Something bitter was rising in Nan Chu, bubbling up from somewhere deep, like the slow, insistent roll of water coming to boil.

She hadn’t lied. She really had caught a cold.

But he didn’t believe her anymore. Not now.

Trust was the barrier between them — a transparent membrane. They stood on either side of it, able to see each other clearly, a small door in the middle. She had been moving toward that door, toward him — and he had let it swing shut in her face, without expression, with a definitive slam.

Nan Chu was wearing thin clothes. The wind coming through the window was enough to raise goosebumps on her pale arms. The long black dress made her skin look whiter still. She hadn’t even put on a coat.

Lin Luxiao’s eyes held contempt. Did she not have a cold and simply freeze herself into one on purpose — hoping to make him feel soft and sorry?

Nan Chu stood very still. Her eyes were calm. Untroubled. And strangely, unexpectedly gentle.

She held the silence for a moment.

Then she moved toward him again, wrapped her arms around his waist, pressed her face against his broad chest. His heartbeat came back to her — strong, even, decisive.

A sense of belonging.

She tilted her head back, tracing kisses up along the taut line of his jaw, moving to his chin, his neck, the side of his ear —

The kisses were coaxing. Longing. And something almost devotional.

He remained unmoved — colder than the snow outside, his eyes carrying their frost all the way down.

Then Nan Chu’s hand found the military clasp at his waist.

In the dim stillness of the room, there was a soft click. The clasp came undone.

“Squad Leader.” She pressed her lips to his ear, her voice low and deliberate, unhurried. “You’re reacting.”

Below, something had hardened. Above, presumably, the attitude should soften.

And yet Lin Luxiao, it seemed, had turned hard in both places —

Nan Chu pressed her hand against that insistent hardness and looked up at him with one coaxing, tilted look. “Give me a chance. Let me prove something to you.”

“Prove what?” The man’s voice had dropped to something rough and charged.

Nan Chu found herself thinking of his voice during their previous encounters — the involuntary sounds he made, undone and completely unguarded — and then looked at the cold, forbidding mask he was wearing right now.

Something restless and contrary stirred inside her.

“Prove to you how faithful my soul is to you.”

He suddenly lowered his head and laughed. He looked at the woman hanging off him.

Like he’d just heard a joke: “With this method of proof? Are you an animal?”

“……”

His dark eyes held steady on her. “Faithful?”

He had read something, somewhere, a long time ago.

Loyalty exists because the price of betrayal hasn’t been met yet. Only death confirms faithfulness.

He had stopped believing long before now.

Lin Luxiao peeled her off him impatiently, pressed her back against the wall — no softness in the grip, veins raised on his forearm, the force of it real — and his voice came out colder than anything before it. “There is nothing between us.”

Her back met the hard wall with a jolt.

Nan Chu actually felt that. It actually hurt. He had completely stopped handling her with care.

Her soft, subdued plea had done nothing. And finally, a thread of genuine anger surfaced in Nan Chu. She glared at him. “Lin Luxiao!”

He hadn’t seen that expression on her — no longer composed and certain — and the sight of her actually angry lifted his mood unexpectedly. He said with lazy ease: “Hmm?”

She ground out through clenched teeth: “You are completely without manners!”

“Then go find someone with manners.”

The curve of his eyebrow, the bad-boy grin — she wanted to grab something blunt and hit him over the head with it.

Her patience for coaxing had run dry. Her own contrary streak surfaced now. “You think I won’t?”

“Go.” Clean, sharp. Done. He didn’t want to waste another breath on her — he swung the door and was gone.

Nan Chu sat on the bed in a daze, hand reaching toward the cigarette box on the bedside table. It was nearly flat, just one left. She worked it free, placed it between her lips, and reached for the lighter.

A flick of the wheel. A blue flame bloomed briefly inside the room. She lowered her head, touched the cigarette to it, and inhaled.

A thread of smoke began to curl upward from the tip.

Smoke drifted soft and slow. The woman’s face grew hazy within it.

A low ache in her back.

She muttered under her breath: “Bastard.”

Nan Chu tapped off the ash, replaced the cigarette between her lips, let the tobacco work its way down to her throat, slow and pressing, filling her chest. She exhaled upward, long and slow, then muttered again: “Son of a bitch.”

The wild streak at her core had resurfaced.

She had always been on the cooler side — with the people around her, even with fans who had, in earlier years, told her they liked her. Some had even gone to the trouble of making things by hand and bringing them to the company office.

She would accept with a polite thank you, hand the item to her assistant, and never open it again.

People stopped giving her things, eventually.

She had a particular wariness of strangers — a tendency to suspect their intentions. When someone was kind to her, her first thought was: what do they want from me? She had nothing to offer, and so she deflected other people’s goodwill before it could take hold.

This was the environment she had grown up in — the weight of her background, the particular nature of her mother’s work and her mother’s distance.

Until sixteen.

When she met Lin Luxiao. He alone had drawn her in, deeply and completely.

Moving into his home, falling for him — none of that had surprised her. She had been certain of both.

Lin Luxiao was the man she would go on loving for the rest of her life.

She loved his integrity. His seriousness. The directness with which he moved through the world.

The only thing she hadn’t anticipated was discovering, once the distance between them closed, that the man was privately a complete delinquent.

She had always found that type insufferable.

And yet she discovered: every quality she had once disliked, once it was Lin Luxiao’s, became something she loved.

Without any way of reversing it.

Because of what happened with Lin Qi, she had spent months doubting the values she had built her life around — wondering if her coldness had pushed him toward the wrong path. But it had been Lin Luxiao’s principles, his openness, his ease with the world, that had slowly shown her: the version of herself she had feared she might be wasn’t actually as broken as she had imagined.

And then reality came in and struck them both hard.

And she discovered that all those principles, that openness and freedom — none of it could protect the person she loved.

The media coverage had been buried by Nan Yueru, who had arranged it.

The one condition: Nan Chu would return to America.

At twenty-one, still too young, not yet fully formed, Nan Chu had heard that his father had been hospitalized from the stress — and that he was about to be sent to a remote mountain posting — and she had made the decision to leave.

That year.

She had learned how to survive. She had learned to deflect journalists with practiced grace. She had learned, more pointedly, to retaliate — so effectively that no one in the industry dared to come for her again. And having seen everything the entertainment world had to offer — the ugliness, the scheming, the buried scandals that never saw daylight — she found herself missing, intensely, a man who lived his life in service to something larger than himself.

She thought of the scene a moment ago.

She shook her head and let out an exasperated laugh, cigarette still between her lips. “Infuriating man.”

And then her phone buzzed. She put the cigarette out and answered. “Mom.”

“Where are you?”

Nan Chu: “On holiday.”

“Book a flight back. I’ve lined up a project for you — audition the day after tomorrow.”

“Whose?”

“A studio called Nan Xuan’s. The screenwriter has a solid name, though it would be a first collaboration. Come back early and talk through the details.”

She stared at the window without expression. “Mom, aren’t you going back to America for a holiday?”

“Once you’re married, I’ll go.”

Nan Chu said, resigned: “That’s not happening any time soon.”

“When you’re back, there’s a film producer — twenty-eight. I’d like to introduce you.”

This past year, Nan Yueru had produced a steady stream of what she considered promising young men for Nan Chu’s consideration.

Nan Chu said, even and unruffled: “When are you going to give up?”

“When you’re married, I’ll give up.”

“You were never married yourself. Why are you pressing me to get married?”

“Because I was never married myself, I’m pressing you. Nan Chu — when you’re old, it is very lonely.”

Waking in the night to a space beside you that is empty. Wind rising outside, and no warmth. Loneliness written in every line of your expression.

That was insight.

And it was also regret.

……

That day.

The new year was almost here. The wind had dropped, the snow had begun to ease, and the town bus in Lushan had started running again. Nan Chu had bought a ticket to leave the following morning.

The beautiful woman in the family quarters had by now become something of a local legend —

But since Lin Luxiao’s general mood remained persistently muted, no one dared bring up the very subject he didn’t want raised.

Until that evening, when the Lushan station organized an inter-unit social gathering.

Which was to say: a collective blind date for all the single firefighters.

At dinner, Zhao Guo suddenly remembered the woman in the family quarters and made a suggestion. “Luxiao, why not invite the girl from the family quarters? You can’t just keep leaving her there like that — come out tonight, let everyone have a good time together.”

And so they could all finally get a proper look —

Who she actually was.

The curiosity was killing them.

Lin Luxiao kept eating, flicked a glance at Zhao Guo, and refused without ceremony. “She doesn’t like crowds.”

Zhao Guo pressed on. “You can’t keep hiding her away like some treasure — she’s been here over a week, at least let her come out and meet everyone—”

He hadn’t finished before Lin Luxiao’s warning look landed on him like a closed door.

Unfortunately, several officers nearby had caught the tail end of it. “Luxiao, is your girlfriend here?”

He swallowed his mouthful of rice, stalled a moment, then shook his head. “No.”

The officer smiled. “Friend or not, it’s rare she’s come all this way. Tell her to come join us — the more the better.”

The officer had spoken. The squadmates around him rumbled in encouragement. Lin Luxiao was well and truly cornered. His temper was pushing hard against the urge to take Zhao Guo’s mouth and quietly remove it.

……

At six in the evening.

Lin Luxiao was in the courtyard of the family quarters, crouched down entertaining the golden retriever. The woman came out after finishing dinner, spotted the tall, quiet figure at the door, and called out warmly, “Xiao Lin!”

Lin Luxiao removed his hand from the golden’s chin, stood, and answered her with a smile.

The woman asked, “Coming to find the girl?”

He had just been upstairs and knocked — no one answered. He pushed his hand into his pocket and asked with practiced indifference, “Where is she?”

“She went out a little while ago. Should be back soon. Something you need?”

Lin Luxiao scratched at his brow. “Nothing.”

He had just turned, thinking he would leave, when he caught sight of Nan Chu. She was coming up the path in a knee-length black down coat, the same vivid red scarf wound at her neck, half her face buried in the bundled fabric, stepping carefully through the snow.

She hadn’t noticed anyone standing nearby. Head down, she made her way along, tracking the snowy path — and deliberately stepping into every patch of snow she could find, however far off the path it took her, unwilling to stop until she heard that satisfying crack and crunch underfoot.

This woman and her sound obsessions.

She was entirely fixated on certain particular sounds.

When they had been together, the snow back north had been heavier than this. The two of them had once gone downstairs together to get something to eat.

The street had still been covered in remnant snow.

She had been completely absorbed in the crunch and squeak of it underfoot, and had insisted — despite her empty stomach — on dragging him along the base of the building for a solid half hour, wholly dedicated to the enterprise of stepping in snow.

If he hadn’t been genuinely starving.

He would have carried her to the car and bundled her in, and she still wouldn’t have noticed she’d been stopped.

He had leaned across to do up her seatbelt for her, and she had reached up idly to feel the texture of his short hair, talking to herself as she did: “I love every sound that carries want in it.”

He had been watching the rearview mirror as he reversed. “Hmm?”

Nan Chu said, “Like the crunch of stepping into snow.” She glanced at him, her gaze clear as water. “And the sounds you make in bed.”

He had corrected her. “Women make noise in bed. Men call it release.”

“It’s still making noise in bed.”

The two of them had spent thirty minutes debating this very question, with no satisfying conclusion, until it ended in a flat and unamused threat from him: “Keep talking and I’ll make sure you can’t get out of it.”

Nan Chu had pouted. “That’s abuse.”

He had leaned back in his seat, head down, laughing quietly — and then looked at her sideways, his gaze long and deep.

Back then, he had been so careful with her. During intimacy he hadn’t dared give her everything; even so, she had cried from the pain.

……

Nan Chu was fully engrossed in her stepping, head still down, when she noticed, at the far end of her path, a tall figure standing in the way.

Lin Luxiao, on his end, had played through every scene he could remember of the two of them together, like a film running on a loop.

Along this stone-paved path, no more than a hundred meters long, a camphor tree every ten meters.

She came past one, and then another, taking her time.

The street lamps blinked on one by one, and the narrow lane acquired a soft, golden glow.

A small figure moved slowly toward him through it, her shadow growing longer behind her as she came.

……

Nan Chu was so absorbed in her stepping that she nearly walked straight into the hand held out in front of her. She looked up, utterly composed. “Oh. You were looking for me?”

Lin Luxiao withdrew the hand, touched the tip of his nose, and then put it back in his pocket.

“There’s an event at seven tonight. The station asked me to ask whether you’d like to come.”

“What kind of event?”

“A very boring event.”

The subtext was audible — he didn’t particularly want her there.

Nan Chu smiled pleasantly. “Sure.”

Lin Luxiao looked at her in silence for a moment, then said, somewhat reluctantly: “Wear your mask.”

“……You’re embarrassed to be seen with me?”

“That lot has seen your films.” He gave a short sound, something between amusement and mild exasperation. “You’re quite uninhibited in them.”