, I don’t want it.”

Every member of the band ended up receiving a sachet from Luo Peiyin. These dainty little things were utterly at odds with the lot of them — if anyone found out who’d gone around giving them as gifts, they’d die laughing.

The second sale went as smoothly as the first. The heat-relief and mosquito-repelling sachets sold out quickly, and just then a vendor came through selling fruit. Gu Qiao had always known that things sold on trains were expensive, but for her, that had always been a good thing. She was always the seller on trains, never the buyer — the more expensive the better. Today was her first time being a customer.

Even knowing the fruit cost far more than it would outside, she steeled herself and bought a generous amount. She gave it to Luo Peiyin and his friends as thanks for his help and for treating her to the meal — and as an acknowledgment that who knew whether, after this meeting, they’d ever have a chance to meet again.

Handing the fruit to Luo Peiyin, she extended an invitation once more: “Cousin, whenever you have free time, you must come visit my home.”

She had once meant that invitation with her whole heart. After sending her letters, she had spent years imagining this distant cousin coming to visit. She pictured him seeing the countryside for the first time, marveling the way she had when she first went to the capital. She tried to see her hometown through his eyes, and found herself loving it even more because of it. She had nurtured this fantasy for three years — but not only had he never come, he hadn’t sent a single letter in reply.

This time, though, the invitation was purely a courtesy — the atmosphere had built to a point where it simply had to be said, as though the proper farewell couldn’t happen without it.

“Will your parents come to pick you up tomorrow?”

“I haven’t managed to reach them yet, but it’s fine — I can get home on my own without any trouble.”

Gu Qiao had fully prepared herself to go to the train station alone, so she never expected Luo Peiyin to volunteer to get off with her. Before disembarking, he instructed the band members to make absolutely sure they got the instruments safely to his home.

The steps down from the train were steep, and the night made it hard to see the way. Luo Peiyin descended first, and seeing Gu Qiao making her way carefully down with her head bowed, he reached up and gave her hand a brief pull — just that one touch, and then their hands parted.

Gu Qiao was rather curious: on such a sweltering day, how was Luo Peiyin’s palm so dry? Her own palm was perpetually slick with sweat. She wondered whether, in those few seconds of contact, any of that sweat had transferred to his hand.

The moment she was off the train, Gu Qiao went to find a telephone. Her family would be frantic with worry if they couldn’t reach her — she had to let them know she was safe at once.

She dialed the village brigade’s telephone, with no real expectation that her parents would answer immediately. After all, the brigade office was quite a distance from their home.

But the moment the call connected, she heard her mother’s voice.

Not long after Gu Qiao had boarded the train, Lou Deyu had arrived at the station. When Cuicui told him Gu Qiao had gotten on a train, sweat had immediately poured from his body. Gu Qiao was traveling alone with no money and no identification. Lou Deyu was no stranger to trains — he’d seen all kinds of people on them — and a young girl traveling alone like that, what if she happened to run into a human trafficker? He knew Gu Qiao was sharp, but there was always that one-in-a-million chance… a chance so terrible he hardly dared think it through. He should never have brought her along in the first place. On a blazingly hot day like this, she could have stayed home under the electric fan watching television, and nothing would have gone wrong.

Cuicui also blamed herself. If Gu Qiao hadn’t been helping her sell sachets, none of this would have happened.

Lou Deyu still had enough presence of mind to comfort the neighbor girl. He told Cuicui that someone as sharp as Gu Qiao would be fine — words he was saying as much to himself as to her. He went to find the train timetable: the next stop for Gu Qiao’s train was over three hours away, and return tickets for the evening were completely sold out. Gu Qiao had left in such a rush that she had no money at all in her pocket — what was she going to do for the entire night?

Lou Deyu grew more and more anxious. He went to the ticket window to ask about trains to nearby cities, knowing that even if he managed to get there, Gu Qiao might not be waiting at the station for him…

In the end, Lou Deyu had no choice but to find the station master and explain the situation. Waiting in the station master’s small office, he repeated silently: please let her be all right, please let her be all right. If Gu Qiao came home safe, he’d be willing to earn less for a year — then, feeling that wasn’t sufficiently heartfelt, he began adding years one by one, all the way to five, at which point the station master received word: Gu Qiao was fine, and the staff at the next station would settle her in the duty room.

Lou Deyu exhaled with some relief, then immediately wanted to retract his vow. Five years without income — he truly could not bear the thought.

He was still not entirely at ease. He sent Cuicui to a neighbor’s home, then returned to his own house with half his heart still suspended in worry. The family, seeing that only he had come back, asked where Gu Qiao was. The grandmother had long since made dinner, only waiting for her son-in-law and granddaughter to return.

When the grandmother learned that Gu Qiao had gone off to a strange city alone with not a penny in her pocket, her heart lurched. “It’s so late and Da Qiao still hasn’t eaten — she must be starving by now, and not a cent on her…”

Gu Jingshu comforted her mother: “Da Qiao is so clever — she’ll be fine. Besides, she got on the train with the sachets, so she could have sold some for a bit of money. Don’t worry too much, Mother. It’s getting late — please eat first.” Even as she urged her mother, she herself made no move to pick up her chopsticks. Gu Qiao’s younger sisters, at their mother’s urging, sent spoonful after spoonful of rice to their mouths, but the meal was utterly tasteless. Gu Qiao’s youngest sister, who normally had complete faith in her elder sister, couldn’t help catching the grandmother’s anxiety and growing unsettled on her sister’s behalf.

Gu Jingshu wasn’t very worried about Gu Qiao traveling alone — she knew her daughter well, and an ordinary swindler was no match for her. But that was under the assumption that her daughter had money in her pocket. Money meant she could buy food, could telephone home…

Gu Jingshu had an intuition: the moment Gu Qiao got off the train, she would call home to report that she was safe. Timing out when Gu Qiao’s train would arrive, she had gone early to wait by the brigade office telephone. Lou Deyu was there too, and he told Gu Jingshu that if they hadn’t heard from Gu Qiao by eleven o’clock, he would ride his motorcycle to the train station and catch a midnight train to go look for her.

Hearing her daughter’s voice, Gu Jingshu felt the weight that had been suspended in her chest finally come to rest, and her voice steadied considerably.

Over the phone, Gu Qiao told her mother: “I ran into my cousin on the train — he not only treated me to dinner, he even got off early especially to accompany me. Don’t worry anymore.”

“Your cousin?”

With Luo Peiyin standing nearby — though he wasn’t intentionally listening — Gu Qiao chose her words carefully: “The cousin from the Luo family.”

Hearing the words “cousin from the Luo family,” Gu Jingshu couldn’t help asking: “How did you two end up running into each other?” The two of them had only met as small children, and even if they crossed paths they might not have recognized each other. She still remembered how her daughter, when she was little, had written letters to this Luo family cousin with a dictionary propped open beside her. For a second-grader’s vocabulary, writing a letter of over a thousand characters was no small feat, yet Gu Qiao had thrown herself into it with enthusiasm, puzzling over every phrase day after day. She would tell her family about all the happy things she wanted to describe, talking it through until it flowed naturally, and only then would she set it down on paper. If not for the fact that the letter needed to be sent right away, Gu Qiao would have kept writing.

Gu Qiao wrote long letters for two years and never received a reply. Gu Jingshu held nothing against the Luo child for it — she simply ached for her own daughter, knowing that a connection between two people needed to be fated. She had wanted to coax Gu Qiao to stop writing, but in the end she had respected her daughter’s choice. After the third letter with no reply, Gu Qiao never wrote again.

Gu Qiao kept her explanation brief: “On the train, Cousin was kind enough to help me deal with a man who’d cheated me. I didn’t know who he was at first — not until I heard his name, and realized it was my cousin from the Luo family.”

Gu Jingshu said to Gu Qiao: “Let me speak with your cousin.” However clever her daughter was, she was still only sixteen years old and alone out there — Gu Jingshu couldn’t rest entirely easy.

“Mother, there’s no need—”

“Someone helped you — shouldn’t I thank him over the phone? Don’t worry. You know what your mother is like.”

Gu Qiao did know. Even though Lou Deyu periodically complained at home about how ungrateful her aunt was — throwing in the occasional jab at the “thrice-married old man” for good measure — her mother had never once said a bad word about either her aunt or her uncle-by-marriage.

Gu Qiao had no choice but to say to Luo Peiyin: “Cousin, my mother would like to thank you in person.”

Luo Peiyin wasn’t particularly surprised. Any reasonable parent, knowing their daughter was in the company of an unfamiliar male cousin, would not be entirely at ease. He hadn’t intended to take on this responsibility in the first place.

Gu Qiao couldn’t hear what her mother said to Luo Peiyin, but when her mother came back on the line, she could tell the worry had been set to rest.

Regular guesthouses required identification to check in, and of course Gu Qiao had nothing of the sort. They had no choice but to look for a small inn near the train station.

In the summer night, they made their way toward it. A low rumble of thunder rolled across the sky — Gu Qiao recognized it as a sign of rain. She walked quickly, not wanting to keep Luo Peiyin waiting. The evening wind before the rain rustled the leaves and lifted her hair, and a strand drifted across Luo Peiyin’s arm. Gu Qiao noticed that he deliberately put a little more distance between them — not much, and not obviously so.

They hadn’t yet reached the inn before rain came down, fast and ferocious, without a moment’s warning. Luo Peiyin handed Gu Qiao the jacket he was carrying and told her to hold it over her head as she ran.

Gu Qiao didn’t hesitate long — just a second — before she took it. But instead of holding it only over her own head, she lifted it to shelter them both. Luo Peiyin was so tall that she had to stretch her arms up with great effort, and in the end Luo Peiyin took the jacket back from her and held it above both their heads himself.

This way, neither of them was really protected from the rain. The downpour washed away the sweat from Gu Qiao’s palms, and at the same time Luo Peiyin’s hands were no longer dry.

By the time they reached the nearest inn to the train station, the jacket held over their heads was completely soaked through, and raindrops were running down Gu Qiao’s hair.

The innkeeper looked over the young man and woman arriving to check in and felt a twinge of doubt — they looked barely in their teens, nowhere near the legal age for marriage. Her suspicions were only dispelled when the boy said he wanted two separate rooms.

But there was only one room left in the inn. The innkeeper had assumed that on hearing there was only one room, the girl would be the more resistant of the two — but it was the boy who spoke first, saying firmly they couldn’t stay and must find somewhere else.

The innkeeper tried to keep them: “It’s this late — every other inn will likely be full too. This one room has two beds. When you sleep in a train berth at night, don’t men and women all sleep side by side? Are there separate compartments for men and women on trains? Young man, don’t be so old-fashioned.”

As it turned out, Luo Peiyin was even more old-fashioned than the innkeeper had imagined.

—