Throughout her life, Fang Zhuo had carried many questions. Why did she have no parents. Why couldn’t she misbehave. Why did people mock her. Why was she so unlucky.

Yet none of these questions ever had answers, and what she learned instead was not to ask.

The first time she walked to school alone. The first time she ran away from home. The first time she found herself somewhere completely unknown to her. The first time she understood how vast and strange the world was.

In the midst of great fear, no one cared how she was doing, or whether she was really alright.

All these questions accumulated. The difficult things she’d thought growing up would answer never did — but she had already stopped asking why.

And yet now, she still wanted to ask why.

She remembered just after finishing primary school, when she helped her grandmother sell rabbit fur. She secretly kept back a little money, took a bus, and went to find Fang Yiming.

Her grandmother may have known, or may not have. Either way, she didn’t stop her.

In a corner of the city, she saw that man holding his son, exchanging pleasantries with someone on the street. He was smiling openly, his eyes and brows both curved upward — as ordinary a father as any she had ever seen.

He bought toys for his younger son, and cheerfully taught the boy to call out to the people they met.

Fang Zhuo pulled her hood up over her head and walked past him twice. He didn’t recognize her either time.

She heard one of Fang Yiming’s colleagues say: “Sons are hard to raise — I have one too, and whenever he acts up, I want to smack him.”

Then the man continued: “Though it’s easier with just one child — two and you really can’t keep up.”

Fang Yiming said with a smile: “That’s right. One is enough.”

He said this while Fang Zhuo was standing directly behind him.

She felt immense sadness. The most intense sadness her age allowed her to comprehend. And yet, as though she had forgotten how to cry, she turned and walked away with perfect composure.

That was the first time she was ever lost in a completely unfamiliar city.

As the sky darkened, Fang Zhuo wandered the streets alone. Aimlessly. In the deep of night, someone spotted her and called the police — but before they arrived, Fang Zhuo panicked and fled on her own.

She walked along the brilliant, neon-lit avenues for over ten kilometers, made her way to another town, asked for directions, and caught a bus back home.

Her grandmother was in the kitchen making porridge, as though she hadn’t noticed anything.

Fang Zhuo hadn’t even thought of eating. She ran back to her room and collapsed into sleep. She cried and dreamed at the same time, wandering in her dreams along that same street, the sadness blurring the line between sleep and waking.

Every time she raised her voice against her own ill fortune, she was the one who lost.

She really was terribly unlucky.

“Wasn’t I?” Fang Zhuo said, her head bowed low. “I asked Fang Yiming once.”

Why had Ye Yaoling left?

She had waited until she first moved in, choosing a moment when Fang Yiming was in a good mood and they were alone, and asked.

The moment he heard, Fang Yiming’s expression went cold. He bit out one word at her: “Don’t.”

He looked as though he resented Ye Yaoling — or perhaps felt guilty. It was hard to say.

“I don’t know what their relationship was like,” Ye Yuncheng said. “She was five years older than me — she left when I was still in middle school. One day she suddenly told me she’d found someone she loved, and that she was going to leave with him.”

As Ye Yuncheng recalled it, though the memory was from so long ago, it remained sharp and clear in his mind.

Because he had never seen Ye Yaoling cry like that before — with such sorrow, such total loss of composure. She held him and kept saying “I’m sorry,” over and over again, and then told him she would never come back.

As if they weren’t family.

…Or perhaps they were only his family. Perhaps for Ye Yaoling, they had never been hers.

The ugly words his parents had thrown at her existed in his memory like background noise — over time he had learned to blur them, until they were almost gone.

He didn’t want to hear those things. Now, called back by Fang Zhuo’s question, they returned to him.

Ye Yuncheng frowned and said, with frankness that was almost unkind: “I don’t like Fang Yiming. I always felt he was nothing but a smooth-talking charmer who led my sister to believe they were going somewhere new together — with no real intention of taking responsibility… Don’t be upset by that.”

“I’m not upset,” Fang Zhuo said. “I curse him in my head all the time too.”

Ye Yuncheng led Fang Zhuo to the room she slept in and opened the old wardrobe against the wall. Inside were Ye Yaoling’s old belongings.

He turned back to look at Fang Zhuo, unsure how to begin.

People’s beliefs could be so stubborn, so irrational — particularly in those earlier years, and perhaps simply because of someone’s sex.

His parents had wanted a son. Their firstborn had been Ye Yaoling. They didn’t dislike having a daughter — they simply preferred a son.

But Ye Yuncheng’s father wasn’t so confused as to be truly unreasonable, and with the nine-year compulsory education system already in place at the time, he decided their daughter should go to school.

At an age when she couldn’t yet distinguish between discrimination and favoritism, Ye Yaoling had lived through a stretch of life that was relatively uncomplicated.

“She had no new clothes — everything was second-hand, things others had given away.” Ye Yuncheng took the clothes out, smoothed them flat, and refolded them along their creases, carefully: “She started looking after me when I was very small. We were very close.”

He had been closer to that sister who laughed at him and called him foolish than to either of his parents.

Ye Yaoling had always been full of vitality, ringleader of every group — equally at ease in the mountains or down by the water, and skilled at all of it. She had countless things she wanted to do, all manner of wild and far-fetched dreams. If you told her to reach up and pluck the moon from the sky, she’d have the nerve to go find a ladder and climb up to try.

He had admired and depended on her, wishing he could trail after her every single day.

“Summer had the smell of summer. Spring had the freshness of spring.”

The four seasons, each distinct.

Fish darting in water. Cicadas singing. Wildflowers. Red leaves. White snow on the steps. Rain dripping from the eaves. Stones beside the road. Ears of corn in the fields.

Everything, every last thing, was vivid and sharp. Like an unbroken series of oil paintings — the most colorful passages of his entire life.

Ye Yuncheng sat on the cold floor. His fingers twitched, but he couldn’t bring himself to disturb the clothes folded on his knees. His voice trembled: “I truly hated it. I still do.”

If things could have simply gone on like that — that would have been enough. But when Ye Yuncheng was twelve years old, in the fourth year of primary school — back when primary school was still a five-year program — his parents were away from home, and Ye Yaoling had taken him out to play. Then the accident happened.

Ye Yaoling had been talking with a friend nearby. Ye Yuncheng was waiting quietly at the side of the road. No one had anticipated the car that came around the bend so suddenly.

In those days, accident compensation was minimal, and the country road had no surveillance cameras. His parents were uneducated and didn’t know what could be done; they didn’t know to find a lawyer. The other party stubbornly insisted that Ye Yuncheng had been playing in the middle of the road and that was why the accident had occurred, and with a combination of intimidation and pressure, managed to settle the matter. When it was over, the payout they received was barely enough to cover the medical bills, and from that point on, Ye Yuncheng was disabled.

Ye Yuncheng closed his eyes. His long, dark lashes fell downward, casting a deep shadow beneath them: “I couldn’t accept it. Do you understand? I couldn’t. I became very difficult — I stopped talking to people, didn’t want to go to school.”

“When I threw tantrums, my parents would give in and comfort me. But they needed somewhere to put their own pain too. They believed it was all my sister’s fault. She hadn’t watched over me properly. She was responsible.”

Ye Yaoling had held herself together for a time, going on as if nothing had changed — reading to him, carrying him on her back when they went out. But Ye Yuncheng, back then, had understood nothing. He had been absorbed entirely in his own world, convinced he was the most unfortunate person alive.

Self-pitying and selfish.

Only later, when he looked back, did he realize how much anguish Ye Yaoling had been living through — and how nothing he had done had helped her.

He was the one who had benefited. He was the heaviest burden she ever carried. His name was carved into every misfortune she had ever suffered. That was a truth he could not escape.

People need such a long time to grow, Ye Yuncheng thought. And yet fate never gives them enough time. By the time he understood — by the time he wanted to protect the person who had always protected him — the one who had made him want to stand up again was already gone.

Ye Yuncheng’s mind drifted. He sensed a presence settling beside him. Fang Zhuo sat down at his side, pressing close against his arm. She gripped his hand, and buried her face against his shoulder.

“She was frightened too — she was still so young herself. She had never been treated fairly in that house, and there was no one she could go to with her sorrows. Everyone around her blamed her. No one could understand her. She must have been under so much pressure. I know.”

She was exhausted. Every ounce of her vitality had been consumed by guilt toward her brother, her parents’ favoritism, the responsibilities no one had chosen to hand her, and a future she couldn’t see.

Ye Yuncheng had sometimes thought: if only he didn’t exist. Then none of this would have fallen on anyone else. Ye Yaoling could have done the things she loved, chased after all her impossible, wonderful dreams.

If she’d had the chance, she would surely have become someone extraordinary.

Ye Yuncheng exhaled — barely a breath: “And then she left.”

Looking at it now, perhaps Ye Yaoling had never truly loved Fang Yiming all that much. All her reckless determination had simply been the need to leave — and Fang Yiming was the nearest hand she could reach for.

Fang Zhuo leaned against him. Through his clothes she felt the trembling of the muscles across his shoulder. The scorching heat of him, and the fierce, rapid beating of his heart, stung at her eyes. She wept alongside him, soundlessly.

Ye Yuncheng said, his voice muffled and hoarse: “I’m sorry. Your mother’s suffering — it was because of me.”

“No,” Fang Zhuo said.

Ye Yuncheng steadied himself, then asked: “Your mother left behind a notebook — did you look at it?”

“I didn’t finish it,” Fang Zhuo said.

“I had a feeling you’d looked. Read it to the end,” said Ye Yuncheng. “The last time she came back — and when she left again — she was calm. I felt she had found some peace within herself. It was just that time had run out.”

“Have you read it?” Fang Zhuo asked.

“I didn’t finish it either,” said Ye Yuncheng.

The two of them quietly laughed at the same time.

Both of them felt, somehow, that Ye Yaoling would surely have loved the other person — but neither could quite believe she would love themselves.

Love, after all, seems to need no reason.

Fang Zhuo had not read it. She had taken out the notebook, but before she could decide anything, she’d fallen asleep on top of it.

When she woke, the sky outside had already gone deep and dark. A rhythmic tapping came from the window. Yan Lie kept his voice low from outside: “Hey — hey — is anyone in there?”

Fang Zhuo slid the window open and looked at him. “Why haven’t you gone back yet?”

Yan Lie grinned with satisfaction: “Uncle said I could stay — and he said once the sun comes out, he’ll air out a set of bedding for me, and then I’ll have my own room.”

He glanced toward the horizon as he said this, his tone wistful: “When is the sun going to come out already? It’s been overcast for two days straight. What a time for it, too — not even a clear sky on such an important national anniversary.”

Fang Zhuo’s head was beginning to clear, though she still felt groggy: “So what are you doing out there, then?”

“What kind of person shows up at a girl’s room in the middle of the night?” Yan Lie said. “Romeo and Juliet talked through a window, remember. I’m here to keep you company.”

Fang Zhuo looked at the less than half-meter of space between their two windows: “Was it this close?”

Yan Lie said cheerfully: “Doesn’t really matter.”