Yao Qiyun had come close to death more than once in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. A domestic SUV, traveling at more than twice the speed limit, had smashed through the median barrier and slammed directly into him as he drove normally along the road after leaving Wu Jiang’s wedding banquet.

Traffic police later confirmed that the driver at fault had been drunk. After hitting Yao Qiyun, the car hadn’t braked in time and had gone on to sideswipe several more vehicles behind it. Everyone involved, including the drunk driver himself, sustained injuries of varying severity, but Yao Qiyun was hurt the worst, because his car had taken the full force of the impact from the side, and the point of collision had landed right around the driver’s seat.

Yao Qiyun had always driven by the book—except for the day Situ Jue left home. He never sped, never drove against traffic, never ran a red light; he never signaled the wrong direction, and he always wore his seatbelt properly. He believed so devoutly in the rules, and yet that belief had done nothing to stop someone who scorned them from bringing a catastrophe crashing down on him out of nowhere.

At the hospital, Yao Qiyun was still in emergency surgery. Situ Jue listened to the deafening echo of her own heels along the corridor. Outside the operating room door, a red light blinked, and there were still bloodstains on the floor that hadn’t been cleaned up yet. She thought she might have stepped in some, and backed away, but the fresh smell of blood only grew stronger. That blood’s warmth had once been part of her own life too.

The operating room door opened, and a doctor walked toward Situ Jiu’an and his wife, who sat holding each other up near the entrance—it looked as though a critical condition notice had just been issued. Situ Jue stood there in a daze, as if a shadowless surgical lamp hung directly over her head, its light beating down, bright and cold, with nothing beneath it at all.

Xue Shaoping spotted her and broke free of her husband’s support, rushing straight at her, sobbing. “He was supposed to be on a business trip today. Of all things, he had to go to Wu Jiang’s wedding. Who do you think he went for? Our family was doing just fine—why did you have to come back?”

She tried to shove and claw at Situ Jue, but before her hands even reached her, she lost her balance and stumbled forward. Situ Jue rushed to catch her, standing there and letting her mother strike at her, terrified that if she let go, Xue Shaoping would collapse to the floor. Her mother had aged, her body weaker with each passing day, her strength failing along with it—for all that hatred, the blows didn’t hurt at all, only rocking Situ Jue’s body slightly back and forth.

“Why did you have to come back? We already thought of you as dead—why did you come back—” Xue Shaoping could no longer form any other words.

“You’re going to wear yourself out like this.” Situ Jiu’an took his wife from their daughter’s arms, comforting her grimly. “Qiyun will pull through. We’ll spare no expense to save him.”

Once he’d said this, he looked at his daughter. Situ Jue, out of old habit around his temper, instinctively shrank back. But Situ Jiu’an didn’t raise a hand to her. “Qiyun is the only hope your mother and I have left.”

Situ Jue closed her eyes, and the tears fell.

“Was I wrong to come back?”

She sat outside the intensive care unit for most of the night. Situ Jiu’an and Xue Shaoping were still going back and forth with the attending physician, people bustling past all around her, and she had no idea what she was even doing there, like someone who had nothing to do with any of it.

Near dawn, Wu Jiang and Ruanruan arrived at the hospital too. Ruanruan had changed out of her cumbersome gown, but hadn’t even had time to take down her styled hair.

“How is he?” They crowded around Situ Jue, asking after Yao Qiyun’s condition.

Situ Jue shook her head and pushed them back toward the door.

“Today’s supposed to be your big day. What are you two doing in a place like this?”

Wu Jiang said, “I thought about it on the way home and just couldn’t stop worrying. He’d been referred to our hospital anyway, so I figured I should come check on things myself.”

“He’s him, and you two are you two. Ruanruan’s been on her feet all day—Wu Jiang, I can’t believe you had the heart to drag her along. Go home. You’re on leave right now. This has nothing to do with you.”

Ruanruan said, “We were worried about you.”

“Me?” Situ Jue gave a bleak smile. “Honestly, this doesn’t have much to do with me either.”

She chased the two of them out of the hospital and, right in front of them, climbed into a taxi herself. Outside, a light rain had begun to fall—the sky had been overcast all day, so this rain had been a long time coming.

Situ Jue had meant to go back to her hotel. The taxi drove on for quite a while before, through her haze, something started to feel off.

“Sir, where are we going? Isn’t this the wrong direction?”

“Can’t be wrong! Don’t worry, I’m not taking you the long way around,” the driver said with a laugh. As he spoke, he had already pulled the car over to the side of a main road. “Didn’t you say you wanted to go to Zhongshan North Road?”

“Me?” Situ Jue came back to herself for a moment, but she didn’t move to get out, only stared blankly out the window. This road hadn’t existed when she left; every building around her was completely unfamiliar. How could the name “Zhongshan North Road” have possibly come out of her own mouth?

Right—someone had mentioned this road. Was it her parents, gray-haired overnight, or the traffic officer she’d seen at the hospital?

Situ Jue told the bewildered driver to keep going, and sure enough, before long she saw the crooked, broken median barrier, scattered shards of glass, and perhaps traces of blood too, though the rain had already washed most of it away. If not for these remnants, it would have been almost impossible to tell that anything had happened here just a few hours ago, the road having already returned to its normal order.

“See that? A multi-car pileup. Nearly killed someone. I heard the drunk guy panicked and stomped the gas instead of the brake. The one who got hit is in bad shape—if it hadn’t been a good car, he probably wouldn’t have made it at all. Wonder how many years the other guy’ll get for this…” The driver clicked his tongue, gesturing outside, recounting it to Situ Jue the way one might tell a city legend so common it barely raised an eyebrow anymore.

Situ Jue felt as though she could see that out-of-control SUV bearing down on her in a blinding instant, the headlights closing in so fast that everything went white. What had he been thinking in that split second? Why had he even been on this road? Even though the city’s ever-changing landscape had blurred her sense of direction, Situ Jue could still tell that this wasn’t the route Yao Qiyun should have taken back to the Situ house from the hotel where Wu Jiang’s wedding had been held. His own place, she’d heard, was near his company, and the Jiu’an Hall offices were even further out of the way from this route.

Had he come all this way, out of his way, just to buy medicine for her mother?

The taxi kept moving. The sky had fully brightened by now—though the clouds and rain kept everything under a gray cast, the last veil of night’s darkness had gradually lifted. As they passed a high-rise construction site, Situ Jue suddenly spotted a narrow alley with steep steps, and memory came shrieking at her without warning, swallowing her whole in an instant, just like that car with its foot pressed to the wrong pedal.

“I’ll lead the way… no peeking…”

“Slow down, don’t be silly.”

“Why are you giving me this?”

“Why don’t we start over…”

Someone was laughing, a light giggling sound—she could hear it. Hand in hand, they’d once run down this alley, one of them with eyes closed, the other watching, and everything they saw was painted in the colors of being in love.

Situ Jue pressed her forehead against the back of the driver’s seat. “Sir, is there a square up ahead?”

“Yeah, we call it Clock Tower Square, because there’s a big clock in it…”

Behind that clock had once stood a little shop called Behind the Curtain of Time.

People had once waited for each other inside that little shop.

“Stop, stop the car! Don’t go any further.” Situ Jue slapped the back of the front seat in a panic, telling the driver to turn around immediately and head the correct way, toward her hotel.

Where had he really been going?

Why had he gone there?

She was afraid that if she went any further, the answer would surface on its own.

Situ Jue shut the door of her hotel room and tore through her things like a cornered animal, searching for her medication, even digging through the trash can. She regretted bitterly not having packed her pills for the trip. She had no prescription now, and she couldn’t ask Wu Jiang again—he’d already gone out of his way for her once, and there was no chance he’d do it a second time.

Once she was certain there was no help to be found in medication, Situ Jue had the front desk send up a bottle of liquor at random. Grateful, for once, that her tolerance was as poor as ever, she drank less than a third of it, threw up, and slept soundly.

When she woke, she had no idea how long the doorbell had been ringing. Head spinning, feet unsteady, she went to answer it, just as a staff member with a key came hurrying from the other end of the hall—seeing she was fine, they turned and left. The moment Xue Shaoping, standing at the door, laid eyes on Situ Jue, she set aside her worry and unease and put back on the disappointment and disapproval Situ Jue knew so well—though she was far calmer and more composed now than she’d been the night before, when the news of Yao Qiyun’s condition had first broken.

The smell of alcohol probably still clung to Situ Jue, but she felt that, at this point, neither of them cared anymore.

“Mom, do you want to come in and sit down?” Situ Jue asked, hesitant.

“No need. I just thought there was something you should have.” Xue Shaoping handed her a bag.

Situ Jue took it and gave it a shake; the first thing that fell out was a set of keys.

“Those are the keys to Qiyun’s place. To be honest, your father and I never even visited the apartment he bought later on—he never brought it up, and we respected his privacy. This morning I went to pick up some of his everyday things and only then found out why he never wanted us to go there… You should go see it yourself. When you have time, of course.”

Situ Jue put the keys back and handed the whole bag back to her mother.

“I don’t think I will. I have a conference to attend tomorrow, and there’s still a lot to prepare tonight. My flight’s already booked—I leave the day after tomorrow. After that… after that I probably won’t be coming back for a while. You don’t need to worry about that.” She kept her head down, but every word came out clear.

“You’re leaving now? Qiyun’s lying in that hospital and he hasn’t even made it through the critical period!” Xue Shaoping looked at her in disbelief, and even she—normally so composed—couldn’t help raising her voice.

Situ Jue took a breath. She didn’t want to cry right now—crying wouldn’t accomplish anything—so she made herself speak slowly.

“Mom, all I can say about what’s happened to him is that it’s a tragedy. Yes—a tragedy. I never wanted this to happen either. But if you’re insisting I take responsibility for his accident, I can’t agree to that.”

“How dare you say he wasn’t waiting for you all this time? If it weren’t for you, would he be lying in that hospital bed?”

“I waited for him too. You don’t understand what happened between us. If he’d never come back to me and I’d been the one in an accident instead, would you have him die alongside me just because he didn’t want to be with me?”

“I never said you should die alongside him.”

“I know. I know I should be at his bedside right now, crying, that everything from the past shouldn’t matter anymore now that he’s like this—that if he dies I should mourn him as his widow, and if he’s left disabled I should care for him for the rest of his life. That would be touching. Noble, even. But why should I have to be noble? I don’t need anyone to be moved by me. I have my own life now. There are so many people lying in hospitals from car accidents every single day—what am I supposed to do about that? Yao Qiyun and I were completely finished seven years ago. I don’t want to argue anymore about who was right and who was wrong, but to me, he’s no different from a stranger now. You can say I owe you, that I owe Dad, that I’ve been an unfilial daughter—but I don’t owe Yao Qiyun anything!”

Xue Shaoping gripped the strap of her handbag tightly, drawing in a sharp breath. “Where on earth did you learn to be this heartless?”

Situ Jue said nothing. Perhaps she had simply learned how to protect herself.

The conference ended without incident. Situ Jue delivered a brief industry report on behalf of her employer, and with Fu Zhishi taking the lead in praising it, most of the attending firms responded to her report quite favorably. Afterward, both Fu Zhishi and Tan Shaocheng tried hard to persuade her to stay a few more days, but in the end Situ Jue decided to stick to her original plan and fly out the next day as scheduled.

On the day of her departure, she went back to the hospital to see Yao Qiyun one more time. Despite the hospital sparing no effort, per the Situ family’s wishes, there was still no sign of improvement. Xue Shaoping no longer had anything to say to Situ Jue—when Situ Jue sat down, her mother even poured her a cup of tea, quite politely.

Situ Jue took a sip. It would be a lie to say it didn’t sting, but deeper than the pain was a feeling of helplessness. They say blood is thicker than water, and yet here they were, always driving each other into corners with no way out.

Xue Shaoping’s back wouldn’t let her stand for long anymore; even sitting, she needed to hunch slightly to find any relief. Like Situ Jiu’an, she would only keep growing older from here.

That sense of sorrow was something Situ Jue could no longer pretend not to see. She tried to set aside all the unpleasantness between them and said that she had to go back and settle things on her end, but that if they were willing, she could come back—could take up the burden that should have belonged to her instead of Yao Qiyun, stay by their side, take care of them, even bring them abroad to live with her if they wanted. Anything was possible, if only the two of them could let go of the past and say the words: you’re still our daughter, and marrying Yao Qiyun was already the best choice you could have made.

But Xue Shaoping only said flatly, “I have only one child. You have your own life.”

Before heading to the airport, Situ Jue went to Yao Qiyun’s place after all—what made up her mind was the wallet he’d had on him at the time of the accident. Xue Shaoping had insisted on not taking back the things she’d given her, and the wallet sat among the scattered belongings, its cash and cards arranged neatly and in order, just like Yao Qiyun always kept things, nothing out of the ordinary. Situ Jue had even half-expected to find an old photograph or two inside. In fact there was nothing like that. But just as she was puzzling over why her mother had wanted her to have the wallet at all, she found, tucked into an inner fold, a few strands of long hair, gathered together into a small bundle, kept with obvious care. It clearly hadn’t ended up there by accident. Situ Jue took the strands out and compared them to a hair she pulled from her own head—the length, the slight wave, all identical.

That was the only thing she’d left on him after their moment in the restroom.

If the hair alone had been enough to shock Situ Jue, then by the time she used the key to unlock the door to Yao Qiyun’s apartment, she had entirely lost the capacity to think at all.

She understood now why, seven years after returning to what had once been her family home, she’d found every corner of it rearranged, unrecognizable from her memory. Yao Qiyun had moved nearly all of the Situ family’s old furnishings from back then into his “new” place—especially the bedroom upstairs that had once been Situ Jue’s, and the room downstairs that had first been hers and later became his. Both had been transplanted here in their entirety. Even if she’d tried to recreate it from memory down to the last detail, it couldn’t possibly have matched what stood before her now, seamless and exact. Situ Jue could hardly believe her own eyes—it felt as though space itself had folded, pulling her back into the old days. Small things—the photo frame on her desk, the alarm clock by her bed, the faded, worn teddy bear—things she’d nearly forgotten she’d ever owned—all of them leapt out from the grave of memory, one by one, sitting quietly in the exact places that had always belonged to them, gazing at the woman who had returned from another lifetime altogether.

Before long, Situ Jue found, in a desk drawer, the wire transfer receipts she’d sent to her parents over the years, the bankbook she’d mailed later, the pills that had mysteriously vanished after Wu Jiang gave them to her once she was back in the country, and even the business card for an escort service she’d once slipped into Yao Qiyun’s pocket as a prank. Anything connected to her that he could possibly get his hands on, he had quietly gathered and preserved in this room possessed entirely by memory.

I’m afraid my memories are like sand slipping through an hourglass, less and less every day, until one day they’ll blur completely. A’Jue, it’s been seven years, and I honestly can’t remember your smile anymore, or the sound of your voice… I was too much of a coward, too afraid of the pain, so I wouldn’t let myself think of you all the time. But I didn’t want to forget you either. So you left, and I just… kept living inside the memory.

This was a text message he had written but never sent, still sitting in his phone’s drafts, dated the day before she came back to the country. She’d gone through his entire phone; her number wasn’t in it at all. Perhaps, like those notes tucked into the black box back at Behind the Curtain of Time, it had only ever been a dream from that moment, packaged up and ready, but never destined to actually be delivered.

Situ Jue sat at the desk, looking around the room. Yao Qiyun’s life, in truth, had been a single-occupancy room—he had shut himself firmly inside it, and then, suddenly, someone had crowded in beside him. He’d flinched, avoided, slowly grown used to it, and in the end had found himself complaining about how cramped the space was while busily buying more furniture all the same. Then one day, that someone could no longer bear it, and gave the space back to him, and the little den he’d grown used to sharing had become empty again. He’d tried to find a new tenant, only to realize that every table and chair in the place had been custom-fitted to that one particular person, and he no longer had the heart to replace any of it.

Situ Jue hated and envied Yao Qiyun in equal measure—how easily people said the word “forget,” as though it cost nothing. The character for “forget” was, after all, made of “death” and “heart” combined—it took a heart’s death to truly manage it. She had never forgotten, because the past had cut her to the bone. Situ Jue had imagined, over and over, what regret would look like on Yao Qiyun’s face, imagined him now hopelessly lost inside his own memories. And yet, precisely because she had rehearsed that scene in her mind so many times, when the real thing finally arrived, the initial satisfaction faded quickly, and she found she hadn’t gained nearly as much relief from it as she’d expected. The pain he was suffering did nothing to ease her own. The imagined version of Yao Qiyun’s remorse had, without her even realizing it, already comforted her over the long years that had passed—and that had been enough for her. The real Yao Qiyun, in comparison, no longer mattered nearly as much. She would rather he lived on, growing old slowly in some time and place that never crossed paths with hers again.

Situ Jue arrived at the airport with plenty of time before her flight. Lin Jing had an unexpected meeting come up, but he’d promised to make it in time to see her off. They’d agreed to meet at the airport’s Chinese restaurant and grab dinner together while they waited.

Situ Jue waited, checking her watch again and again as the time passed. The restaurant’s lighting was dim, with black decorative lines and a dim blue glow.

The minutes ticked by, and her hope slowly dimmed along with them. Just as she was on the verge of giving up, the person she was waiting for suddenly appeared, holding a black umbrella against the rain.

He stood across from her, travel-worn, as though he’d come a long way in a hurry.

“Am I too late, A’Jue?”

Situ Jue happily reached out her hand, and the bracelet on her wrist—Mrs. Yao’s bracelet—spun softly around it.

In the distance, a bell tolled. This day had come to its end, and the time that belonged to the two of them had only just begun.

Lin Jing said, when he woke Situ Jue, there were tears at the corners of her eyes.

“Bad dream?”

Situ Jue shook her head.

The two of them finished their simple meal, and Wu Jiang still showed up after all, running so hard he could barely catch his breath.

“Made it, just in time…”

“Didn’t I tell you not to come see me off? What are you doing here again? Look at you, sweating all over—anyone would think something terrible happened.” Situ Jue’s tone was light, but she found herself rising to her feet without meaning to. Wu Jiang’s brief silence froze the smile on her face, and for a moment she looked almost helpless. Perhaps from the very second Wu Jiang had appeared, some part of her had already sensed it, and she was only hoping for one word from him to deny it and put her fears to rest.

Wu Jiang placed a hand on Situ Jue’s shoulder. “Things aren’t looking good on his end. The injuries were too severe, especially to his head. My colleagues did everything they possibly could—we thought there might be a turn for the better. This afternoon, for a while, it seemed like he might be waking up, but… it’s like your mother said. It’s as though he’d rather just let himself drift off to sleep. When she came and asked me if there was still hope, I couldn’t bring myself to tell her to prepare for the worst, but honestly, all we can do now is what’s within our power and leave the rest to fate…”

Situ Jue stood frozen, murmured a quiet “thank you,” and gave no other response.

Wu Jiang, growing worried, reached out and touched her arm instead. “Listen to me, Situ Jue. If you need to cry, then cry. Don’t hold it in.”

“I’m fine.” Situ Jue turned and hurried to gather her luggage. “I have to go.”

“You’re really still leaving?”

“Yes, I have to go now. Listen, they’re already calling the boarding announcement.” She grabbed her coat from the back of the chair in a rush, and it slipped from her hand and fell to the floor. She bent down to pick it up—and stayed crouched there for a long, long time before she stood back up.

Lin Jing let out a sigh and picked up Situ Jue’s suitcase for her.

Situ Jue looked at Lin Jing, tilting her head up like a child, gazing at him with wide, hopeful eyes. “I forgot to tell you—before you got here, I had the most wonderful dream. It felt so real, more real, even, than right now.”

Lin Jing exchanged a glance with Wu Jiang, and asked, going along with her, “Was it about you?”

Situ Jue thought for a moment. “No. It was about someone else. But I was happy for them in the dream—at least they were happy…”

—THE END—