After watching a few episodes on the couch, Ban Sheng grabbed the keys from the table and drove her home. The car moved swiftly through the night, the darkness streaming past the windows like a comet trail.

The car pulled up below Lin Weixia’s building and the engine cut off. She unclipped her seatbelt and leaned forward to push open the door, but Ban Sheng reached out and caught her hand.

“Do you have anything planned for Christmas?”

Lin Weixia took out her phone and, with great performance, opened the calendar app. She drew her response out: “I think I might have something that day — but if it’s you asking, I suppose I could be persuaded to make it work——”

A glint of mischief flashed in her eyes. Her pale cheeks were suddenly caught between his fingers, forcing her face toward his. Ban Sheng let out a low laugh, chest vibrating slightly, playing along, his voice low and quiet:

“Yes, I’m asking. Will you say yes?”

Lin Weixia gave a small, deliberate cough. “Fine,” she said quietly.

Two days later. Christmas. The weather forecast had called for the snow to ease from heavy to light, and predicted the day’s foot traffic to be ten times the usual volume, urging everyone out and about to take care on the icy roads.

Lin Weixia sat at her vanity mirror and carefully drew in her brows, did her makeup, then took a plum-colored lipstick and applied it lightly to her lips — a soft, luminous finish.

When it came to picking her outfit, Lin Weixia usually stayed with simple, minimal palettes, but today she had specially chosen an ink-green capelet that made her skin appear almost translucent white against it. Beneath a black beret sat a pair of clear, bright eyes. From her ears dangled a pair of cherry earrings, swaying gently against the soft fall of her hair.

Her face looked even more delicately understated than usual.

Lin Weixia and Ban Sheng had arranged to meet at the cinema. The classic film Love Actually was being re-released this year, and the two of them had made a date to see it together on Christmas Day.

Lin Weixia arrived early. She collected her tickets and sat on a bench to wait. The cinema was busy — couples, married pairs, families of three — every face lit up with happiness.

For some reason, though this wasn’t the first time she’d arranged to meet Ban Sheng, Lin Weixia found herself inexplicably more nervous than usual, her heartbeat out of rhythm.

She was thinking — this is a new beginning.

She checked the time. Still half an hour before they’d agreed to meet. She sat waiting eagerly for Ban Sheng, but he was nowhere to be seen.

Another half hour passed. He still hadn’t come. Lin Weixia stopped glancing toward the entrance. She shifted in her seat — her legs were starting to ache — and her dark lashes dropped low, whatever she was thinking hidden behind them.

Before long, a clear recorded voice rang out from inside the screening hall: “Attention, guests — the 8:10 PM screening of Love Actually is now beginning ticket checks……”

The people on either side of her rose to their feet. Most were couples — girls carrying buckets of popcorn, guys holding tickets as they filed into line.

The phone in her pocket buzzed. Lin Weixia pulled it out. Ban Sheng’s number was on the screen. Her heart gave a small lift, and she answered immediately: “Hello?”

“Weixia. It’s me.” Ban Sheng’s voice was quiet and subdued.

“I’m sorry — something came up last minute. I can’t make it.” He let out a long, heavy breath. He sounded like he was standing in some open, echoing corridor or stairwell. The hollow sound of it came through the line.

Lin Weixia was silent for a long moment, her arm — raised to hold the phone — beginning to ache. She came back to herself finally and answered, “Okay.”

From the other end of the line came a sudden sharp sound. Ban Sheng moved the phone away, his voice pausing, and when he spoke again it carried the texture of fatigue: “I’ll make it up to you next time, for sure.”

After she hung up, Lin Weixia tucked her phone back into her pocket. The hall around her hummed with noise. A meter away, a couple was mid-argument — the girl, clearly irritated: “I told you to buy the tickets early and you wouldn’t listen. What do we do now?”

The guy scratched his head. “We could catch the eleven o’clock showing?”

The girl hit him on the shoulder with her wallet. “The eleven o’clock? Are you forgetting the school curfew? This is so annoying — it’s all your fault.”

The more she thought about it, the more wronged she felt. The guy looked increasingly at a loss for what to do, and it looked like the two of them were about to go around again. Lin Weixia walked over, held out the tickets, and said: “Here. Take them.”

“You’re not watching?” The girl looked surprised.

Lin Weixia shook her head. A quiet smile touched her lips. “I’m not watching. The person I was waiting for didn’t come.”

With that, she pressed both tickets into the girl’s hand, put her hands in her pockets, and walked against the flow of the crowd, moving toward the exit as everyone else streamed in the opposite direction. Behind her, the girl called out: “Thank you — wait, I haven’t paid you for the tickets yet——”

Lin Weixia didn’t turn around. She raised one hand and gave a brief wave.

Compared to everything that had come before this moment, Lin Weixia found that her heart was not as heavy as it once was. Perhaps it was the accumulation of experience — the threshold for what she could bear had quietly grown.

Wednesday. After her clinical psychology lecture, Lin Weixia walked out of the building with her classmates. A strong gust of wind swept past, stirring the dust and dead leaves from the ground.

Passing the notice board at the university, a cluster of young students had gathered in front of it, murmuring amongst themselves in a low but unmistakable stir of noise. Her companion was the type who loved a bit of drama and tugged Lin Weixia into the press of the crowd, laughing: “Excuse us, sorry, coming through.”

The books in Lin Weixia’s arms slipped slightly. She tightened her grip and let her eyes drift toward the notice board — then went still.

A white sheet of paper had been posted there — clearly printed and put up anonymously by a student. Its contents were a direct accusation against Ban Sheng of the Biomedical Engineering Faculty, Class One: alleging that he had been using prohibited substances and relying on them to perform beyond his natural capacity in laboratory projects and research, which was unfair to other students, and demanding that the school investigate.

The post accused Ban Sheng of rule-breaking and cheating through drugs, using charged, exaggerated language and a familiar pattern of escalation — framing the school as complicit if it failed to act.

“Is this real? Isn’t that person from Penn?” someone wondered.

“Maybe he was already doing it at Penn. Abroad they play differently,” a guy speculated with a quiet, conspiratorial laugh.

A tall girl cut in coldly: “You believe something like this without a shred of evidence? I’d sooner believe someone has it out for him and wants to bring him down. Ban Sheng is just too good at everything — and this is where they decide to hit him.”

“Ha. People really are something.”

The onlookers argued back and forth, and Lin Weixia said nothing throughout. Her fingers pressed tighter and tighter, knuckles going white — and as the snowball of gossip grew larger and larger —

A pale hand reached out and tore the paper off the notice board in one clean motion. Lin Weixia’s eyes were cool and expressionless. She crumpled the page into a ball and dropped it into the nearest trash can, right there in front of everyone.

Lin Weixia didn’t go to the library to study. Instead, she went around to every notice board on campus and pulled down every anonymous posting of the same kind she could find. She spent an entire afternoon doing it.

The following day, Lin Weixia ate alone in the university canteen. She’d only taken two dishes — stir-fried green beans, and celery with beef.

She was eating slowly, unhurried, when a cup of hot cocoa appeared at her left — and with it, the clean, delicate scent of jasmine perfume. Lin Weixia looked up. It was Li Shengran.

Li Shengran appeared impeccably put-together, phone and a box of peppermint gum in hand — the kind you used to freshen your breath after smoking.

“You still have the appetite to eat at a time like this,” Li Shengran said, her habitual edge coming through. “Aren’t you going to find him?”

Lin Weixia set down her chopsticks and folded her arms. “What else am I supposed to do — drown in my own tears? I’ve called him. It’s off.”

Ban Sheng had long since mastered the art of going silent and disappearing.

She picked her chopsticks back up, bent over her bowl, and began eating her rice. Her tone was even: “I’m still eating.”

The implication was clear: Li Shengran was free to leave.

Li Shengran read Lin Weixia’s attitude clearly enough. As a woman, she was on Lin Weixia’s side — she thought Lin Weixia had every right to be angry, even to wash her hands of the whole thing.

But she had known Ban Sheng since they were children, and she had watched every hard step of how he had gotten here.

Something came back to her suddenly — the time at Jiuga Mountain, and that unlabeled bottle of “stomach medicine.” Lin Weixia had asked about it more than once, and Ban Sheng had always deflected with practiced ease. A cold premonition took hold.

“Is he sick?” Li Shengran asked. “Post-traumatic stress disorder?”

Li Shengran reached into her bag and took out a stack of medical reports, then held them out. “More than that. You’re studying psychology — these should be easy enough for you to read. They’re a portion of his medical history from the past few years.”

Lin Weixia took them and flipped through quickly, her mind absorbing information at speed. Then — a clatter — one of her chopsticks slid off the edge of the blue-rimmed canteen table and hit the floor.

The Hamilton Depression Rating Scale. 24 items assessed: anxiety, cognitive impairment, sleep disturbance, hopelessness…… Score above three: severe depression.

The SSI Suicide Ideation Scale indicated the patient had a strong desire for suicide…… The further she read, the more one name appeared across every page — Ban Sheng.

Lin Weixia’s fingertips trembled involuntarily. The clinical terms she knew inside out from her coursework suddenly became unbearably real in front of her eyes.

Everything felt unfamiliar.

“The day he was getting ready to come find you, something came up — he needed to call his father about something. Ban Sheng and that family hadn’t spoken in two years. He called the number — and found out his father had changed it. Then he relapsed, badly. He was forcibly admitted to hospital, and his phone was confiscated.”

Li Shengran drew a breath. “You probably don’t know this — Ban Sheng has had depression for many years. During those two years abroad, it progressed into severe depression and moderate anxiety disorder.”

While the two of them were talking, the phone on the table gave a buzz. Lin Weixia opened it — a new official notice had gone up on the school website. It announced that third-year exchange student Ban Sheng, having been caught up in a public controversy and the subject of multiple reports to the school alleging violations of student conduct, had had his current laboratory project suspended pending investigation.

What that meant — it meant all those nights Ban Sheng had spent in the lab, the sleepless hours, every ounce of effort he’d poured in — could be for nothing.

“Bastards,” Lin Weixia said, unable to stop herself. A single crystalline tear dropped onto the phone screen.

She was cursing whoever had filed the reports — whoever had maliciously dragged him into this. Who gave them the right.

“Anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medication — and someone calls that substance abuse,” Lin Weixia said coldly. “In a world like this, all you need is a mouth. You can turn white into black.”

Li Shengran glanced at the celery and beef in Lin Weixia’s bowl and sighed softly. “And that Winter Solstice — I saw you’d bought celery. You thought he really loved beef with celery, didn’t you? He doesn’t like celery at all. Back in high school he ordered the same dish as you to accommodate you. He only ate it because you liked it.”

“What?” Lin Weixia was completely thrown.

“The tattoo was a lie I told you. He got the butterfly tattoo because of you — he had it done right after the college entrance exams, because he didn’t want to forget you.” Li Shengran said it calmly. “And the most important thing — he changed his major when he got to university because of you. He was afraid that one day you might not be able to hear anymore.”

After everything that happened around the college exams, Ban Sheng had been kept at home. Then one day, he slipped out. He tracked down a friend from the middle school years who had been in the same year as Lin Weixia, and that friend told him everything he knew about her.

He told Ban Sheng that Lin Weixia’s hearing had once been fine. When she was very small, she had a high fever, and her father — drunk out of his mind — gave her the wrong medicine. After an overdose of something like gentamicin, Lin Weixia lost the hearing in her right ear.

She had been wearing a hearing aid ever since.

“Then in middle school, she was different from everyone else — so her classmates tore up her notebooks, called her names, shut her out. That was nothing. The worst of it was a group of those animals who cornered her after school, trapped her in an alley. She must have been pushed past her limit, because Lin Weixia fought back — she bit one of them so hard on the hand she nearly took a chunk of flesh off. He was in so much pain he slapped her left ear more than ten times on the spot. He hit her so hard her ear started bleeding before he stopped. After that, her left ear was affected too. The matter got buried in the end.”

Her left ear had been beaten until the hearing on that side was damaged as well. So Lin Weixia couldn’t handle sounds that were too loud or chaotic — sometimes she would have triggered responses. Sometimes when she spoke, her reactions were half a beat slower than other people’s.

When the friend finished telling him all this, he looked at Ban Sheng and asked cautiously, “You okay, Ban-ge?”

He had never seen Ban Sheng like this before — showing up with a face full of bruises, asking about Lin Weixia like nothing was wrong, and then sitting there listening to all of it while the veins at his temple stood out, as though holding himself together by sheer force of will.

Ban Sheng leaned against the crumbling wall, face expressionless. His hand had closed into a fist without him noticing, tight enough to draw blood.

The friend had never seen Ban Sheng’s eyes that red before.

The heart of a young man — hidden, endured, swallowed whole.

After the college exams ended, a boy named Liu Qiang had nothing better to do and wandered back to school by himself, whistling. He was drifting around the area, thinking about finding a barbecue stall for a late-night snack, when a deep roll of thunder split the sky — and then sheets of rain came hammering down.

Liu Qiang hummed to himself, hopping over puddles, and ducked into an alley to shelter from the rain. He was in a fine mood — until a hard punch connected with the back of his skull, and he went face-first into the waterlogged ground.

“What the——”

Liu Qiang spat, pushed himself up on his elbows and was about to swing at whoever it was when a dark figure bore down on him, and a solid blow landed on his sternum. He let out a strangled scream.

Rain fell without stopping. Stray drops drove sideways onto Ban Sheng’s face, expression merciless and cold. A wooden baton hit the ground with a resounding clang.

On the damp, moss-covered wall, two shadows were cast: one lean and tall, hood pulled over his head, the exposed profile cut sharp as a blade — the face of someone without a trace of mercy. The other shadow, shorter, took blow after blow, and finally bent double, curling like a shrimp, face flushed dark as liver, until the legs gave out and buckled to the ground.

Liu Qiang was beaten badly. He kept begging: “I’m sorry, man, I’m sorry — what did I do to you——”

Liu Qiang hurt all over, feeling like every organ in his body had been shattered. He ended up lying in a waterlogged patch of mud. Ban Sheng crouched down slowly beside him, a splash of dirty water on his face, the cut above his brow opened and seeping. He stared at Liu Qiang. His open palm suddenly produced a folding knife, the sharp blade glinting cold in the light of a bare bulb.

“Which hand was it?” Ban Sheng said quietly.

Liu Qiang had no idea what he’d done, and Ban Sheng gave him a clue:

“Butterfly.”

The moment Liu Qiang heard that word, his mind went straight to Lin Weixia, and his whole body went rigid with panic, scrabbling frantically backward. Back then he’d barely touched her face, put his hand on her waist and was just reaching for her chest when Lin Weixia went absolutely feral — bit him like she was possessed or something.

Of course he’d slapped her. Had to teach that stupid girl a lesson for not knowing her place. He hadn’t thought it would end up damaging her left ear as well.

She’d come within a hair’s breadth of going completely deaf.

The thought made Liu Qiang’s throat tighten with sudden terror. He spun and tried to run — Ban Sheng planted his foot on Liu Qiang’s hand. Liu Qiang’s scream split the alley.

Before he even had time to process what was happening, a gleaming knife appeared close to his ear. Ban Sheng’s jaw shifted faintly. The blade in his hand was pressed forward with a slight, deliberate force, and Liu Qiang immediately felt something warm and wet at his ear. The terror jolted another scream out of him.

“I changed my mind.” Ban Sheng looked at his ear and said it without expression.

This lunatic might actually cut off his ear to offer as an apology to Lin Weixia.

Liu Qiang scrambled upright and grabbed onto Ban Sheng’s trouser leg, begging for his life while simultaneously kneeling on the ground and slapping himself across the face:

“I was wrong, I was wrong! Don’t trouble yourself, I’ll do it myself.”

Ban Sheng stood over him, looking down from above. Liu Qiang kept slapping himself — harder and harder, until his ears were swollen and ringing — the sharp sounds bouncing back and forth in the narrow alley. He slapped and shouted:

“I wronged Lin Weixia, I wronged Lin Weixia, it’s my fault, I deserve to die——”

A clang — the baton dropped to the ground. The boy in black walked away, his footsteps growing faint.

And the rain went on falling.

After Ban Sheng went back, he spent a great deal of time reading — everything he could find about hearing loss and the hearing-impaired.

Before this — when Lin Weixia had had her hearing aid ripped out by Zheng Zhaoxing at school and her ear had bled — and Ban Sheng had been helping her flee, he had asked her if wearing it was uncomfortable. Lin Weixia had said she was used to it.

The look on her face had said she had accepted, long ago, that this was simply her lot. In that moment, something in Ban Sheng ached, and he wanted very much to do something for her.

Later, Ban Sheng came across an article online about the design and future of cochlear implants. It mentioned that cochlear implants could improve pitch recognition in patients with hearing loss by thirty to seventy percent.

But because cochlear implant manufacturers around the world all used proprietary speech processors, and most laboratories in China hadn’t gained access to those platforms, domestic research had been ongoing — developing independent platforms and continuously refining speech encoding suited specifically to the tonal qualities of Mandarin.

Reading through the long stretch of material, Ban Sheng learned a great deal. He was afraid that as Lin Weixia grew older, her hearing might deteriorate further — through age, or any number of other factors — and she might one day have no choice but to undergo cochlear implant surgery.

After everything he had learned, Ban Sheng wanted to do something for her —

So that she could always hear the world around her, more clearly.

His girl had come into this world. She should never have been made to suffer so much.

She deserved to be happy. Carefree. Without a shadow of worry.

Protecting Lin Weixia was Ban Sheng’s secret.

And so, when applying to universities abroad, Ban Sheng — against everyone’s objections — gave up the astrophysics he loved and chose biomedical engineering without a second look back.

On her way to find Ban Sheng, Lin Weixia could not stop hearing Li Shengran’s words echoing in her head. She stood at the side of a busy road, frantically flagging down a taxi, her expression urgent.

Once inside the car, the driver glanced at the girl in the back seat and was startled to find her face streaked with tears. He asked if she was alright. She shook her head.

“I never liked you, not from high school. He had his whole heart set on you — and then you used Ban Sheng, caused his father to beat him and send him abroad, which only made the depression worse and worse.”

“Provoking and testing you before — that was all me acting on my own. I just couldn’t stand you. But you know what’s funniest of all? None of those high school things mattered to him. To this day, his greatest fear is that you were in love with Liang Jiashu. All these years — he has only ever seen you.”

A young man’s earnest heart — sincere and unyielding, the kind that only comes around once in a lifetime, given only to you.

Given, and never taken back.

“I don’t know if you noticed the scars on his arms. I’ve seen him have too many episodes. He doesn’t lash out at you and then swing back emotionally on purpose — he can’t control it. Every time he hurts you, he feels guilty and regretful afterward, and burns his arm with a cigarette to punish himself.”

Lin Weixia knew from her studies how unpredictably the emotions of someone with severe depression could swing. At Jiuga Mountain, that time — that had been one of Ban Sheng’s worst episodes. He hadn’t wanted Lin Weixia to see him at his lowest, so he had deliberately said something cruel to drive her away.

Ban Sheng had thought countless times about telling Lin Weixia everything. But proud as he was — how could he say it? He was living in darkness. The person he appeared to be to the world was a lie. I’m sorry, the person you care for is mentally ill.

He loves you deeply, and yet every moment of every day he thinks about dying.

Lin Weixia felt as though a blunt blade was going back and forth across her heart. So the scars she had touched on his wrist that night at the guesthouse — they were from that.

As a psychology student, she had noticed things during their time together. That time at Jiuga Mountain, when he’d reacted so strongly to the wind chimes — she had thought it might be post-traumatic stress disorder, and had been trying to guide Ban Sheng toward opening up and working through his wounds.

And when his attitude toward her swung back and forth, she had always assumed it was Ban Sheng testing her feelings, punishing himself and her in equal measure. Care makes one blind. When it came to Ban Sheng, she had lost her own clear-headed judgment entirely.

The car drove for over half an hour before arriving at the hospital. Lin Weixia threw open the door and ran — and the driver behind her called out that she hadn’t paid. She spun back around, dug into her pocket and pressed money into his hand without counting for change, then vanished from his sight before he could react.

In the inpatient ward, Lin Weixia checked in at the nurses’ station and turned left on instinct, searching for Room 4817. The walls here were a cold, pale blue. There was sunlight, but the atmosphere was oppressive and still.

Passing row after row of rooms, Lin Weixia caught, now and then, the sound of screaming — of crying — alongside the low, measured murmur of nurses soothing and calming.

The air was heavy and disorienting.

She arrived at a yellow-white door and pushed it open. A slant of sunlight fell inside.

Though it had only been a few days, it felt to Lin Weixia like a century had passed since she had last seen him.

He stood on the balcony in a hospital gown, back to her. Beyond him, bare mountains stretched out and snow half-melted away. From the floor below came the occasional sounds of patients out walking. From the next room, the crash of a cup thrown, and heaving sobs — all of it tangled together.

Ban Sheng was very tall, and slender. His whole frame was wrapped in a brittle, falling quality — as though only a skeleton remained to hold him up, jutting bones and angles, hands hanging at the seams of his trousers, the back of his hands mottled purple-blue, covered in needle marks of every size.

“Ah Sheng.” Lin Weixia called out to him. She was trying very hard to control herself. Her voice trembled anyway.

The tall, lean figure went rigid. Sunlight fell to the floor, stretching his shadow long. He stood in the light but seemed to live inside a shadow. His back was still turned, and he let out a quiet, self-deprecating laugh:

“I didn’t want you to see me like this.”