Ruan Yu was momentarily struck speechless.

Sure enough, face-to-face encounters were more prone to slip-ups.

She quickly covered her tracks: “I looked you up! There was an article about you online.”

Not a bad patch job on the lie — but the problem was, she had now pushed herself into a different hole entirely.

Xu Huaisong asked, with an expression hovering between a smile and something else: “And why were you looking me up?”

The plate of lard rice cakes in Ruan Yu’s hands suddenly felt scalding hot.

She blinked twice, keeping her expression dry: “Just… basic background research on the lawyer handling my case. I also know that Attorney Liu is a local from Hang Shi.” As she said this, she held out the gleaming white plate along with a pair of silver chopsticks. “While they’re still hot?”

The subject change was painfully abrupt. Xu Huaisong lowered his eyes, accepted both, and retreated to the sofa.

Ruan Yu guiltily rubbed her nose and sat down across from him.

His table manners were refined — he picked up a piece of rice cake and chewed it slowly, his expression not shifting in the slightest, giving absolutely nothing away about whether the food was good or not.

Ruan Yu was quietly trying to read him, when in the very next moment she saw him swallow, look up, and ask: “Would you like some?”

Had her gaze been too hungry, too intense? She quickly waved her hand and looked away — and then watched helplessly as every last piece of rice cake disappeared.

Refined table manners, apparently, did not mean a refined appetite.

Ruan Yu swallowed and brought the empty plate back to the kitchen. When she returned, she found him leafing through the documents.

Hearing her come in, he looked up and said, “I haven’t looked at these yet.”

“Were you…” She paused. “Have you been very busy these past few days?”

“Yes. I hadn’t opened WeChat.”

So he hadn’t been ignoring her messages on purpose. She had figured as much — Xu Huaisong didn’t seem like the type to be that petty.

Ruan Yu relaxed a little: “Honestly, the case isn’t urgent. The public outcry has mostly died down, the court date is still a long way off, and finishing the counter palette now wouldn’t serve any immediate purpose. You could go rest first.”

Xu Huaisong said nothing and lowered his head to continue reading.

She had extended the courtesy; there was no need to press further. Half an hour later, though, she watched him close the folder.

Xu Huaisong’s eyelids had simply given up on him.

He still understood the principle of sustainable pacing. There was plenty of time ahead — no need to drain the lake to catch every fish.

He closed his eyes. “Help me contact Liu Mao to come pick me up. I need to sleep for a bit.”

Ruan Yu said “alright” and sent Liu Mao a message. She was just about to ask whether he wanted to lie down on the long sofa nearby when she looked up and found he was already asleep again.

She walked over and crouched down beside him, calling out softly: “Attorney Xu?”

No response.

Being a lawyer was truly a high-energy profession.

Fine — she’d let him sleep sitting up. She went to the bedroom and fetched a freshly washed thin blanket, draped it over him, then settled back onto the sofa across from him and closed her own eyes to rest. When she opened them again, Xu Huaisong was gone.

She had fallen asleep too. Wonderful.

Being an author was apparently a high-energy profession as well.

She was just reaching for her phone to check whether Xu Huaisong had sent a message, when her eyes caught something on the coffee table — a note.

Two words in sprawling, sweeping strokes: Left.

Ruan Yu looked down at the thin blanket still draped over herself, and sat there in a mild daze for a moment.

Xu Huaisong slept straight through to eleven o’clock that night at the hotel. Out of habit, he opened Ruan Yu’s Weibo.

Her account had had comments and private messages re-enabled two days ago, but she hadn’t posted any updates. Now, unexpectedly, he saw a new post — published an hour ago.

Wen Xiang: Coming on here to apologize. I Really Want to Whisper in Your Ear probably won’t be updated again. The coins will be refunded when the subscription period ends. This decision has nothing to do with the online harassment before. Goodnight, everyone. 🌙

Xu Huaisong blinked, expression mild, and scrolled down to the comments.

They were packed dense — one after another, a cascade of exclamation points, readers crying and pleading, heartfelt “please don’t, author!” and a stream of “why?”s.

Ruan Yu hadn’t replied to a single one. But the top-most comment showed a small “liked by the blogger” marker — it seemed she had given it her silent approval.

Xu Huaisong read through that comment once, set down his phone, opened the window to let in some air for a while, and then dialed a number: “Coming out for a drink?”

One in the morning. A quiet bar near the hotel. Liu Mao, propping open his eyelids, looked around at the now-empty tables and snatched the glass from Xu Huaisong’s hand: “I ask you — do you come out for drinks without any intention of actually talking? You just sit there drinking in silence. Have you considered that I, the one with no jet lag, might be extremely tired?”

Without a glass in hand, he simply reached for another one. There was already a faint haze of intoxication settling into Xu Huaisong’s eyes, though he was still just barely lucid.

He swirled the liquid, shot Liu Mao a sidelong glance, and said: “Talk about what? Your blind date?”

That landed Liu Mao a solid hit.

When Xu Huaisong had last visited Hang Shi, Liu Mao had explained the history of how he and Ruan Yu knew each other — and had been getting ribbed about it ever since.

Yet here Xu Huaisong was, not having breathed a single word about his own connection to Ruan Yu.

Liu Mao sighed. “Fine, forget it.”

“If I tell you, don’t go dislocating your jaw.”

He scoffed: “What kind of earth-shattering story could make a man nearly thirty years old dislocate his jaw?”

Three minutes later, a loud thud rang out from the otherwise silent barroom.

Liu Mao held his jaw and said: “Romance in the Rain wasn’t even this dramatic.”

Xu Huaisong turned his head away and smiled, saying nothing.

Liu Mao sat there in stunned silence for a good while before asking: “Okay but even if you didn’t know how she felt back then, why not just try confessing? Why didn’t you say anything? You really had to be the model student?”

Xu Huaisong was quiet for a moment, then smiled again: “You didn’t know what things were like at my home back then?”

Liu Mao couldn’t find a response to that. After a pause, he asked: “So what do you think now?”

“I don’t know.”

Xu Huaisong was telling the truth.

Too many years had passed. Real life wasn’t a television drama where a single line of white text on black — Eight years later — could make an entire stretch of time disappear with a casual stroke of the pen.

The truth was, from the moment he first learned what had really happened all the way to now, he had never truly sorted through it.

Coming back to China, the little schemes he’d pulled — each time it had felt as if some force was pushing him forward.

And he had simply stopped resisting.

After a long silence, he knocked back a glass of vodka and said something he would never have said sober: “Liu Mao, this feeling is awful.”

He wasn’t afraid that she had never felt anything for him. What he feared was that she once had.

What was there to fear about unrequited love? He had made his peace with that long ago. What was terrifying was turning around years later to find someone telling you — you could have been together.

And now she had named the male lead of her novel “He Shiqian” — a name that celebrated the passing of time, the fading of all things into the past — and she had already reached the point where she could write all of it out without so much as a flinch.

Liu Mao thought for a moment and asked: “Do you know what ‘phantom feelings’ are?”

Xu Huaisong glanced at him.

“A friend of mine caught feelings for a girl not long after university started — they were clearly into each other, but neither of them ever said anything. It wasn’t until close to graduation, when someone else mentioned it, that he found out she had liked him too. Pretty similar to your situation. But guess what happened next?”

Getting no response, he carried on anyway: “He went after her hard — eventually they got together. Except the outcome was…” he held up a finger, “less than two months before they broke up. Because when they’d first been drawn to each other, they barely knew one another at all. Once they were actually together, they realized it wasn’t what either of them had imagined. Turned out they’d both been living inside their own fantasies the whole time.”

Xu Huaisong lowered his eyes and drank harder.

“Afterward, my friend said to me — when he’d been chasing her, he was completely driven by obsession. All he could think was that it would be such a waste to let it slip away like this. It was only after the breakup that he understood — it had only ever been a ‘phantom feeling’ hiding behind the mask of regret. But by then it was too late. What had been a really worthwhile memory, where both of them had kept the most beautiful impression of each other, had just been needlessly…”

“What are you getting at?” Xu Huaisong set his glass down with a sharp crack. “Trying to talk me out of it?”

Liu Mao choked: “That’s not what I meant, I was just saying—”

He hadn’t finished explaining when he saw Xu Huaisong grab his suit jacket and stride out.

By the time Liu Mao settled the tab and followed him outside, there was no one in sight.

Xu Huaisong hadn’t set up a domestic phone number yet, so Liu Mao could only call him on WeChat voice — it rang for a long time before connecting.

He asked: “Where are you?”

“In a taxi…”

“Heading back to the hotel?”

Xu Huaisong’s voice came through slightly murky. After a long silence he said: “Her place.”

Two in the morning. Ruan Yu got up in the night — perhaps because she had napped during the day — and found herself suddenly wide awake once she was back in bed.

Unable to sleep, she simply unlocked her phone and started scrolling through Moments.

She wasn’t expecting much at this hour, but refreshing the feed brought up a post published not long ago.

Zhikun Liu Mao: Keeping someone company for a late-night drink at the bar. No particular feeling about it, just one word: upward-stroke, horizontal-with-hook, horizontal, vertical, left-falling, right-falling, horizontal.

The photo attached showed a row of vodka glasses, with the corner of a dimly lit bar just visible in the frame.

Nothing else.

Ruan Yu traced those strokes on her bed sheet and assembled the character “困” — exhausted. She thought to herself that Liu Mao was actually more interesting than he had seemed at first impression.

She quickly scrolled past the post, found nothing else worth looking at, and switched back to Weibo.

After several days of deliberation, she had made a decision a few hours earlier — she would no longer continue serializing I Really Want to Whisper in Your Ear. After all, ever since writing that dream chapter, she had been steadily accumulating a collection of personal embarrassments. Letting them pile up further didn’t seem wise.

So she had posted an apology announcement.

Ruan Yu tapped on the post, intending to look through the reader comments and reply to a few, when one comment at the very top immediately caught her eye.

It looked like the sort of thing posted by an account that mass-dropped comments everywhere for followers. The account, going by the name “Beautiful Words for Beautiful Love,” had written: People always need to look forward. Nothing is truly insurmountable — it’s just that some things can never be returned to.

Good heavens. How had she ever liked something that saccharine? When on earth had her thumb slipped?

A shiver ran through her entire body; goosebumps rose along her arm. She hurriedly tapped to unlike it.

Author’s Note — Tipsy Song Song: “Once upon a time, you were the one who wanted to like it — you liked it, you liked it — and now you’ve gone and unliked it. What am I supposed to do with that?”