Fang Zhuo came out of the office to find Xiao Mu standing in the corner of the waiting area, staring at the tips of his shoes, completely at a loss.

Seeing Ye Yuncheng collapse in front of him had been far too great a shock for him. He felt it was his fault — that he had failed to take proper care of Ye Yuncheng.

The environment here was completely foreign to him. Yet he had already lost even the ability to feel ordinary fear.

Fang Zhuo composed herself and walked over, feigning ease. “It’s alright. The doctor said he’ll be better very soon.”

Xiao Mu lifted his head and asked, still sobbing softly: “Really?”

Fang Zhuo ruffled his hair and pulled her lips into the best smile she could manage: “Really.”

That brief stretch of time in which the world had seemed ghostly and unreal — along with a sense of panic unlike anything she had felt before — made Fang Zhuo suddenly realize that she was not nearly as strong as she had imagined herself to be.

Life was so unpredictable, full of rises and falls, light and shadow. Sometimes all it took was one small unexpected thing to overwhelm a person entirely. She also realized that no matter how mature she grew, she might never be able to face the loss of Ye Yuncheng with composure.

It turned out that maturity wasn’t about becoming invincible — it was about keeping your spine straight in the face of everything you were afraid to confront. You couldn’t close your eyes. You couldn’t run. And sometimes you still had to smile and tell people you were fine.

Once again, she felt an urgent longing to grow up — to grow up enough to protect others.

Fang Zhuo buried every dark feeling she had and smiled as she comforted Xiao Mu: “It’s a good thing you were with Uncle and got him to the hospital in time. That’s why it didn’t turn into something worse.”

Xiao Mu asked again: “Really?”

“Really,” Fang Zhuo said. “Let’s go in and see him.”

When they walked into the ward, Ye Yuncheng had not yet woken up. He lay there quietly, his brow tightly furrowed, his sleep visibly uneasy.

There was only one chair beside the bed. Fang Zhuo let Xiao Mu sit in it to keep watch. He half-draped himself over the bedside and, obediently, made no noise.

Fang Zhuo wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do in a moment like this. She gathered her thoughts and decided to call Liu Qiaohong first. She picked up the phone from the bedside cabinet, lit up the screen, and found several unread messages.

They were all from Yan Lie, asking what had happened and where she was. He had sent four or five in a row before stopping around the time when classes let out — he had probably gone to find the homeroom teacher instead.

Fang Zhuo was just composing a reply when the screen was overtaken by an incoming call. The contact name read: Homeroom Teacher.

She stepped out of the ward with the phone, walked to the small balcony at the end of the corridor, and tapped to answer.

“Fang Zhuo, where are you right now?”

Fang Zhuo gave the name of the hospital and briefly described Ye Yuncheng’s condition, explaining that she probably wouldn’t be able to come back to class for the next couple of days.

“As long as he’s alright, nothing else matters. I’ll have the class monitor photocopy some notes and have them brought over to you. Don’t worry about that,” the homeroom teacher said, then asked: “Do you have enough money on you? Is there an adult with you there?”

“I don’t know yet — I still haven’t looked into the costs,” Fang Zhuo said. “I’m going to call Uncle Liu to ask. He should have all of my uncle’s information.”

During the break between classes, the background noise around the homeroom teacher was considerable. Among it, Fang Zhuo could faintly make out Yan Lie’s voice. The teacher said: “All right. I have one more class. Once it’s done, I’ll come to the hospital. Keep your phone with you, and call me if anything comes up. Understood?”

Fang Zhuo said she understood, then ended the call and dialed Liu Qiaohong.

The hospital corridor was long and dim. Even with the lights on during the day, it gave off a cramped and heavy feeling.

Once she stepped onto the balcony, the view opened up. Moving air swept away the hospital’s characteristic smell, and Fang Zhuo’s mind cleared considerably.

At this hour, Liu Qiaohong was out doing outreach work. When he picked up the call, he greeted her with his full-throated energy: “Hey there, Ye-ge! Good news, I hope?”

Hearing his voice, Fang Zhuo felt a wave of something bittersweet rise up without warning, and she called out: “Uncle Liu.”

Liu Qiaohong heard the shift in her tone and stepped somewhere quieter. “It’s Fang Zhuo? Shouldn’t you be in class right now?”

“Uncle is in the hospital,” Fang Zhuo said, drawing in a breath. “He needs to have his gallbladder removed.”

“I see…” Liu Qiaohong’s voice was calm — just thinking, no emotion layered on top. “That’s all right. It’s a minor procedure. Are you at the hospital now?”

Her own feelings settled with his steadiness. “Yes. I wanted to ask about the health insurance situation — I’m not very familiar with any of this. Given Uncle’s circumstances, roughly how much would be covered?”

Liu Qiaohong gave a brief chuckle and said: “Don’t worry about the money. Gallbladder removal isn’t expensive, as I recall. Old Qin from the village — his gallbladder was already inflamed and swollen by the time he went in, and he used a specialist. Even that only came to twenty or thirty thousand yuan. His insurance covered eighty percent. Your uncle can get ninety-five percent covered. I’ll go apply for emergency assistance on his behalf right now, and bring it to you — you won’t need to spend anything. If you run into any difficulty, tell them at the hospital. A large hospital will proceed with surgery first and sort out the rest later. We can talk about everything else when I get there.”

Fang Zhuo nodded. “The doctor said they’ll schedule the surgery once the tests are done.”

“Good. Nothing to worry about then.” Liu Qiaohong’s voice grew a little higher, taking on a tone of exasperated affection. “What’s the matter with Ye-ge? Acute cholecystitis, bad enough to need surgery. I told him to take care of himself and he never paid any attention. When he’s recovered, I’m definitely going to have a word with him. Oh — and you, Fang Zhuo — is your insurance sorted? I keep telling you, you absolutely must have health insurance.”

Fang Zhuo wasn’t certain. “The school should have enrolled me, I think?”

Liu Qiaohong said firmly: “Double-check with your teacher and make sure. You don’t have a low-income household registration, so you can’t miss out on health insurance benefits.”

There were two or three seconds of silence on the line.

Liu Qiaohong said: “Don’t worry. You’ve been reading about all those cases in the news where people can’t afford treatment, and it’s scared you. But the country is changing fast. Just in the last couple of years, there have been so many policies aimed at benefiting the people and reducing poverty. Since the precision poverty alleviation strategy launched in 2015, people in situations like your uncle’s are a national priority. Otherwise, what am I here for?”

Fang Zhuo allowed herself a small smile. “Mm,” she murmured.

She glanced back down the corridor toward where she’d come from. A shadow was gradually taking shape as it approached through the light — Xiao Mu had said that doctors and nurses were looking for someone. Fang Zhuo quickly ended the call and jogged back to the ward.

The medical staff explained everything in detail. Fang Zhuo entered each key instruction into her phone’s memo app, then signed where they directed her to. Not long after, a slot opened up in the operating room and Ye Yuncheng was wheeled away.

Once the bed was empty, a few of the family members of nearby patients came over to Fang Zhuo to talk.

One slightly plump woman washed an apple for Fang Zhuo and told her to go back and pack the toiletries they would need, and then shared a great many tips about caring for a post-surgery patient, saying she would take her to the hospital canteens later that evening.

They could see that Fang Zhuo’s family circumstances were what one could only call “extremely difficult” — a disabled patient, someone with an intellectual disability, and a high school student, all of whom needed looking after. And so they offered all the advice they could. The doctor, before leaving, had also asked the others to look out for her.

While gallbladder removal is a minor surgery, post-operative care needs to be handled very carefully. The patient would need to be hospitalized for observation for over a week. Without proper attention, complications could arise — infections, damage to surrounding structures, or other serious issues — all of which would be extremely difficult to endure.

Even if the surgery itself didn’t cost much, the follow-up treatment, recovery, and diet would all require money. Fang Zhuo asked Xiao Mu to wait outside the operating room while she went home to gather some things and bring back Ye Yuncheng’s savings.

On the bus ride home, the intense surges of emotion had mostly subsided. She watched the still-bare green plants along the roadside, felt the occasional threads of spring breeze, and found her state of mind much like the small pond in the residential courtyard — only a gentle ripple.

She found a nylon bag in the small storage room downstairs and dragged it back up to the apartment.

The rental room was filled with the rich aroma of braised food. The ingredients were still laid out on the table.

Fang Zhuo went through and shut all the windows and doors, checked the gas valve and every electrical switch, confirmed everything was safe, then went to the kitchen and cooked a pot of rice. She ladled two portions of braised food into insulated containers to bring to the hospital for lunch, and put the rest in the refrigerator.

She remembered that Ye Yuncheng kept his money together with the ledger, hidden beneath the drawer of the cabinet. She went to the bedroom and methodically set out the clothes they would need, then crouched down on the floor and searched through the drawer.

The search went smoothly. Loose cash had been tucked inside the ledger. She pulled it out and counted carefully — a total of only twelve hundred yuan, the everyday grocery money. Beside it was a bank card. Fang Zhuo didn’t know the PIN.

She went through everything again quickly to make sure she hadn’t missed anything.

The ledger had been in use for many years, only recently starting to fill up more regularly.

Ye Yuncheng’s income was straightforward — in earlier years, just substituting teaching work and various subsidies. His expenses were equally sparse: aside from buying food, there was almost nothing else.

Fang Zhuo had always found something slightly puzzling about this. Ye Yuncheng lived alone, rarely bought anything unnecessary, didn’t even replace the furniture. So why had he been in such financial difficulty when she first encountered him? Aside from the money he had forwarded to her school, there had been no extra savings — despite the fact that Uncle Liu had always looked after him.

She flipped to somewhere in the middle of the ledger, and a familiar name caught her eye.

Fang Yiming — followed by a string of bank account numbers, and then a series of small transfer amounts, ranging from a few hundred to over a thousand yuan. At first they came every few months, then as national assistance programs expanded, they became monthly. There had been occasional gaps when Ye Yuncheng himself fell ill, but he had kept it up consistently, right up until he sent that letter to Fang Zhuo asking her to come home to tend the grave.

The money from the following several months had been set aside and used to have the gravestone refurbished.

The wall that Fang Zhuo had been holding up inside herself completely collapsed, swept under by a tidal wave that came from out of nowhere.

How could he have done this?

How could he have accepted Ye Yuncheng’s money?