Situ Jue had read a great many time-travel novels—the kind where the heroine, whether unlucky or lucky, no one could quite say, tumbles without warning across a thousand years and meets the prince fate had waiting for her. She loved that sort of storyline, the same way she loved coming home after a day at the lab, mixing the strongest brandy she had with a dark beer, and sprawling on the sofa to watch soap operas while she drank—accompanied, of course, by a little sleep aid.
As far as Situ Jue was concerned, those wildly implausible plots were never meant to be believed. Their only purpose was to sprinkle a bit of self-indulgent fantasy over an otherwise dreary reality.
Still, Situ Jue had no interest in tripping and falling back into some ancient dynasty. She loved modern civilization far too much—a power outage alone felt unlivable to her. As a teenager, she used to think that if a person really could travel through time, she’d only want to sneak a peek into the future and see whose hand she’d be holding once she was grown. Later, even that fantasy fell apart, because during the darkest days of her life, she would close her eyes and wish she could skip past that stretch of time and avoid the grief altogether. And yet every time she woke and opened her eyes, morning had come and everything was exactly the same; she never once escaped what she had to face. If there really were some god out there governing time and fate, that god had ignored even a young girl’s most sincere prayers—proof enough that this simply wasn’t the fate she’d been given. So instead she turned her thoughts elsewhere: if she couldn’t go to the future, then going back to the past would be good too.
If she could go back, what would she do?
Maybe she really ought to go tell that younger Situ Jue—the one gritting her teeth through the salty taste of her own tears—to remember: he’ll have his day too.
Or maybe she should stay by the Situ Jue of the day she left home, so that the girl standing alone in that enormous airport with her luggage wouldn’t feel quite so lost and alone; when that younger Situ Jue tossed her phone into the trash bin in the departure lounge and looked back one last time at the road she’d traveled to get there, comfort her: you don’t need a lifetime to get over this. It won’t be long—maybe just a few years—before it’s all behind you.
Or perhaps, most of all, she should go back to the very beginning, before it had even had the chance to start, and say to that young, naive Situ Jue: stay far, far away from that person. Whatever you do, don’t fall in love with him.
And yet—if fate truly follows its own course, isn’t a person’s greatest fortune, and the source of every ounce of courage, precisely the fact that no one can foresee the ending at the start?
Let’s take a look at what Situ Jue and Yao Qiyun were like at the very beginning.
Back then, Situ Jue was, emotionally, a rather late bloomer—perhaps every child raised happily, cushioned by loving parents, is the same way. At fifteen, she’d just started her first year of high school. Girls her own age were mad for Japanese idol dramas and manga; Meimei, who’d been her classmate since childhood, had already secretly gotten her first boyfriend. But Situ Jue was still exactly as she’d always been—gathering friends, running around, playing, utterly oblivious to the so-called confusion and heartache of adolescence.
She did enjoy the manga she borrowed from Meimei, Red River, and she watched every episode of the immensely popular Tokyo Love Story—but for her, watching was watching, nothing more; they were other people’s stories, ones she couldn’t even muster feelings about. She devoured the comics the boys loved too, Dragon Ball and City Hunter, with equal enthusiasm. Walking through the school grounds or down the street, she wasn’t entirely unaware of the glances boys with acne threw her way—she just found them funny.
Wu Jiang still tagged along with her everywhere, the way he had since childhood, the two of them practically inseparable. He was a year older than her; their mothers worked in the same hospital pharmacy; her father ran a modest business at the time, his father held a modest government post. Their families lived close by, everyone knew everyone, they were of matched age and comparable standing, and they simply got along. In the height of summer they’d often sit in the shade of a tree not far from either home, schoolbags dropped at their feet, splitting a watermelon between them, sitting back to back gnawing away without a shred of self-consciousness while the cicadas droned lazily overhead.
Wu Jiang was always finding excuses to stick watermelon seeds on her face, then complimenting her: “Situ, your freckles look better zoomed in.” Or: “Ha, you’ve grown a mole—you look just like a matchmaker.”
Situ Jue’s usual response was to wipe her face and kick Wu Jiang straight to the ground.
The two of them tussled and roughhoused, plenty of physical contact between them, and neither ever so much as blushed. As for real romance, she had her share of longing for it, like any girl, but she always felt it was something very far away, very far in the future.
It could be said that Situ Jue’s entire childhood, and even half of her adolescence, slid by on the calendar without a care in the world—right up until she met Yao Qiyun. If adolescence represents worry, confusion, suspicion, and an indefinable kind of gloom, then it’s fair to say Yao Qiyun’s arrival was exactly what raised the curtain on Situ Jue’s adolescence. Even though, at the start, it had nothing whatsoever to do with love.
On the day Yao Qiyun was brought before her, Situ Jue—who had always been healthy and full of energy—experienced her first period, of all strange coincidences. She’d never had trouble in that department before; every month passed without incident, no complaints to speak of, and if not for her mother, Xue Shaoping, constantly nagging her about it, she’d never have thought to excuse herself from gym class over it. But this one time, from the moment she woke and found a small stain on her sheets, a sharp, sudden ache settled low in her belly, her back and legs ached, her legs cramped, cold sweat beaded on her forehead—she was sure she was dying. Her mother, a pharmacist, simply handed her a packet of motherwort powder and some black-chicken tonic pills, unbothered.
Later, Situ Jue would think about this and wonder whether it was a bit unfair to pin the blame on Yao Qiyun, given how little she cared for him. But after mulling it over at length, she realized the connection wasn’t entirely baseless. At the very least, it was because of him that she’d slept so poorly the night before—because her usually loving, harmonious parents had, in a rare occurrence, shut themselves in their room and argued the whole night through.
It had all started the day before, at the lunch table, when Situ Jiu’an solemnly announced a decision to his wife and daughter.
Situ Jiu’an was a businessman, one of the earliest to ride the wave into the pharmaceutical trade after the reform and opening-up era began, and he’d reaped considerable rewards for it. But beyond that identity, what he could never set aside was his background as a soldier. As his only daughter, Situ Jue had heard her father’s tales of hardship and gratitude so many times she could recite them in her sleep. He’d been a poor boy who, at seventeen, left his mountain village to join the army, and through sheer intelligence and diligence had steadily climbed the ranks over more than a decade, eventually reaching regimental-level rank before honorably retiring. He’d turned down, “with real backbone,” the mediocre civilian job assignment offered to him, and instead built his own business from scratch using nothing but his small severance pay. He’d married Xue Shaoping, a well-educated city woman, and together they’d had Situ Jue—a thoroughly modern city girl.
Later, having spent plenty of time immersed in Tianya, “the online home of Chinese people worldwide,” reading countless posts, Situ Jue eventually concluded that her father was, without question, a textbook case of a self-made “phoenix man” who’d married up. Fortunately, phoenix man Situ Jiu’an had very few relatives back home, sparing them a great deal of the usual family drama, and his marriage had always been a happy one. The one thing that occasionally wore on both mother and daughter was his devotion to “brotherhood in arms.”
For all his years in the military, Situ Jiu’an had never actually fought in a real battle—but the men he’d served alongside, fellow soldiers and subordinates, weighed heavily on his heart all the same. Among his retired peers, he’d done reasonably well for himself, so whenever an old comrade ran into trouble, he’d offer help enthusiastically, often before they’d even had to ask.
Over the years, even Situ Jue lost count of how many of her father’s “army buddy uncles” had come through their home, how many times the family had lent financial or material support to her father’s old friends, or how many of his former subordinates had been taken in by Jiu’an Tang, the family company, since its founding. Fortunately, her mother, Xue Shaoping, wasn’t a petty woman. She understood her husband and usually let it go without complaint, grumbling at most when things really got to be too much. And Situ Jue, raised from childhood to value loyalty and generosity, never gave the matter much thought either—which spared the family a great many conflicts.
But the real trouble began the day Situ Jiu’an brought up, heavily, at the dinner table, his closest friend and former subordinate from his army days. This subordinate, by Situ Jiu’an’s account, had been an honest man—one of those soldiers who said little and did much, the very best kind. And yet even a man like that hadn’t necessarily been valued in the equally complicated little society of the barracks. With Situ Jiu’an’s help, he’d finally scraped his way up to deputy platoon leader, only to be discharged after all and assigned to a struggling little factory, which eventually went under. In the end, he’d simply gone home to farm, married, had children, and lived a difficult life.
This had always weighed on Situ Jiu’an as a lasting regret; he’d always felt some responsibility for the fact that his friend had never found a better path, and he was constantly looking for ways to offer him financial help. Unfortunately, this friend, surnamed Yao, had a proud, stubborn streak (Situ Jue later concluded that his temperament—difficult and unyielding—was hereditary, deeply rooted, impossible to shake). Situ Jiu’an would visit, and he’d welcome him warmly, but no matter how he tried to slip him money, the man would never accept it, even as his family’s situation in the countryside grew painfully dire.
Once Jiu’an Tang began to flourish, Situ Jiu’an repeatedly invited his friend to come work with him at the company, and every time, the friend refused. He said he knew he had no talent whatsoever for business or socializing, and didn’t want to be a burden or drag Situ Jiu’an down. Farming was the only thing he knew how to do, and he’d made his peace with living out a modest, humble life that way.
If that had been the end of it, it would have been the end of it—everyone has their own fate, and there’s nothing to be done about that. But the years of hard labor and harsh living conditions steadily wore down this friend’s health, and Situ Jiu’an’s friend kept enduring the early symptoms, putting them off, until his son finally insisted he go to the town hospital for an examination—only to discover it was already late-stage liver cancer, beyond any hope of treatment. By the time Situ Jiu’an called, as he usually did, to catch up, he learned that the man’s already impoverished household had been utterly wiped out trying to treat an illness that could never be cured, and his wife, unable to bear it any longer, had left, claiming to be going off to find work, and had never been heard from again. Only a son remained, having dropped out of school to keep watch by his father’s bedside day and night.
Situ Jiu’an immediately contacted the best oncology hospital in the city, determined to bring his old comrade in for the best possible treatment—but he was too late, arriving only in time to see his friend through his final moments. He was consumed with grief and regret, and it was some time before he smiled again. Xue Shaoping did her best to console him more than once, and Situ Jue, during that period, didn’t dare misbehave in front of her father for fear of upsetting him further. So when Situ Jiu’an suddenly seemed more energetic at the dinner table that day—the first time since his friend’s death—Situ Jue and her mother initially assumed he had finally begun to recover, and felt some relief. Instead, he announced that he intended to bring his late friend’s orphaned son up from the countryside, to raise and care for as his own.
Situ Jue listened as her father went on and on about the boy’s tragic circumstances, his intelligence, filial devotion, thoughtfulness, and diligence, and forgot entirely about the food on her chopsticks. She wasn’t without sympathy—whenever her father spoke of poor Uncle Yao, she genuinely felt sad for him—but that sort of life, that sort of person, felt impossibly distant from her own, like some story read in a newspaper. And now some tragic character from that story was apparently going to join their family, to live alongside her—it all felt more than a little absurd.
Xue Shaoping’s reaction was even stronger. She listened to her husband in silence, all the way until he mentioned that the school had already been arranged and that he’d be driving out the very next day to bring the boy home himself. That was when she understood: her husband wasn’t discussing this matter with her at all—he had already made the decision, and was simply informing them of the fact.
This was enough to make Xue Shaoping, ordinarily good-tempered and always respectful of her husband, set down her bowl with a hard thud in front of their daughter. She could accept that her husband, over the years, placed enormous importance on the bond between fellow soldiers; she could accept his depression over the loss of a good friend—to her mind, that was exactly what a good man should be like. But for Situ Jiu’an to completely disregard her feelings as a wife, deciding to bring another person’s child into their home to raise without so much as a discussion—no matter how good or how pitiable that child might be—filled her with fury and resistance.
Facing his wife’s anger and objection, Situ Jiu’an was both prepared for it and utterly helpless in the face of it. Perhaps the very reason he’d waited until the last possible moment to tell his wife and daughter was that he feared their opposition would make him waver. And on the day he’d said goodbye to old Yao, the boy’s silence and maturity throughout, along with that precociously hopeless look in his eyes, were things he simply could not forget. From that moment, standing before his friend’s fresh grave, he had sworn he would raise that boy as his own son and spare his old friend any further regret.
“Do you understand what it means for someone new to suddenly join this family? That boy is already sixteen—not six years old, not six months old. How are we supposed to relate to him? To me and to our daughter, he’s a stranger. This is my home, not an orphanage!” Xue Shaoping said furiously to Situ Jiu’an.
At the time, Situ Jiu’an sidestepped his wife’s argument and instead turned to Situ Jue, who was picking half-heartedly at her food. “How can you call him a stranger? Daughter, don’t you know Uncle Yao? And that older brother too—you’ve met him before…” Seeing his daughter’s blank expression, Situ Jiu’an frowned. “You went with me to Uncle Yao’s house before, don’t you remember? That older brother even ate a meal with you and talked with you—how could you forget?”
In truth, the expression on Situ Jue’s face at that moment wasn’t one of recollection at all—it was mild nausea at her father’s earnest use of the phrase “older brother,” and she was working hard to compose herself.
She’d read plenty of idol dramas, Taiwanese romance novels, and Japanese manga, and a scenario like the one she might now be facing would, in a TV drama or a comic, have counted as an incredibly romantic setup. A prime example was Kaho Miyasaka’s manga Itazura na Kiss. Situ Jue couldn’t stand Kotoko, but she was rather fond of Naoki Irie. Reading it, she’d absolutely thought about what it might be like to suddenly gain a handsome boy her own age under the same roof, living side by side day after day—wildly tantalizing.
But—but! Storylines like that existed only in fiction for good reason, because in reality it was simply too strange. Just as her mother had said, a stranger suddenly appearing in your home, and one you had to live with day and night at that, was hard for anyone to swallow. And especially that “older brother”—thinking of the phrase, she finally lost her appetite entirely and set down her stubborn chopsticks—left absolutely no room for any romantic fantasy whatsoever.
The “Uncle Yao” her father spoke of, she had in fact met, more than once, but all those times had been before she turned ten. The most recent visit to Uncle Yao’s house hadn’t been recent at all—it must have been nearly two years earlier, during the summer after her first year of middle school, when her father had taken several old army friends to visit Uncle Yao and had insisted on bringing her along, saying it would let her experience rural life firsthand, appreciate the comforts she took for granted, and shake off her spoiled little habits.
As it turned out, once Situ Jue arrived in the countryside, she was like a bird released back into the forest, delighted to run wild wherever she pleased. She was naturally lively and restless, and although she was always causing mischief with Wu Jiang, her parents were usually nearby keeping an eye on things, and in the city, even a decent patch of open green space was hard to come by, so she always felt a little cooped up. The beautiful hills and rivers of the countryside utterly enchanted her; everything fascinated her, everything seemed interesting. While Situ Jiu’an was busy drinking and reminiscing with his old friend, Situ Jue dutifully greeted a handful of “uncles”—surnamed Zhang, Li, Yao—without bothering to sort out who was who, then ran off to play with the local village kids. It wasn’t until that evening, when something she’d eaten upset her stomach and she came down with sudden, violent vomiting and diarrhea, that Xue Shaoping, frantic with worry once she heard, forced Situ Jiu’an to drive her straight back home that same night. Afterward, he scolded her rather sharply, saying she couldn’t handle the slightest hardship and that her mother had spoiled her rotten—leaving Situ Jue thoroughly aggrieved.
Situ Jue tried hard to recall that trip to the countryside. She remembered the pond not far from Uncle Yao’s front door, remembered the smell of sweet potatoes roasted in an earthen kiln alongside a few kids a little younger than her, remembered the speckled chickens pecking at grain everywhere—but she had absolutely no memory of the “older brother” surnamed Yao her father was talking about.
Xue Shaoping had always doted on her daughter, so Situ Jiu’an tried to find an opening with her instead. Seeing that Situ Jue hadn’t said anything, he went on, “You’re an only child in this family. Wouldn’t it be nice to have another family member, another older brother? You’d have company, someone to look out for you, and you wouldn’t have to run wild outside all day long.”
Little did he realize this argument didn’t land well at all. There were plenty of things Situ Jue liked, but being looked after by someone wasn’t one of them. Her parents were one thing—but who was some “outsider” to do that? She avoided her father’s expectant gaze and didn’t dare look at her mother’s reddened eyes either. In truth, she just found the whole thing strange; anything deeper in the way of anger or heartbreak was beyond her at that point. The one thing she never lacked was playmates—what difference would one more in the house make? Fortunately, she wasn’t the type to torment herself over things, and she thought: whatever she said clearly wouldn’t matter. Her father had obviously already made up his mind—if she couldn’t fight it, she could at least avoid it.
So she made a few unhappy noises, lied that she was full and her stomach hurt, and fled the scene, leaving the whole mess behind her.
That night, Situ Jue got up in the middle of the night, thirsty, for a drink of water, and heard the faint murmur of her parents talking in their room. Curious, she crept upstairs to see what was going on. Through the closed door, she could still make out the anger in her mother’s deliberately lowered voice.
Situ Jue didn’t dare get too close, so only scraps of the conversation reached her.
Xue Shaoping was saying: “…You can give me all the reasons in the world, it won’t matter. It’s not that I lack sympathy, but even if that boy’s lost both his parents, surely there are relatives who could take him in—there’s nothing wrong with paying for his schooling, but why does he have to come live in our house… Situ Jiu’an, don’t think I don’t know you. You’ve never said it out loud, but deep down you’ve always regretted having only a daughter, and now that you’ve been handed a son for free, you can’t wait to keep him close like some treasure… You’re stuck in the old ways, hopelessly old-fashioned…”
Then came another round of explanations from Situ Jiu’an, all about duty and loyalty, or how sensible and mature the boy was, and so on.
Situ Jue leaned against the wall by the door, feeling thoroughly unsettled. She thought: maybe her father really couldn’t shake, deep down in his bones, that stubborn old Chinese notion that a son was needed to care for you in old age. He’d never once, in front of her or her mother, expressed any wish for a son, but ever since she was little, whenever he lifted her up and held her, he’d tease her, scratching her with his beard, and say, “We’re really just raising someone else’s future daughter-in-law here. Looks like your mother and I are destined to be grandparents on the wife’s side—Jiu’an Tang will end up belonging to someone else’s family sooner or later.”
She’d always taken that as a joke over the years, but hearing her mother’s words tonight put it in a different light, and she felt an unexpected surge of indignation. So what if he was a boy? When had she ever fallen short of a boy, growing up? Would her father really end up treating some boy who wasn’t even his own flesh and blood better than his own daughter? She shook her head—worrying over things she couldn’t know was the most foolish thing to do. Even if the sky fell, she’d still have her mother.
She crept back to her own room, and had a restless night full of dreams; eavesdropping in her thin nightclothes had probably given her a chill, and the aftereffects lingered—right as her period arrived, leaving her thoroughly miserable from the start of the day.
As if that weren’t enough, no sooner had she taken the medicine her mother gave her than her father, on his way out the door, informed her to hurry and pack up her room—she was moving to the second floor, and her old room would be given to the soon-to-arrive “Brother Yao.”
Situ Jue leapt up on the spot, furious, protesting loudly and refusing outright. But Situ Jiu’an proved remarkably firm on this point, rejecting his daughter’s objections without a moment’s hesitation—there was no room for discussion; she would move whether she liked it or not. Situ Jue turned to her mother with a pitiful face, begging for help, but her mother’s silence told her everything: after a whole night of arguing, her parents had apparently reached some kind of agreement, and even her mother—who always valued family and marital harmony above all—had compromised on this one.
Situ Jue returned to her room, spirits at rock bottom. Her room was on the first floor, while her parents lived on the second; theirs were the only two rooms in the house with private bathrooms. She understood why her parents wanted her to move upstairs—they wanted to give the newly arrived Yao boy a somewhat independent space of his own, and the second-floor room was right next to her parents’ master bedroom, so it made more sense, all things considered, for their actual daughter to live there. But understanding it and being willing to give up her room were two different things, and her reluctance had reasons she could never explain to her parents.
Never mind that her first-floor bedroom, lived in for over a decade, was full of memory and sentiment—that room also held countless little hidden mechanisms and secret compartments, known only to her, holding all sorts of things she didn’t want her parents to find. But worst of all, once she moved, her one and only escape route—her door to freedom and fun—would be cut off entirely.
Situ Jue’s room had a window facing the community’s green space, and for safety’s sake, her parents had long ago installed security bars over it. Those bars were the old-fashioned kind, iron rods set vertically into the window frame, and they looked utterly solid. But over two years ago, Situ Jue had discovered that one of the rods had loosened with age, and with some deliberate shaking and tugging, she’d found she could actually pull it free at just the right angle—leaving a gap in the bars just wide enough for someone slim and cat-like agile, like Situ Jue, to slip through freely.
Ever since Situ Jue physiologically crossed into adolescence, her parents had kept a much tighter rein on their once wild, free-roaming daughter, laying down all sorts of rules—for instance, unless there was something special going on, she wasn’t allowed out to play after eight in the evening. After discovering the secret of the window, Situ Jue felt reborn. At first, on evenings when she was supposedly doing homework at home, her mother would knock and ask if she wanted a snack, and Situ Jue would snap at her a few times for interrupting; eventually, Xue Shaoping stopped bothering her much while watching television. So whenever something fun was happening outside, all it took was a soft signal from Wu Jiang and the others under her window, and Situ Jue would lock her door, pretend to be studying hard or already asleep with the lights off, then slip away—only to sneak back in once she’d had her fill of fun.
Though she loved to play, she knew her limits and never dared stay out too long; combined with her habitual caution, this secret had never once been discovered by her parents over all this time. Now, moved up to the second floor, cut off from that room and that window, living right under her parents’ noses—what fun could there possibly be left in life?
That particular day happened to be a weekend, so no one in the family had to work or go to school. Xue Shaoping, busy preparing everyday necessities for the incoming boy, seemed to have an endless list of things to do and no time to spare for Situ Jue, so the burden of moving rooms fell entirely onto Situ Jue’s own shoulders. Nursing an aching back, she packed reluctantly, silently cursing this uninvited guest who’d upended her entire life. It wasn’t until nearly dinnertime that afternoon that she finally finished. The room was cleared out, her mother had already put fresh new sheets on the bed, and soon that bedroom would carry someone else’s mark entirely.
Situ Jue still wanted a moment of silent mourning at that window, but Situ Jiu’an had already led a grayish, unassuming figure in through the door. Situ Jue stood behind her mother as the two of them welcomed the pair—one grown man, one boy—her father making the introductions with great warmth.
The boy whose name was, apparently, something like “Yao-chi-yun”—no, it should be Yao Qiyun—was sixteen, thin and tall; his slight build made his arms and legs seem even longer than they were. He stood there attempting a smile, but the awkwardness and shyness radiating off him were unmistakable. The four of them sat down together at the table, with Situ Jue seated right across from him; she made no effort to hide her curiosity about this invader, openly studying him despite her mother’s warning cough.
Yao Qiyun was dressed in a brand-new but obviously oversized set of sportswear—judging by the enormous brand logo on it, no doubt her father’s rather questionable taste at work. His cheeks were terribly gaunt, tinged with an unhealthy sallow color; his hair had clearly just been cut, and it too had no shine to it at all. Aside from a slight underbite, his face wasn’t unattractive enough to offend anyone—but his rather deep-set eyes, paired with the faint upward tilt at their corners, gave even his most striking feature a somewhat gloomy cast, which was exactly the kind of quality that sunny, cheerful Situ Jue disliked most.
Under Situ Jiu’an’s repeated urging, he finally picked up his chopsticks—his hands, dark and thin, with prominent knuckles, pale nails, and faint traces of grime still lodged beneath them.
“Eat up, Qiyun, this is your home now, don’t be shy.” Situ Jiu’an kept piling food onto Yao Qiyun’s plate, and under his watchful gaze, Yao Qiyun seemed too embarrassed to keep his head down over his bowl, so for the first time he reached out with his chopsticks and picked up what was apparently Auntie Xue’s specialty—braised lotus root meatballs.
It was right then that Situ Jue’s intense stare left him utterly flustered, thoroughly uncomfortable; in his nervousness, his hands and feet stopped obeying him, and the round meatball slipped from his chopsticks and rolled clean off the table onto the floor.
Yao Qiyun’s face turned bright red instantly. He set down his chopsticks and started to bend down to retrieve it, but Situ Jiu’an caught him by the arm. “Don’t bother, don’t bother, it’s fine, let’s just keep eating.”
The meatball rolled across the floor under the round table and came to a stop right by Situ Jue’s foot. Afraid she might accidentally step on it, she silently pulled out a tissue and bent down to pick it up—and in doing so, caught a glimpse of Yao Qiyun’s feet, and very nearly couldn’t hold back a laugh.
Her careless father had outfitted Yao Qiyun with an entirely new wardrobe, but had somehow forgotten his feet. There he sat, in his awkward new clothes, while on his feet was a pair of Warrior sneakers so worn the soles were nearly through, the uppers fraying, the original color no longer identifiable.
Perhaps sensing that Situ Jue had noticed, Yao Qiyun quietly drew his feet back, as if that alone could hide them from her sight. Under the table, Situ Jue made a face, then straightened up as if nothing had happened. She wasn’t sure whether a trace of her amusement had shown on her face, but she could tell Yao Qiyun at the table looked even more mortified than before, not knowing where to look or where to put his hands.
Situ Jiu’an wasn’t a fool. Though he had no idea what the trouble was, he came down first on his mischievous daughter, frowning. “Situ Jue, just eat your meal. What’s with all the fidgeting? Is this how you’ve been taught to behave?”
Situ Jue felt thoroughly wronged. She admitted she didn’t feel much fondness for this Yao Qiyun, but she’d been carefully keeping that to herself—she wasn’t someone who looked down on poverty, and if anything, this boy seemed far more self-conscious about it than she was.
“Do you even listen to yourself before you speak? Our daughter kindly picked it up—what did she do wrong? Is this how you teach a child?” Before Situ Jue could defend herself, Xue Shaoping had already cut in coolly. Then she glanced at Yao Qiyun, who looked ready to bury his face in his dinner, and softened her voice. “Keep eating, Qiyun. Is it that you’re not used to my cooking?”
Yao Qiyun shook his head so hard it looked like a rattle drum. “No… Auntie, really, it’s not that.”
The sight of him forcing down his food struck Situ Jue as both awkward and pitiable, and the small flicker of resentment she’d felt toward him faded a little under that pity.
“He’ll get used to it in time—we’re a family now, and there will be plenty of adjustments to make, but these are all small matters.” Situ Jiu’an patted Yao Qiyun’s shoulder. Xue Shaoping remained silent.
After the meal, Xue Shaoping cleaned up in the kitchen while Situ Jue, as usual, sat on the sofa downstairs eating an apple and watching Battery Boys on television. Yao Qiyun went over to the kitchen, apparently to help. Xue Shaoping, of course, told him it wasn’t necessary, but the boy insisted on washing the dishes with real determination; in the course of their polite back-and-forth, a plate got broken, and eventually Xue Shaoping gave in and let him do it, drying her hands and standing by to supervise.
Situ Jiu’an smoked in the living room, pacing back and forth, and started in again on Situ Jue’s faults—spoiled, never lifted a finger to help, wouldn’t lift a finger around the house, why couldn’t she learn a thing or two from Qiyun, what a fine boy Qiyun was, children of the poor grow up early, and on and on—until Situ Jue, who had finally reached the part where Tatsuya opens up to Minami, couldn’t concentrate on the show at all. She rolled her eyes and shot back, “He’s the one who needs to make a good impression right now—how could I possibly compete with him for that? Then you’ll just say I’m being inconsiderate.”
“You’re not as considerate as he is anyway,” Situ Jiu’an said, momentarily at a loss for a better response.
That set Situ Jue off. She flung down her cushion and stood up sharply. “How am I not considerate? Mom’s the one who won’t let me wash dishes! Besides, aside from not washing dishes, what have I ever made you worry about?”
That much was true—everyone always praised the Situ family’s daughter as beautiful and thoughtful, and Situ Jue had lived up to it, never once embarrassing her parents in her studies, conduct, or anything else since childhood. Hearing her say so, Situ Jiu’an seemed to realize he’d been taking out his own frustration on his daughter.
“Even so, there’s nothing wrong with learning a bit more from Qiyun.” He was too stubborn to fully back down, and that was the best concession he could offer.
Situ Jue said, “He and I are two different things. Stop comparing me to him.” With that, she spun around and stormed off toward her room—only to remember, right at the doorway, that the room no longer belonged to her. She stomped her way up the stairs instead.