Chen An sat in his car. He rummaged through the drawer and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, extracting one and putting it between his lips. His hands were shaking so badly that it took three attempts before he could light it. The nicotine entered his lungs, wisps of white smoke drifting past his eyelashes. He squinted.

After chain-smoking three cigarettes in clouds of smoke, he finally calmed down enough to reflect coolly on whether his earlier hasty departure had looked like a panicked escape, whether it had seemed pathetic.

After all, seven years ago he had been pathetic once before. That shameful scene would repeatedly appear as a form of self-punishment whenever he was about to act impulsively. After seven years of this kind of aversion therapy, he had actually managed to persist until never seeing her again—until seeing her again.

Then he began urgently trying to recall what the person he’d just seen looked like. Because he’d been too flustered, he hadn’t actually examined her carefully, just caught a hurried glimpse. At the time, his mind had been roaring, and he’d remembered nothing. Now when he tried to recall, there was only a crude outline—he couldn’t even remember if her hair was long or short.

The entire conversation had been extremely awkward, completed purely through willpower, like taking an exam while running a high fever. After finishing, he couldn’t even remember what questions he’d answered, though perhaps when the test was returned, it wouldn’t necessarily be a zero.

Everything felt so surreal. The only concrete fact was that Cheng Lele was actually personnel dispatched by Tongda Cinema Chain.

To avoid him, someone who hadn’t even appeared at her father’s tomb-sweeping ceremony had, because of work, actually returned to Taixi. But ironically, she was here to work for him. There was something sardonic about it.

Would she continue to resign without hesitation in order to avoid him?

But if she didn’t resign, did that mean he had already lost his value as something to be avoided?

Amid these humble thought patterns, Chen An’s self-esteem flickered in and out. On one hand, he warned himself not to place too much importance on such a one-in-ten-thousand chance encounter, but on the other hand, he couldn’t help but let his thoughts wander further and further.

After thinking for a long while, he finally felt composed enough to control his body and started the car to leave.

He parked the car outside the residential complex and had to walk a distance to get home.

When he reached the first floor, Chen An looked toward the courtyard. He remembered that in the first year after he’d returned, the courtyard had been left unmanaged and completely overgrown, with weeds growing so tall they seemed to bury all the joy of the past. He had climbed over the courtyard wall to pull the weeds once. When they grew to half a person’s height again and still no one tended to them, he had to climb over the wall again. Crop after crop, year after year.

He couldn’t help but wonder—would this courtyard still grow weeds in the future?