By the time Situ Jie was in her second year of college, Jiu’an Hall had grown to the point where Situ Jiu’an could no longer manage it alone, forcing Xue Shaoping to resign from her hospital position and step into the company’s management. With her attention pulled elsewhere, the household naturally received less care. Even though both children were grown, and Yao Qiyun was diligent about pitching in, he still had his own studies to manage, and a household of four still needed someone to handle the cooking and cleaning.
Xue Shaoping began entertaining the idea of hiring a housekeeper, but finding someone both capable and trustworthy these days wasn’t easy. She’d already tried out two different women, one after another, neither of whom made it past her trial period. It was around this time that Yao Qiyun’s aunt back home called him, explaining that her husband’s health had taken a turn for the worse, the family was struggling, and she was thinking of coming to the city to find work.
Situ Jiu’an had actually met this particular aunt before — she was his old comrade-in-arms, and Yao Qiyun’s father’s only sibling, a sister. As Situ Jiu’an remembered her, she was a hardworking, capable middle-aged woman who ran her own modest household with real organization and discipline. Most importantly, she was remarkably reasonable and fair-minded — even knowing that her own nephew had been taken in by a wealthy family, she’d never once tried to leverage that connection for her own benefit, no matter how difficult her family’s circumstances had been over the years, and she’d always shown Yao Qiyun genuine affection.
After discussing it together, Situ Jiu’an and Xue Shaoping quickly decided that, since Yao Qiyun’s aunt was looking for work anyway, she might as well come help out at their home — the pay could be worked out easily enough. When they called back to relay the offer, the aunt agreed readily; to her, ordinary housework was nothing to worry over, and it meant she’d be close enough to keep an eye on her nephew too — why not take the chance? Situ Jie, foolish girl that she was, had always secretly worried that Yao Qiyun might one day suddenly return to his hometown and be separated from her for good. The moment she heard his closest relative from the countryside was coming to live in their own house, she threw both hands up in enthusiastic approval — this way, he’d have nowhere left to run off to. Yao Qiyun could only laugh privately at how silly she was being. As for the matter itself, being the one person connected to both households, he showed remarkable restraint, staying quiet about it from start to finish — a discretion that even the ever-observant Xue Shaoping privately noted and approved of.
And so, not long after, Yao Qiyun’s aunt officially arrived at the Situ household. Situ Jiu’an hadn’t misjudged her — she truly was skilled at managing a home, with none of the carelessness sometimes stereotypically associated with people from the countryside. The floors and stair railings alike gleamed under her care, leaving virtually no corner of the house untouched, and she often took the initiative on chores without needing to be told. In her first few days, she’d made a couple of small blunders not knowing how to work certain appliances, but she adapted quickly, and her cooking gradually adjusted to suit the family’s tastes. As it turned out, she was one of the few women in her village who had actually attended middle school, and it showed in how clearly and sensibly she handled things — even Xue Shaoping joked, half in earnest, that she herself couldn’t run the household half as well, and grew increasingly comfortable trusting her with more.
From the very start, Situ Jie hoped to leave a good impression on the person closest to Yao Qiyun, cheerfully calling her “Auntie, Auntie” right alongside him, and consciously holding back the small complaints she’d normally direct at her own mother whenever Aunt Yao was around. At first, everything was harmonious, and everyone seemed genuinely content with how things stood. Aunt Yao doted endlessly on her nephew and remained perfectly polite and courteous toward the rest of the Situ family.
But as time went on, living under one roof inevitably brought its own frictions. The first real point of tension arose from how Aunt Yao perceived the relationship between her nephew and Situ Jie.
Aunt Yao had no idea about the undercurrent of feeling running between her nephew and the Situ family’s precious only daughter, and now that Xue Shaoping was spending less time at home, Situ Jie and Yao Qiyun had also grown a little less careful about hiding it. One weekend, Situ Jie called Yao Qiyun while he was out and asked him to pick up some snacks on his way home. He agreed — but once he got back and Situ Jie dug through the bag, she was more than a little annoyed to find he’d bought a whole box of hazelnut chocolates, despite knowing full well she never touched anything with nuts in it.
Yao Qiyun himself was baffled by the mistake. His mind had been full of an experiment report due soon while he was shopping, and on top of that, the store’s shelf labels had been mismatched with the products, which was how someone usually so meticulous had ended up making the error. He apologized to Situ Jie right away. Sulking, Situ Jie shoved the box of chocolates straight into his arms, muttering, “Trying to kill me with these? Since you’re the one who got it wrong, you can eat every single one, all of it!” Yao Qiyun laughed and begged for mercy again and again.
Having grown up together, and now with an extra layer of youthful romantic tension between them, this kind of playful bickering was nothing out of the ordinary for them. Situ Jie had always had a sharp tongue but a soft heart, and the more comfortable she felt with someone, the more she indulged in this kind of little petulance — it was less genuine anger than a form of affectionate teasing, and she had no real intention of forcing Yao Qiyun to eat an entire box of chocolates in one sitting. Yao Qiyun, of course, never took it seriously either — and had Situ Jiu’an or Xue Shaoping happened to witness the whole exchange, they’d likely have just laughed it off too.
But to Aunt Yao — a woman with a strong sense of pride and deep affection for her nephew — the scene read entirely differently. All she saw was a spoiled, imperious rich girl throwing a fit over something trivial, and her nephew repeatedly swallowing his pride and backing down. Not understanding the full picture, she found herself, for the first time, harboring a quiet resentment toward Situ Jie, privately thinking that the Situ family, for all their outward warmth and modesty, likely had no idea how much grief their nephew had endured at Situ Jie’s hands over the years.
The dynamic between Situ Jie and Yao Qiyun had always run on a cycle of small arguments every other day and bigger blowups every few days, prone to flaring up at the smallest provocation — but they made up just as quickly as they fell out. On the surface, Situ Jie usually seemed to come out on top, though in reality Yao Qiyun tended to quietly get his own back once they were alone, so neither of them ever truly won. Aunt Yao’s opinion of Situ Jie soured gradually amid these small, sweetly hidden conflicts between the two young people, and once that impression had taken root, no matter who was actually in the wrong in any later argument, or who came out ahead, she instinctively assumed Situ Jie was bullying her endlessly patient nephew.
Beyond that, friction between Aunt Yao and Situ Jie also began showing up in the small, everyday details of life. Aunt Yao was naturally strong-willed, having always been the dominant figure in her own household, and after coming to live with the Situ family, she kept many of her old habits intact — whatever she believed was right or beneficial, she stuck to firmly. Situ Jiu’an and his wife had little time to concern themselves with such things, and out of respect for her, generally let it go; for her part, she also knew to make reasonable concessions when it came to the two of them. But with Situ Jie, it was a different story entirely.
Situ Jie disliked leafy green vegetables, yet Aunt Yao insisted on preparing exactly one vegetable dish per meal, invariably something rich in “chlorophyll,” with everything else being meat-based. Situ Jie brought this up with her more than once, tentatively suggesting maybe they could occasionally have vegetable stems instead, or cucumber, or lotus root — something like that. Aunt Yao would nod and say she understood, but the next meal, and the one after that, it was always the same leafy greens, with her reasoning always being that it was good for one’s health.
Situ Jie also couldn’t stand having sweet and salty flavors mixed together, and especially hated when someone used oil-stained utensils in a dessert — yet Aunt Yao insisted on using the same spoon she’d just used to serve soup to stir dessert as well, no matter how many times Situ Jie brought it up. Situ Jie, stubborn in her own right, grew increasingly irritated over time, and though she held her tongue out of consideration for Yao Qiyun, she flatly refused to touch any dessert that Aunt Yao had stirred with a soup-soiled spoon.
Yao Qiyun even brought it up privately with his aunt, asking whether she might accommodate Situ Jie’s preferences on this one point. Aunt Yao told her nephew she’d been doing things this way for decades, and if even Situ Jiu’an and his wife had never said a word about it, there was no reason a young girl like Situ Jie should be so particular.
As an elder, his aunt wasn’t someone Yao Qiyun could easily argue with, and being someone who believed action spoke louder than words anyway, he simply began quietly making small accommodations of his own — occasionally cooking Situ Jie a separate vegetable dish without any leafy greens, or, on weekends, personally putting together a dessert for her as a small surprise.
Situ Jie was, of course, deeply touched and grateful. That was, until the day she saw Aunt Yao dip a spoon that had just come out of a pot of chicken soup straight into a bowl of coconut milk sago pudding — a dish Yao Qiyun had just made especially for her, and her favorite besides. Something in her that had been holding steady finally snapped. Right in front of Aunt Yao, she flung the spoon into the trash with real force, and from that moment on, the relationship between the two of them was formally, irreparably broken.
From then on, an undercurrent of quiet tension settled permanently over the household. As long as Xue Shaoping and Situ Jiu’an were home, things stayed civil enough, but if they happened to be out, and Situ Jie came back from school a little later than usual, she’d often find the table already cleared, or find only a single portion left out, meant for Yao Qiyun alone. Furious, Situ Jie was in no mood to plead for anything — she simply started eating out before coming home instead.
Yao Qiyun found himself caught impossibly in the middle, unable to talk his stubborn aunt out of her position, with no choice but to stand by Situ Jie’s side no matter what. If Situ Jie wasn’t coming home to eat, he wouldn’t touch his chopsticks either; and if only a single portion had been left, he’d always give it to her. Aunt Yao, both openly and behind his back, criticized her otherwise perfectly capable nephew for having no spine when it came to Situ Jie — in her eyes, apart from a pretty face, there was nothing about Situ Jie that could possibly justify her nephew treating her so well.
Somewhere along the way, Aunt Yao began, in front of Situ Jiu’an and his wife, subtly needling them about Situ Jie’s small flaws — how picky an eater she was, how willful, how quick-tempered, how she always came home late from school… Situ Jiu’an, hearing this, could only sigh over how his only daughter had grown a bit too spoiled, a sentiment he clearly shared to some degree. Even Xue Shaoping, hearing enough of it over time, felt compelled to give her daughter a mild talking-to now and then.
Situ Jie could only laugh bitterly about it in front of Wu Jiang, remarking that she’d never expected to find herself embroiled in what amounted to a preemptive mother-in-law conflict before she’d even gotten married. Wu Jiang, hearing this, teased her outright, saying it sounded like she’d secretly been dreaming of marrying into the Yao family all along. Seeing that Situ Jie wasn’t in the mood for jokes, Wu Jiang offered a more sober piece of advice — that whatever Aunt Yao’s opinion, at the end of the day she was still only Yao Qiyun’s aunt, and what really mattered was how Yao Qiyun himself felt. If Situ Jie genuinely cared about him, she shouldn’t let small, petty matters like this damage the foundation of what she and Yao Qiyun had.
And so, one evening during study hall, Yao Qiyun found himself sitting beside a visibly troubled Situ Jie.
He tapped her head lightly with his pen. “Situ Jie, you constipated or something?”
For once, instead of snapping back, Situ Jie asked him earnestly, out of character. “Yao Qiyun, do you think of me too, deep down, as just someone who’s picky, throws little tantrums, acts spoiled, and pushes you around?”
Yao Qiyun nodded, matter-of-fact. “Pretty much, yeah.”
Watching her expression turn a mix of furious and dejected, he added with a small smile, “I’m used to it by now, though. Doesn’t bother me.”
Situ Jie huffed, clearly annoyed. “Well, thank you so much for liking me the way I am, then.”
Yao Qiyun, still buried in a stack of homework, answered without even looking up. “No need to thank me. Just doing my job.”
It took him a while to notice that Situ Jie had gone quiet. Puzzled, he finally looked up — only to find her eyes brimming with a wide, delighted grin.
“Ohh, Yao Qiyun, you just said you liked me. I heard it!”
He froze for a moment, then flipped back through his notes, propping one hand against his forehead to shield himself from her piercing gaze, and answered as flatly as he could manage, “Did I?”
Did I?
Or didn’t I?
No wonder Situ Jie went to such trouble to seize on his every word. Their relationship was more intimate than family, more private than friendship, more complicated than any romance. It wasn’t as though Situ Jie couldn’t sense what was in his heart — if anyone had told her Yao Qiyun didn’t like her, she’d only have laughed it off, utterly unwilling to believe it for a second.
His constant, meticulous care for her, his quiet, protective devotion — no amount of bickering or arguing could erase that. And that wasn’t even counting the subtle, unspoken understanding between them, or the way his gaze sometimes lingered on her without his permission. If that wasn’t love, then love was surely the emptiest, most meaningless thing in the world, hardly worth wanting at all.
The most moving vow was never “I love you,” but “let’s be together.” Situ Jie understood this perfectly well — and yet his evasiveness, his stinginess with even that simple spoken promise, only made her more acutely aware of the anxiety and hesitation he kept hidden beneath his cool, guarded exterior. She’d grasped the essence of love, but remained lost when it came to what their future together might actually look like.
Perhaps Wu Jiang shared in that same uncertainty, her relationship with Qu Xiaowan every bit as unresolved. Qu Xiaowan had never once accepted Wu Jiang’s feelings outright, and yet Wu Jiang was clearly different from the other admirers she never bothered giving a second glance — at the very least, whether happy or troubled, Qu Xiaowan was always willing to have Wu Jiang by her side.
Situ Jie liked to call the two of them “fellow sufferers.” What she hadn’t anticipated was that, not long after, this particular fellow sufferer’s parents would show up at the Situ family’s dinner table one weekend.
Wu Jiang’s mother, Auntie Chen, had worked alongside Xue Shaoping for years and was close to her as a sister; the two families had always kept up a steady back-and-forth. Most of that closeness, though, usually took the form of the two women shopping together, having tea, going for spa treatments — the kind of gatherings women share. A visit involving all three members of the Wu family at once, with both Xue Shaoping and Situ Jiu’an there to receive them, was a rare occasion indeed.
Before dinner, Situ Jie invited Wu Jiang up to her room to see some new CDs she’d bought, and as the two of them headed upstairs together, she happened to catch Auntie Chen, who was chatting cheerfully with her mother, giving them a look that seemed to carry more weight than usual. Auntie Chen had watched Situ Jie grow up and knew her perfectly well, and yet Situ Jie couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off today. The moment they were out of earshot of everyone downstairs, she turned to Wu Jiang. “Why was your mom smiling at me like that? It gave me the creeps.”
Wu Jiang, entirely oblivious, was busy browsing through the CDs on the shelf. “Oh, this one’s good, let me borrow it for a bit.”
Situ Jie said, exasperated, “As if I don’t already know your taste. Buttering up your ‘Bodhisattva sister’ again, aren’t you? Did you even hear what I just said?”
With Wu Jiang’s temperament, though, nothing short of the sky actually caving in overhead really counted as a big deal.
She grinned and pocketed the CD anyway. “So what if she looks at you a certain way. My mom staring at you isn’t going to take a chunk out of you.”
That was easy enough to say — but once dinner actually started, Auntie Chen kept steering the conversation right back to Situ Jie, gushing about how “little Situ” had grown up to be so pretty, so clever, so poised, with such a bright, cheerful personality — heaping on praise from every possible angle, with Uncle Wu nodding along and smiling between bites of his meal. Situ Jiu’an and Xue Shaoping, naturally, kept modestly waving off the compliments, while Aunt Yao, busy bringing out dishes, occasionally let a flicker of disapproval cross her face.
Even though Situ Jie recognized that what Auntie Chen and the others were saying was probably sincere, having it laid out so nakedly made her feel a bit like a prime cut of pork on the chopping block, up for inspection by anyone who cared to pick and choose. She shot a glare at Wu Jiang, who was quietly stifling a laugh, then discreetly studied the quietest person at the table — Yao Qiyun. Only she seemed to notice, beneath his flawlessly polite and courteous manner, a certain deliberate detachment, as though he were holding himself apart from all of it, closed up tight like a clam.
She kept trying to catch his eye with a look, but he ignored every one of them. She deliberately reached for the same piece of rib he was going for, and he pulled his chopsticks back just in time. Finally, taking a risk, Situ Jie nudged his leg lightly under the table — only for him to choose that exact moment to stand up and say to Wu Jiang’s mother, “Auntie Chen, let me refill your soup.”
After dinner, the two families sat around chatting warmly for a long while, and at Xue Shaoping’s suggestion, the two middle-aged couples even sat down together for a few rounds of mahjong. It was already deep into the night by the time they saw the Wu family off. Situ Jie, yawning repeatedly, was about to head to bed when Xue Shaoping called her back.
“Sweetheart, Mom wants to ask you something. Are you and Wu Jiang seeing each other?”
Situ Jie nearly tumbled down the stairs. She rushed to deny it, then, worried that denying it too forcefully might make her mother suspect the opposite, found herself half-tempted to swear to the heavens in front of everyone present that her friendship with Wu Jiang was completely, entirely innocent.
To her surprise, Xue Shaoping — who usually kept close tabs on her daughter’s romantic life — didn’t push the matter any further. She just smiled and said, “I’ve never wanted you rushing into a relationship too young, but you’re both grown now, and it wouldn’t be strange for you to have your own feelings about things. I just want you to take love seriously, and choose carefully. That said, that Wu Jiang boy really is a good one.”
“Mom, what are you even saying,” Situ Jie said, stomping her foot, blushing. “Wu Jiang and I are just friends, there’s no spark between us at all. Why bring this up out of nowhere?”
Situ Jiu’an chimed in to his wife as well. “Come on, it’s far too early for this kind of talk. Why are you in such a rush to marry our daughter off to someone else’s family?”
Xue Shaoping took a slow sip of her tea. “Oh, Situ Jiu’an, Situ Jiu’an. A grown daughter can’t be kept forever — she’ll leave home sooner or later, that’s just how it is. What era do you think we’re living in? Are you still hoping to keep her here with a live-in son-in-law or something? If our daughter really did marry into the Wu family, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing at all — at least I’d have peace of mind about it. When I first married you, you had nothing to your name, and I never once complained about it, but why should our daughter have to walk that same difficult road? Better to find someone from a comparable family — no painful adjusting to do on either side, and life would be that much smoother and more comfortable. And not to put too fine a point on it, setting aside what the two young people actually want, the Wu family is more than a match for ours.”
Situ Jie’s grandparents on her mother’s side had left a substantial family fortune, and Xue Shaoping herself had been educated and beautiful in her youth — by the standards of the time, Situ Jiu’an had genuinely married above his station. Xue Shaoping had thrown herself wholeheartedly into building their life together from nothing, running every corner of the household and the business without complaint, and there had certainly been hard times along the way. Situ Jiu’an had carried a quiet sense of debt to her over the years because of it, so when she put it this way, he had nothing to say in response. After a moment’s thought, he suddenly said, “It’s far too early to talk about any of this. Oh, by the way, I just heard old Wu’s been transferred to head up the Health Department…”
Situ Jie, who had just been about to warmly embrace her father for finally taking her side for once, felt her heart sink the instant she heard that last remark. Furious, she snapped, “Do you have to be so calculating about everything? Might as well just sell me off by the pound while you’re at it, this is ridiculous! I’m not even going to bother arguing about something this completely impossible.”
She stormed off to her room and immediately called Wu Jiang on her phone. Wu Jiang, who’d only just gotten home herself, was completely bewildered facing Situ Jie’s furious interrogation. She said she had no idea how any of this had come about, guessing it was probably because she’d been coming and going at odd hours lately, often on the phone whispering privately to herself, which must have convinced her parents she had a boyfriend.
“I swear I only told one lie — when my mom asked who I was calling, I said it was you…”
Wu Jiang’s voice trailed off weaker and weaker as she spoke, while Situ Jie nearly passed out on the spot, seriously contemplating murder. She pounded her chest in outrage. “You can eat whatever nonsense you want, but how could you say something like that! Go tell your mom the truth right now, out your Bodhisattva sister, or even make up some random name if you have to — just leave me out of it!”
“I can’t do that. My mom had my fortune read once, and apparently if I end up with someone older than me, I’ll die young. The timing’s all wrong right now — there’s no way I can tell her the truth. She’s too sharp, you think I could just throw out some random name and fool her? In her eyes, no one’s daughter measures up to you anyway. Since it’s already happened, just cover for me a little longer, would you? Non-violent non-cooperation — deny everything, true or not. It’s not like they’d actually tie the two of us up and force us into a wedding, right?”
“Now I finally understand — friends exist purely to take a bullet for you. This is one favor I can’t do. You’re going to be the death of me…”
“Situ, I’ve genuinely thought this through — trust me on this, there’s no real downside for you. Your parents won’t actually pressure you into anything. And as for Yao Qiyun’s side of things, well — heh, this might actually give things a nice little push in the right direction, all naturally…”
Situ Jie, past caring about decorum at this point, snapped furiously, “You don’t know a damn thing! Fine, fine, I’m done talking to you, keep going and I might actually drop dead.”
She hung up, thoroughly unsettled. She understood exactly what Wu Jiang was getting at. Her parents’ misunderstanding, fine, that could be sorted out — but Wu Jiang had no idea how Yao Qiyun’s temperament actually worked. With most people, provoking them a little might genuinely help move things along, but Yao Qiyun was different — he was already weighed down with hesitation and doubt, and pushing him would only backfire, sending him retreating even further away.
So much for things falling naturally into place. If anything, it looked like trouble was only just beginning.