On the day of the college entrance exam, Mom Zhou and Zhou Haiyan came together to see me off.

Mom Zhou had heard from others that there was a certain etiquette to how parents dressed when seeing their kids off to the exam.

So on the first day, she wore a bright red qipao, and dragged Zhou Haiyan into a bright red short-sleeved shirt, meant to symbolize a lucky, auspicious start.

The two of them stood at the entrance, both strikingly good-looking, hard to miss in the crowd.

Sensing how nervous I was, Mom Zhou unscrewed her thermos and handed it to me. “Drink a little, calm your nerves. May the whole way ahead go smoothly, straight to your heart’s content.”

I took it. It was sweet.

For a moment, it felt like the cup of sugar water from that hospital room had been only yesterday.

Zhou Haiyan grabbed my pencil case and checked it twice, making sure nothing was missing, his tone perfectly serious. “Nothing holding you back now. You’re clear to take off.”

I doubled over laughing.

My nerves eased considerably in an instant.

On my way to find my exam room, I ran into my classmate Wang Zhe.

He fell into step beside me. “What a coincidence. Were those your parents just now at the gate?”

I said, chest puffed with pride, “My mom and my brother.”

He gave me a look and sighed, half-joking. “Guess your family doesn’t let anyone in unless they’re good-looking, huh?”

I paused, then feigned a sigh. “Well, obviously.”

We looked at each other and both burst out laughing.

“You’re not planning on falling asleep during this exam again, are you?”

“Please, I wouldn’t dare. If I fell asleep during the college entrance exam, my brother would dissect me alive when I got home.”

I raised an eyebrow, surprised. “Your brother’s a forensic pathology major?”

He nodded. “At Sichuan University.”

Me: “……”

A legend had been sitting right beside me this whole time—if I’d known, I’d have actually paid attention to that alumnus’s speech that day.

We joked around the whole way there, like we were just heading into some ordinary, everyday test.

Three days straight, everything went smoothly.

The moment I walked out of the exam room after the last subject, all the tension that had been coiled inside me finally let go.

Exhaustion crashed over me right after, and I wanted nothing more than to go home and sleep for three days and three nights straight.

Zhou Haiyan teased that I looked like I’d been drained of my very life force.

That evening after dinner, Zhou Haiyan had to leave suddenly on a business trip out of town.

Mom Zhou was in the kitchen making cookies for me.

An apron tied around her waist, her profile gentle and serene, the years seemed to have left almost no mark on her face at all.

I went over and hugged her. “Thank you, Mom. Making this many this time?”

She reached over with her clean hand and touched my hair. “Made plenty, take your time eating them. Our Qingqing’s had it rough these past few months.”

Mom’s cookies tasted amazing—I’d shared some with my roommates before, and they’d all raved about them nonstop.

I cupped my face in my hands, quietly watching her.

The warm light traced a gentle glow around her, and all those warm memories came flooding back through my mind, blending into one continuous thread.

Her constant fussing had softened all my years, one after another.

The last tray of cookies came out of the oven.

Mom turned, looking for the empty plate she’d set out earlier. “Strange, where did I just put that?”

Half-asleep on my feet, it took me a moment to catch on.

Then Mom realized she was already holding the plate in her hand, and let out a little sigh. “Getting old, I guess. Memory’s not what it used to be.”

Once all the cookies were plated, it was getting late, and I urged her to go rest.

She shook her head. “You go on to sleep first, Qingqing. Mom’s not tired yet.”

Seeing how insistent she was, I yawned, forcing my heavy eyelids to stay open.

“Okay, Mom, I’m heading to bed then.”

She looked at me gently. “Go on, go on.”

Halfway there, something occurred to me, and I turned back.

After the exam, none of them had asked me how it went, afraid of putting pressure on me.

But I wanted to feel confident, just this once.

I leaned in and whispered by Mom’s ear.

“Mom, I think I did really well this time. Let’s take a trip together with the scholarship money.

“Let’s go see the ocean!”

Mom had once said she wanted to go to the seaside and pick up shells.

She couldn’t help laughing, pulling me into a hug. “Oh, well, well, our Qingqing really is something.”

The familiar warmth of her scent filled my senses, her embrace full of gentle heat.

I don’t know how it happened, but the words slipped out. “Mom, I love you.”

The moment I said it, I felt embarrassed and ran off.

What I didn’t see was her standing frozen there, her eyes slowly reddening, staying silent for a long while before finally saying, her voice hoarse, “Qingqing, Mom loves you too.”

I hurried back to my room, washed up quickly, and flopped onto the bed. My eyes kept spinning, drowsiness overtaking me, and within a few minutes I’d fallen into a deep sleep.

……

Once no one was around anymore, the energy Mom Zhou had kept up all evening collapsed all at once, her expression turning weary and drained.

She walked to the osmanthus tree and stood there for a long time.

The wind chime hanging on the branch had gone unnoticed for so long that it had gathered a layer of dust from wind and sun.

She reached out to take it down, but before she could, a gust of wind beat her to it, bending the branch first.

The porcelain wind chime dropped straight to the ground and shattered into pieces.

She blinked.

Tears fell without warning, as if a piece of her heart had been forcibly scooped out.

Two small figures argued in her mind.

One comforted her: “It’s been hanging there so long, no one ever touched it, it probably wasn’t anything important anyway. It’s fine that it broke.”

The other, cutting through the memories that had been slowly slipping away, reminded her: “This was once something very important to you.”

She rose onto her toes, spread her arms, and danced a dance she’d grown clumsy at, forgetting the steps a few times along the way.

Suddenly, she murmured, quietly.

“See? I really have almost forgotten it all.

“What’s the point of living, if you can’t remember anything at all?”

These past few years, afraid of worrying the children, she’d forced herself to keep seeing doctors and going through treatment, swallowing handful after handful of medication, while, out of sight, handfuls of hair had been quietly falling out.

On the surface, she’d seemed to be getting better. In truth, it was because she was forgetting—gradually forgetting all those painful memories.

Those who appear calm on the surface are often living through their own slow self-destruction.

She had fooled everyone, but she couldn’t fool herself. Over time, those memories had become fused with who she was—and in losing that pain, she was also losing herself.

Her pale fingers brushed against the tree’s branches and leaves, which pests had eaten through until they were ragged and torn.

“I’m sorry. I never noticed you were sick.”

She dug out an old, half-used bottle of pesticide from around the house, first spraying it carefully over the pest-infested osmanthus tree, then took the remaining half bottle back with her to her room.

……

Inside, the woman lay quietly on the bed, fully dressed, the emptied medicine bottle sitting in the trash can.

As the searing pain overtook her body, she slowly began to slip into hallucination.

Hazily, she heard someone calling her name. “Jiqiu, Jiqiu.”

The voice, calling out again and again, familiar and warm—no one had called her that in many, many years. The person she remembered had already died five years ago, on that rainy night.

No funeral. No headstone. Not even a proper memorial.

She opened her eyes, and out of the hazy white light walked a tall man, his handsome, resolute face unchanged despite the years they’d been apart.

“Yibai. Have you come to take me home?”

Slowly, the corners of her mouth curved upward, and with great effort she reached her hand out toward the man. In truth, there was nothing in the room at all. At last, her arm slowly went limp and fell, and the person on the bed gradually closed her eyes.

The door stayed shut. No one came in or out for the rest of the night.