“Mom, what illness? We agreed we weren’t going to say that word anymore — it’s bad luck.”

Lin Qing immediately scolded her mother gently.

Her mother was not appeased. “Whether there’s an illness or not — does saying so change anything? It’s written right there in black and white on the medical records. Can-cer—”

“Mom!”

Lin Qing cut her off sharply.

She believed in science, but she had a genuine aversion to hearing that particular word spoken aloud.

It felt like an ill omen.

Lin Qing’s mother had been diagnosed with a certain form of cancer after Lin Qing finished her university entrance examinations.

The doctor’s assessment: recovery was not possible. How much longer she had was entirely up to fate. Some people lived another decade or two after diagnosis; others were gone within six months.

The day the diagnosis came in was the same day Lin Qing received her acceptance letter from the university she’d dreamed of.

She gripped the ticket into her prestigious university’s mathematics department and understood for the very first time what it meant that “human plans yield to heaven’s designs.”

It was that precise. Her mother had worked herself to the bone to send Lin Qing to university, certain that at last she could look forward to her own free time.

But just as one sentence of imprisonment was commuted, the next verdict had already taken effect.

“All right, all right! I won’t say it. You’ve mastered the art of burying your head in the sand.” Her mother was, in truth, quite composed about it.

Four years, over a thousand nights — enough for the gradual accumulation of change to bring an adult to a place of acceptance.

“What are you planning to take with you tomorrow? I’ll help you pack.”

Lin Qing thought for a moment, then said with calm certainty: “Nothing. There’s nothing to take.”

The city had everything.

Her mother clearly disagreed. She pointed to the tip of her own nose and made a particularly abrupt suggestion: “Nothing to take — then take me.”

“Take you?” Lin Qing was a little startled.

The city certainly didn’t have that.

Lin Qing had been thinking about bringing her mother to the city, but the idea hadn’t fully taken shape.

“Mom, I have been thinking about it. The medical care in the city is better. I could bring you there, and we’d rent a place together. I’d work during the week, and on weekends we could book appointments with specialists and all that.”

“No! I won’t agree to that!”

At that, her mother waved her hand with firm decisiveness and refused on the spot!

It was hard to leave one’s homeland.

Lin Qing understood.

The circle of elders dancing around her mother in the square, and the mahjong companions — her mother likely couldn’t bear to leave any of them behind on short notice.

Besides, this plan of hers had only been turning over quietly in her own mind — this was the first time she’d brought it up with her mother.

And when her mother had just blurted out “then take me with you,” she’d probably only been speaking in the impulse of the moment — expressing the reluctance of parting.

Let it go — the work of changing her mind could be done gradually.

Lin Qing calmly accepted the outcome.

“All right, Mom. Think over what I’ve suggested. I’ll go back tomorrow first, find a place to rent — and when you’ve made up your mind, I’ll come back and bring you.” Lin Qing stepped back, giving her mother space.

Her mother pursed her lips in dissatisfaction and said with spirit: “When I say ‘no,’ I mean — I don’t agree to renting a place!”

“Hm?” Lin Qing was puzzled.

Her mother smiled gently, set down what she was doing, came over, and took Lin Qing’s hands in hers with great seriousness. “What I mean is — if you want me to come with you to the city, then we should buy a place in the city!”

Lin Qing was even more astonished. “Mom, property in the city is terribly expensive!”

Her mother immediately sat up with bright energy. “What’s there to be afraid of the price?! I’ve already thought it through — we’ll sell this old house! I’ve got some savings set aside, and we can put some on the card, borrow a bit more — more than enough for a down payment. And the city always has older buildings alongside the newer ones — we’ll buy something not so new, but good value: a one-bedroom. You take the bedroom, Mom sleeps in the living room! Hey! Problem solved!”

Lin Qing was completely blindsided.

What was this?!

Her mother had lived in this small town her entire life. Aside from the trip Lin Qing had taken her on, she had never once walked through the doors of a train station.

The rest of the time, she was like a tree or a stone on the old street — deeply, deeply rooted.

So much so that somewhere in Lin Qing’s subconscious, she’d simply assumed her mother would never willingly uproot herself from this place.

This awakening of spirit was… perhaps a little too awakened?

Lin Qing couldn’t quite believe it and asked: “Mom, if you sell the house here, where will you come back to?”

“Come back for what?” Her mother laughed.

“Isn’t this… our hometown?”

Lin Qing blinked her large, watery eyes and asked with some trepidation.

Her mother slapped her knee. “What hometown?! Wherever you are is wherever I am! Where there is my daughter — that is home!”

Lin Qing stared at her mother in disbelief, genuinely unable to process this unexpected turn.

To guard against her mother speaking impulsively — or simply saying things she didn’t mean — she pressed further, a little anxiously: “Aren’t you afraid I won’t be able to pay the mortgage? That I won’t be able to support you?”

“Not afraid! I have full confidence in my own daughter.”

With that, her mother promptly and efficiently began gathering and packing their things.

Watching her mother’s blindly confident retreating figure, Lin Qing found herself dimly understanding: so many problems in this world don’t actually need to be spoken aloud — both parties have long since known the answer in their hearts.

She had been thinking, for a long time, about whether or not to bring her mother away with her.

Her mother had long since anticipated Lin Qing’s anticipation, and had been turning over whether to follow her.

This question had been suspended between mother and daughter since Lin Qing’s senior year, when she began looking for work.

Both of them had been working hard to solve the equation.

But Lin Qing’s heart remained unsettled.

Something in her intuition told her, vaguely — beneath her mother’s bold and decisive manner, there were secrets she didn’t yet know…

“Lu Zhou, what do you think — what is my mother actually thinking? Such a big decision, such a big change — how can she just do it, just like that?”

That evening, Lin Qing sat on the stone bench of the old street, chin in hand, video-calling her childhood friend Lu Zhou somewhere far away.

Lu Zhou was Lin Qing’s classmate from primary school through middle school.

Whether they’d been classmates in kindergarten too, neither of them could remember.

But the town only had one kindergarten.

In high school, Lu Zhou’s father was transferred for work, and the whole family moved from the town to the county seat.

From that point on, Lin Qing and Lu Zhou went from childhood friends to “online friends.”

Lu Zhou was wearing a white Descente outfit, with a white sun visor shading him from the sunlight of a latitude several degrees removed from Lin Qing’s.

Behind him stretched a wide expanse of green.

Blue sky, white clouds, golf.

Fair skin, refined features — no matter how beautiful the backdrop, it was merely the frame for Lu Zhou.

“Isn’t it a good thing that Auntie agreed to go with you? Didn’t you say you’d been anxious about it — worried she wouldn’t want to leave?”

Lu Zhou seized the gap between rounds to quickly connect with Lin Qing.

A fine sheen of perspiration still clung to the bridge of his high, straight nose.

He’d led by one stroke in the first half, and as long as he held firm in the second half and kept his opponent in check, he would be the champion of this New Zealand tournament.

“But she suddenly wants to sell the house…” Lin Qing wasn’t sure how to put the worry into words. “Isn’t that moving too fast?”

Lu Zhou smiled lightly in the sunshine. “That’s nothing to worry about. Whenever you move, I’ll come back to help.”

“Tomorrow,” Lin Qing said honestly.

“Tomorrow? That soon?”

Something in Lu Zhou’s chest gave a brief lurch. To get there by tomorrow, he’d have to catch a rocket from Musk.

“Let me call a cross-city moving company for you — I really can’t make it back in time.”

Lu Zhou glanced back at the referee, then checked his watch.

As a rising new star on the golf green, Lu Zhou’s every move was under the focus of sports journalists and the audience present.

The brief flicker of tension that crossed his brow was immediately caught by his opponent, who launched into a beautiful swing — the crack of club against ball clear and decisive, unmistakably the sound of a magnificent shot!

“Lu Zhou, what I’m trying to talk about right now isn’t the move, it’s…”

Lin Qing paused, and the words “selling the house” quietly swallowed themselves back down.

In that instant, she became aware — because of the time difference, the cluttered and worn old street she sat on, deepened by the amber of the setting sun into something even more hazy and muffled, stood in stark contrast to the bright, open expanse of the golf course visible on the other side of the screen.

Two people in two different environments. Venting to Lu Zhou from this distance was utterly futile.

“Wishing you success in the match.”

Knowing when to admit defeat, Lin Qing ended the video call decisively.

All these years, Lu Zhou was the only person Lin Qing had ever truly considered a kindred friend.

Every time they met, he only ever added to his standing in her heart.

She had never placed expectations on him; he had never let her down.

Two people like that — perhaps they were best suited to being good friends.

Lin Qing walked home with drifting steps, her heart unanchored.

Just as she entered the building, she heard her mother hollering at the real estate agent in their own courtyard: “What do you mean the space not listed on the title deed doesn’t count?! You look at this courtyard — I’ve turned it into a proper little plot: a vegetable patch here, a covered bike area there. I’ll tell you straight — whoever buys this place is basically getting an entire extra room for free!”

“Those are all unauthorized additions that would need to be demolished. If we take the property, we’d have to pay to have them cleared — those are costs.” The agent countered with reason and firmness, with one clear aim: to use urgency to drive down the price.

Her mother was half-furious and half-heartbroken over the old house, and somehow, sharp as she was, she’d been cornered by the agent.

Lin Qing worked hard to send the agent away and talk her mother back to a calmer state.

“All right, all right, Mom! If you want to come with me, we don’t have to rush it to tomorrow. There’s no such thing as an impossible deal, but there’s also no such thing as a house sold in a single day. Sell at your own pace. Whenever the house goes, that’s when you come find me. Does that sound all right?”

Lin Qing, as always, was the practical one.

Her mother listened and was silent for a long time, brow furrowed.

Then, as though jolted awake from a dream, she suddenly leapt to her feet and whirled out the door — and practically hauled the two agents back off the road by force!

“Fine! The courtyard doesn’t count, it doesn’t count! What’s the soonest you can close the deal?! I’ll drop another fifty thousand!”

Her mother’s urgency to sell the house could only be described as burning impatience.

Lin Qing was scorched by that “another fifty thousand.”

She lunged forward to stop her: “Mom, this house can barely sell for forty thousand as it is — if you drop another fifty thousand off the price, you’d be selling an entire house for what you’d pay for a car.”

“Then a car for a car! I just want it sold!”

The moment her mother finished speaking, Lin Qing could clearly see both agents smiling so wide their lips nearly reached their foreheads.

A windfall delivered to their door.

Lin Qing’s chest was full of grievance, but there was nothing she could do — her mother had made up her mind.

At that moment, a WeChat message came through.

It was from Lu Zhou.

Just two words: “Don’t rush.”

Lin Qing didn’t reply. She turned her phone face-down and went to shower.

The sound of water rushing and splashing covered the restlessness churning in her heart.

In the bedroom.

Her mother solemnly and carefully burned the last stick of incense before Lin Qing’s father’s photograph.

Then, pressing her lips together, steeling herself, she reached out and — with an act of resolve — placed her father’s photograph together with a thick stack of medical records into the suitcase.

During the time Lin Qing had been away, her mother’s condition had been quietly worsening.

Just a few days before Lin Qing came home, her mother had returned from a medical check-up.

The doctor had told her: the cancer had been progressing from its third stage toward the second — and at this rate, describing the remainder of her life as numbered would not be an overstatement.

Lin Qing had originally come home to enjoy the winter break, which made her mother very happy. But then the unexpected offer from Longquan had caught them both off guard.

Being able to spend even one more day with her daughter — it was a gift.

If you cannot outmaneuver heaven, then outmaneuver yourself.

Before she retired, her mother had been an accountant. The fifty thousand knocked off the price was simply her way of buying time.