The meal concluded with everyone in high spirits — everyone, that is, except Lu Yicheng, who felt somewhat awkward and uncomfortable throughout.

Her grandmother gave Lu Siyan the red envelope. After seeing Jiang Ruoqiao give a nod of approval, Lu Siyan accepted it with great delight. There was nothing he loved more than receiving red envelopes! And this one had come from his great-grandma — which made it something else entirely.

Jiang Ruoqiao brought her grandparents back to the short-term apartment.

She had been quite busy lately — she had barely caught her breath after finishing that shoot, and now the company had sent her a written translation assignment. She preferred interpretation over translation, and on top of that, the materials the company had sent were heavily business-oriented. Every industry had its own specialized terminology, and just because someone studied English didn’t mean they could automatically grasp every field’s vocabulary — so translating this kind of document was mentally draining work. The pay wasn’t particularly generous either, calculated per thousand characters at a few hundred yuan per thousand.

The remuneration sounded decent enough on the surface, but it wasn’t especially high.

Even the team leader had told Jiang Ruoqiao that many of the more experienced staff refused to take on this kind of work.

Translating a document like this might earn her a few thousand yuan in total — but that few thousand wasn’t something she could earn in an hour or two. It was enormously taxing on the mind, and Jiang Ruoqiao had already been working on this one document since the day before. After her bath, she opened her laptop and sat down to work with the dictionary open beside her. It was only when she heard a knock at the door that she instinctively glanced at the clock in the bottom corner of her screen — it was already eleven o’clock at night.

It was almost certainly her grandmother, who had gotten up in the night, noticed the light still on in her room, and come to check on her.

Jiang Ruoqiao went to open the door. And indeed, there was her grandmother standing in the doorway, holding a porcelain bowl that was still steaming gently. “I saw your light still on, so I thought you were still up working, and made you some brown sugar eggs. These are good for you.”

Jiang Ruoqiao was at once amused and touched. “Grandma, I never eat late-night snacks.”

“You’ve been using your brain too much — you need to eat something.” Her grandmother coaxed her gently. “Come now, I’ve checked the calendar. Your time of the month is coming up in just a few days. This is good for you. Listen to Grandma — your body is the most important thing.”

This made Jiang Ruoqiao think of her high school years. Without any exaggeration, she had been grinding herself to the bone back then.

She had understood from quite early on that if she wanted to have a decent life, she needed to study hard and get into a good university.

In those days she was up late every night — after evening self-study finished it was already past ten, and by the time she got home and washed up it was nearly eleven-thirty. But she still pushed herself to review for another hour.

The sleep deprivation during her final year of high school was severe, and yet that relentless effort had paid off — she had earned a place at her first-choice university.

Her grandmother had always worried she wasn’t getting enough nutrition, and Jiang Ruoqiao had spent many an unwilling hour in high school forcing down brown sugar eggs.

Not wanting to let her grandmother’s kindness go to waste, Jiang Ruoqiao accepted the porcelain bowl and ate it slowly, in small spoonfuls.

Her grandmother settled herself comfortably on the edge of the bed, looking at her granddaughter’s face with fond, lingering tenderness. “Qiaoqiao, let Grandma ask you something. What exactly is going on between you and that young Lu fellow? I can see he’s quite warm toward you.”

Jiang Ruoqiao: “…”

Just as she had thought. She was there for the gossip all along!

Jiang Ruoqiao lowered her head. “Just… we’re classmates from the same university.”

The other layer to their relationship — that she would tell her. But not yet.

“I don’t think so.”

Every woman, once she puts her mind to something, becomes something of a detective. And a grandmother who has lived through decades — well, she is a detective among detectives.

“Think about how attentive he was to you. How attentive he was to me and your grandfather.” Her grandmother said. “Looking at him, I think of your father.”

Jiang Ruoqiao’s expression shifted for just a moment.

“Your father treated me and your grandfather as though we were his own parents — better than a biological son, even. That young Lu is genuinely invested. Think about it — there was a whole table of people, and he still noticed that your grandfather enjoyed that yam dish, and noticed when I needed water. Grandma has been around long enough to know: when a young man is attentive to your family, it means he is attentive to you. Why else would he bother?”

Jiang Ruoqiao said nothing.

She was twenty years old now and had been in three relationships, and had been liked enthusiastically by many people. She wasn’t blind — she knew what Lu Yicheng’s intentions toward her were.

But the thing was, she never made herself miserable over these kinds of things.

If Lu Yicheng could make her fall for him, then she would dive headlong into it.

If he couldn’t make her fall for him, then even with Siyan in the picture, she would stay right where she was.

Had Lu Yicheng said anything? No, he hadn’t.

He hadn’t said anything, hadn’t confessed anything — so it wasn’t her turn to get all tangled up in advance about this.

She was right here. She was still single. And whoever became her boyfriend in the end would be someone she genuinely liked.

Everything else was for the person who liked her and wanted to be with her to worry about.

When you stripped it down to the simplest terms, matters of the heart were very straightforward — everyone played their hand and let things unfold.

—

After spending a day taking her grandparents around to see the sights, Jiang Ruoqiao brought the two elders to the hospital.

The two of them had been completely fooled into going.

She told them it was a benefit offered by the studio — every year they had extra health check slots, and she had bought two at a steep discount. Her grandparents didn’t really like hospitals, always feeling that such places brought bad luck, but they couldn’t resist Jiang Ruoqiao’s gentle persuasion and dutifully complied. By the end of the day, both elders had undergone a thorough series of examinations. Her grandfather’s health was essentially the same as always — elevated blood pressure, blood sugar, and cholesterol, but nothing beyond that. He simply needed to continue following his doctor’s orders and take his medication on time.

Her grandmother’s health, however, proved to be exactly as the dream had foretold — something was wrong.

The doctor studied the examination results, brow deeply furrowed, and pointed to a particular area on the scan. “This section here may be a concern. You should consider bringing the patient in for a follow-up examination.”

This doctor was also from Xi Shi — practically a fellow townsperson — and so spoke frankly with Jiang Ruoqiao, advising her to take her grandmother directly to a larger hospital and book an appointment with a specialist for a second opinion. Whether it required a biopsy or surgery, it would all be handled under the same specialist, which would save time — otherwise they’d go through the whole process here, only to end up at a bigger hospital anyway.

“Dr. Huang Hongying is the authority in this area,” the doctor said. “She’s the most qualified person to see. She’ll give you the best assessment. The only difficulty is that her appointments are extremely hard to get. You’ll need to find a way.”

The drop in Jiang Ruoqiao’s heart was immediate and profound.

In medicine, no doctor will render a definitive judgment before seeing absolute pathological evidence.

This doctor had clearly spoken as frankly as she did partly out of a sense of fellow-townsperson kinship — giving the most sincere advice possible, urging her to go directly to the leading expert in this field. Jiang Ruoqiao’s legs felt weak beneath her. She had anticipated from the beginning that things might not be good — but now that this moment had actually arrived, she was still afraid.

Getting medical appointments was difficult. Getting specialist appointments was even harder.

Jiang Ruoqiao had already made up her mind to go directly for Dr. Huang’s appointment.

That evening, she told her grandparents that there was a dormitory inspection and she needed to spend the night at school — her grandparents didn’t suspect a thing and even urged her to hurry back to campus. Once she left the apartment, she took the subway directly to the hospital. She had spent the entire day online, researching how to book Dr. Huang’s appointments. Dr. Huang was a leading authority in her field, and patients came from every corner of the country to see her each day. Appointments could also be purchased through scalpers, though several patients’ family members had reported being scammed. And in Jing Shi, every day spent was another day’s worth of expenses — there was no room to waste.

Jiang Ruoqiao knew nothing about dealing with scalpers and had no intention of going that route.

It wasn’t about the money or the expenses, in any case. It was about time. She truly feared that a single day’s delay might have a damaging impact on her grandmother’s condition.

She decided to follow the example of some other patients’ family members and start lining up from the evening onwards, waiting for appointments to be released.

Appointments were also available online, but for a specialist of this caliber, there had been no availability online for the entire past month. The hospital counter released a limited number of slots each day.

Once she arrived at the hospital, Jiang Ruoqiao called Lu Yicheng.

He answered quickly. “Hello.”

Jiang Ruoqiao’s voice was steady. “Lu Yicheng, I need to ask a favor of you.”

There was no one else she could think to call right now.

“My grandparents are elderly — they’re at the apartment right now, just the two of them, and I’m out.” Jiang Ruoqiao said. “You live in the complex right next door, so it wouldn’t be too far to come and go. If there’s anything they need help with, could I ask you to make a trip over? Would that be alright?”

Lu Yicheng would of course never refuse, but he couldn’t quite stop himself from asking: “You’re out?”

Jiang Ruoqiao’s gaze dropped, and she didn’t hide anything from him. She gripped the phone a little tighter. “Yes, I’m at the hospital. I’m trying to get a specialist appointment — I probably won’t be back until tomorrow morning.”

Lu Yicheng was quiet for a moment, then asked: “Is it the elderly person’s health? Is something wrong?”

“Possibly. But I’ll see what the specialist says first.”

Lu Yicheng asked again: “Which hospital is it?”

To make sure Jiang Ruoqiao wouldn’t read too much into it, he said: “I have some experience with getting hospital appointments.”

Jiang Ruoqiao told him the name of the hospital.

—

An hour later, Jiang Ruoqiao stood in the queue, at a loss for anything to do.

A hospital was perhaps the one place in the world where you could witness the full spectrum of what it meant to be human.

Here, every day, the full cycle of life — birth, aging, illness, and death — played out without pause.

She had always thought that spending the night in a queue to get a hospital appointment was something you only heard about in stories — yet here she was, and she found it was all entirely real. There were already several people ahead of her, waiting through the night for the appointment slots to be released when the hospital opened in the morning. One by one, more people joined the line behind her as the evening wore on.

When Lu Yicheng arrived, this was what he saw. Among the crowd, Jiang Ruoqiao was a presence unlike any other. She was standing still, not chatting with anyone around her as others were, not looking at her phone. She simply stood, eyes on some point in the distance, as though watching something she alone could see. From behind, she looked very solitary. The sight brought him back to a few years earlier — he had stood like that too, in winter, queueing to get his grandmother an appointment, trying to win for her some sliver of a chance.

He stood at a distance, watching her.

It was difficult to put into words what he felt in that moment. He had always considered himself a solitary person, yet right now he thought: if there was anyone in this world who had walked the same path as he had, who had encountered the same things — it could only be her.

On this night, watching her, a vision seemed to settle over him like a waking dream —

The version of himself who had stood in that queue one winter was now standing directly behind her. The entire rest of the world was insubstantial and remote. There was only him, and her.

He saw the younger version of himself. He also saw her.

—

A tap on her shoulder pulled Jiang Ruoqiao out of her thoughts. She turned — and was genuinely surprised to find Lu Yicheng standing there.

He was still wearing his black backpack. He smiled at her. “I have experience with this. I’ll stand in for you.”

Jiang Ruoqiao’s first instinct was to decline. “Oh, there’s really no need, thank you.”

“I came prepared.” Lu Yicheng said. “And I’ve told Siyan — he’s at home waiting for you to come pick him up.”

As he spoke, he swung the backpack off his shoulders, unzipped it, and let her see what he meant by “came prepared.”

Inside was a folding stool, a handheld mini fan, a portable charger, and a toiletry set including a toothbrush, toothpaste, face towel, and mouthwash.

Jiang Ruoqiao bit back a laugh — it was the first time all day that she had genuinely smiled. “You even brought a toothbrush.”

Lu Yicheng said, a little uneasily: “It saves having to buy one.”

He looked at her briefly, then said in a gentle, reassuring voice: “Don’t worry. Go back and be with your grandparents. I really do know what I’m doing with this.”

There was nothing more he could do right now. But what was within his power to do, he would do.

—