Zhu Yun entered the room, and Gao Jianhong’s father quietly pulled the door shut behind her.

The moment it closed, all the noise and commotion outside disappeared. The private room was well-appointed — the walls were a soft, faint pink, a small plant sat on the windowsill, and the whole space felt clean and quietly comforting.

Gao Jianhong lay in the hospital bed. At first glance, Zhu Yun barely recognized him. His head had been completely shaved for the surgery, a tube ran through his nose, and his cheeks were gaunt.

He was very weak, but still alert. He watched Zhu Yun enter the room.

“He won’t see me.” His voice, constrained by the nasal tube, was low and slow.

Zhu Yun moved to his side. “Don’t think too much about that right now. Focus on the surgery.” She had been standing, which made it difficult for him to look at her. She pulled over a chair from nearby and sat down.

His gaze settled as she did.

“Did my mom and Wu Zhen get into it?” he asked quietly.

“Just a few words. Nothing major.”

“My mom always felt that Wu Zhen brought bad luck to me…” He paused. “When something goes wrong, people always need someone to blame.”

Zhu Yun kept to the same message: “Focus on the surgery. Everything else can wait until you’ve recovered.”

Gao Jianhong stared at the ceiling, lost in thought. After a long silence, he asked slowly, “Why did you drop the lawsuit?”

“It was a decision made together by everyone in the company. We had to think about the future — spending too much in the fight wasn’t worth what we’d gain.”

Gao Jianhong listened, then gave a slow shake of his head.

“No. You don’t need to comfort me. There was never any ‘together.’ There was only ever one person who made the decisions — from beginning to end.”

Zhu Yun said nothing.

“It was always only ever him who decided…” Gao Jianhong murmured, repeating the words to himself.

His brow furrowed. He seemed to be in pain. Zhu Yun moved to stand. “I’ll go get the doctor.”

He spoke with effort and reached out from beneath the blanket, grabbing her wrist. He held on tight and fixed her with an intense, ashen-faced stare.

“He should have gone all the way — finished me completely. At least then my end would have had a reason. What is this instead? What does this amount to?” Without his hair, the veins on Gao Jianhong’s skull were starkly visible. He fought through the pain, beads of sweat breaking out across his forehead.

“You tell me — what does this amount to? Does this mean he’s forgiven me?”

Zhu Yun held his arm steady. “Calm down.”

“He shouldn’t forgive me,” Gao Jianhong said, shaking his head. “I genuinely wanted to grind him into the earth. I wanted him to stay buried, forever.”

The wind had picked up outside. The night’s darkness spread wide and heavy.

Gao Jianhong gripped Zhu Yun’s wrist with surprising force. She didn’t dare push him away or do anything to agitate him further. She simply stayed still and looked at him.

Gradually, slowly, his grip loosened. He had spent himself. He sank back against the bed.

“But I knew from the very beginning that I would lose,” he said. “I knew I couldn’t beat him. He knew it too. You knew it too…”

Hearing that, Zhu Yun finally asked: “Then why keep competing against someone you knew you couldn’t beat?”

Gao Jianhong didn’t answer right away. He seemed to be reaching back through memory. After a long silence, he said something.

“It was me who told Zhang Xiaobei.”

Zhu Yun didn’t follow. “What?”

“That night I was drunk. I was so angry…” Gao Jianhong murmured. “I didn’t even know he had a sister — he never said a word about anything, none of us mattered to him at all. I was so furious. I had made such a huge decision, given up everything to work alongside him, and he just walked away from it all so easily. I knew Zhang Xiaobei hated Li Xun. I knew she had connections in the media. So I called her. I told her everything about Li Xun, and I even told her he had deliberately seduced a superior’s daughter.”

Zhu Yun stood there motionless as the revelation of something buried long ago sent a wave of disorientation through her.

Gao Jianhong continued, as though talking to himself. “By the time I sobered up, the news had already broken. I don’t know whether the way public opinion shaped it had any effect on the severity of his sentence. I was terrified then.”

He kept murmuring on, his voice barely there, unconcerned with whether Zhu Yun could hear or not.

“…I couldn’t tell anyone about this. I kept trying to forget it, but I never could. I kept dreaming about the three of us going to Lan Guan together that day. I had been so nervous I could have been sick — but you were sick before me, and he was the only one who wasn’t afraid, cool enough to stand there and laugh at you. But when I woke up, you were both gone.”

As he spoke, his gaze drifted to Zhu Yun.

“I keep going back to the past. Almost every waking moment. The more I dwell on it, the worse the pain gets, and the worse the pain, the more I hate him. It didn’t have to be like this — it’s his fault. He abandoned us first. He asked me if I regretted it. I want to ask him if he regrets it. Go ask him for me — ask him if he has any regrets!”

Gao Jianhong grew increasingly agitated, shouting at full force now, drenched in sweat, his body shaking violently. Zhu Yun steadied him, her own voice trembling. “Gao Jianhong, we have all done wrong. But none of us are beyond redemption. You don’t have to force yourself to play that kind of role.”

He could no longer make out what Zhu Yun was saying. With the last thread of his strength, he pulled her close to his lips and said, in a voice as thin and unsteady as a breath: “If there is even the smallest part of him that regrets it — please tell him I’m sorry.”

Outside, the wind howled.

Gao Jianhong collapsed, drained of everything, and lay motionless on the bed. Zhu Yun rushed to the door and called for the doctors.

Three hours after that, Gao Jianhong was finally wheeled into the operating theater. The moment the surgical lights flickered on, Zhu Yun’s knees buckled. She pressed her back against the wall and slowly sank to the floor.

Gao Jianhong’s parents leaned against each other in the corridor, taking strength from one another.

The surgery would take several more hours. Zhu Yun said her goodbyes to Gao Jianhong’s parents and drove back to Li Xun’s apartment via the elevated expressway. The bridge was a ribbon of light, with points of brightness scattered on both sides — ten thousand households glowing in the night.

Zhu Yun lowered the car window a little. The wind rushed in at once, tousling the hair at her temples and scattering the neon reflections below.

Why do the emotions of youth leave such indelible marks on the heart? Love, friendship — and those naive, earnest dreams and promises. You think you’ve forgotten them, but they’re still there, deep inside. As you grow older, you encounter more complete and mature versions of everything, yet somehow those scattered, imperfect pieces from before are always the ones you remember most clearly.

This single incident could not be said to have entirely changed the course of their lives, but its influence could not be dismissed either. Years later, looking back, the bitter and the sweet remained just as vivid as ever.

Would Li Xun regret it?

Zhu Yun could answer that on his behalf —

No.

At least, he would never admit it aloud.

The first half of Li Xun’s life had been so deeply solitary — solitary in a way that had left him with almost no one but himself. He had hardened into something as unyielding as stone. He rarely admitted fault — so how could someone like that ever say he had regrets, or deny the path he had walked?

But he had other ways of expressing what he felt.

She had always believed that his heart was soft — and that it would only grow softer with time, like a child slowly growing up, or a peach ripening on the branch, becoming sweeter and more tender with each passing season.

When she arrived back at the apartment, the lights were off. Li Xun was sitting on a stool by the window, gazing outside. A cigarette hung between his fingers — nothing about him had changed since she left, except that he had put on a pair of trousers, his torso still bare.

Zhu Yun walked toward him. When she was three or four steps away, he turned his head slightly, and without a word, opened his right arm. She stepped into it. He closed it around her waist, just right.

The ashtray on the table was piled high.

Zhu Yun pressed a soft kiss to the top of his head. “Gao Jianhong has already gone into surgery.”

“You didn’t wait for it to finish?” Li Xun asked.

“No — it’s going to take several more hours. I need to sleep.”

He gave her a lazy, tired smile. Zhu Yun saw the exhaustion in it and said, “Go wash up. Get some rest.”

Li Xun stubbed out the cigarette and rose slowly, disappearing into the bathroom for a while. When he came out, it was Zhu Yun’s turn. Li Xun’s apartment seemed to have been rented for the first time — the decor was minimal. When he had first come out, he’d had a habit of keeping things tidy, but after a year or two, all of that had fallen away, and everything had reverted to its natural state of cheerful disorder.

On the bathroom counter, Zhu Yun spotted the toothpaste — squeezed in the most chaotic, wasteful way imaginable. She picked it up, twisted it, and folded it flat.

Li Xun was already in bed, the bedside lamp on, the book he had borrowed from Zhu Yun’s place in his hands. He had nearly finished it.

He was so absorbed that he didn’t even notice her come out of the bathroom.

Zhu Yun thought that this was one of his genuine qualities — having spent so long alone, he had always known what to do with himself. He was never restless, never bored, never at a loss for how to fill time.

She slipped quietly onto the bed beside him and lay there watching his profile, letting her thoughts drift idly.

He looks good now, she thought — still and focused, like a painting. But what about later? What about when he’s old? She let herself imagine it: a proud, solitary old man in his seventies or eighties, hair gone white, never without a sharp word, but because he had built considerable success in his youth, everyone around him would be too afraid to challenge him. They’d keep their distance; he’d keep his. Every day, he’d pick up a book and find some quiet corner to read in, away from everyone…

Slightly terrifying, actually.

Come to think of it, that was exactly the type of unhinged elderly villain you’d find in a European thriller.

“What are you thinking?” He had noticed her at some point without her realizing.

Zhu Yun lay very still and shook her head.

By now Li Xun was used to this from her. He didn’t press, and said mildly, “Keep it to yourself then. Just don’t be surprised when your chest sags from holding it all in.”

Zhu Yun reached over to pinch him. Li Xun caught her hand, set his book aside, and reached over to turn off the lamp.

In the moment he twisted his body to reach it, Zhu Yun suddenly asked —

“Li Xun, do you want a child?”

The light went out. The room fell dark. The room fell silent.

The silence made Zhu Yun a little anxious.

After a moment, she felt him turn toward her. Her eyes had gradually adjusted to the darkness, and she could see him looking at her.

He asked, “Are you trying to use a child to deal with your mother?”

“That has nothing to do with it.”

“Then why do you want a child?”

“I want the child to have you as a companion.”

To have a brand-new, unspoiled life that has never known a moment of the world’s suffering — to have you as a companion.

He said nothing. He looked at her for a long time.

“You’re older than me by half a year,” Zhu Yun said. “You’ll be thirty next year — the age is about right. Though it’s really up to you. We’ve only just gotten back together, and your career isn’t settled yet. And — oh, right — we’re not even married. We don’t even have the paperwork.” The more she heard herself say it, the more impulsive the whole idea seemed. She burrowed into the pillow. “Forget it.”

“Why forget it?”

“…”

“I want one,” Li Xun said. “Let’s do it.”

“…”

He said it again: “Let’s do it.”

Zhu Yun finally found her voice. She pushed herself upright and said, hesitantly, “So… so it’s decided just like that?”

“Yes.”

The room was dark; she couldn’t read his expression. She cleared her throat and said, with as much composure as she could manage, “All right then. That’s settled.”

That night, they didn’t do anything. Li Xun held her from behind as they slept, holding on so tightly that Zhu Yun broke out in a sweat — and he still didn’t let go.