A midsummer night. The evening breeze was, for once, refreshingly cool.

Occasionally a vehicle sped down the road, raising a loud rushing noise against the wind.

At this hour, the police station would usually be at its most chaotic — drunk troublemakers, fighters and brawlers, never a quiet moment.

This time was the rare exception. Both sides reached an amicable settlement with unexpected ease.

Those men must have known who Lu Rangchen was. Moments before, they had been dead-set on making trouble. Now, in an awkward turn, they agreed to let the matter rest.

Even the officer on duty was amused, commenting that they all seemed to know each other.

Lu Rangchen, standing to one side with his hands in his pockets and taking a phone call, didn’t even lift his eyes. His relaxed brow carried a detached, sharp edge.

The man who had been hit laughed it off. “I don’t know him. I just happen to know of him.”

Everyone in Nanchen knew there was someone on Huizhou Road.

He ran a tennis club — last name Lu, with a formidable background. He had been a national-level tennis player in his earlier years, then retired.

His family was wealthy, and he moved in both business and political circles.

It wasn’t just anyone in Nanchen who could afford to cross him — even back in the capital, few had dared.

The man considered himself unlucky to have bumped into this particular person, and especially unlucky for having tried to extort him on top of it. He hadn’t even dared ask for much in the way of compensation.

Still, compared to the cost of having a few stitches put in, he’d come out ahead overall.

After the matter was settled, the man offered Lu Rangchen an explanation: “I really didn’t mean any harm — I just saw the girl was pretty and tried to tease her a bit. I didn’t expect she’d take it so badly.”

Lu Rangchen leaned lazily against the wall, a unit cigarette hanging from his lips. When he looked up again, his eyes were half-narrowed, visibly impatient.

It was the same demeanor as when he used to settle disputes back in school — too disinclined to waste words, yet radiating a dangerous, brooding menace from every pore.

The man was a full head shorter than him, and wilted under that look in an instant.

Just then, an officer called him over to sign something, and he quickly ducked away.

With him gone, the line of sight was clear. Lu Rangchen glanced up, and saw Zhu Yunque sitting on the bench across the room.

On this summer night, she wore a sleeveless, fitted white dress with a fine fringe of bangs brushing her brow, her dark glossy hair falling softly behind her ears.

Slender and willowy, like a white camellia blooming in calm repose.

Thinner than she’d been before. More beautiful. More composed.

But her temperament hadn’t changed one bit.

She sat there with almost no presence, like a still pool of water with no ripples — and yet like a thorn, lodged in your chest, buried in flesh, pricking you at every moment without rest.

Their eyes met for two seconds.

Lu Rangchen’s jaw tightened slightly. He looked away.

He removed the cigarette, holding it pinched between two long fingers, and lowered his gaze to read a message with cold indifference.

A proud, sharp face.

Carved by time into something more distinctly masculine — yet also more unapproachable.

Zhu Yunque watched for a few seconds, then dropped her gaze, lowering her lashes.

Something in her chest seemed to push slowly upward through the soil, itching, trembling, stirring back to life.

Just then, Deng Jiao finished signing the agreement and looked back at her. “Teacher, we still need a witness.”

Hearing that title—

Lu Rangchen’s fingers went still.

In the next instant, he heard the young woman’s voice say quietly, “I’ll do it.”

Her voice was faintly muffled, carrying a trace of tired hoarseness — the kind of fragile, broken quality that made a person want to protect her completely.

Lu Rangchen’s throat moved.

A sardonic smile curved his lips.

Not just her temperament, he thought.

After all these years, her talent for putting on a performance hadn’t changed one bit either.

…

Outside the police station.

Deng Jiao followed Lu Rangchen toward the black SUV parked up ahead.

The car door had just opened when a voice sounded from behind.

Clear and cool as always, yet with a certain delicate, subtle quality — submerged in the night, wavering between darkness and light, softly entangling.

Deng Jiao assumed the words “wait a moment” were directed at her, but when she turned, she found that Zhu Yunque had walked up to face Lu Rangchen.

At a standard height of 167 centimeters, Zhu Yunque was tall and striking among ordinary people — yet in front of Lu Rangchen, who stood at 188, she seemed small and delicate.

The image of the two of them standing together was unexpectedly striking. Deng Jiao stared, momentarily forgetting herself.

Apparently caught off guard by her approach, Lu Rangchen held his hand on the car door and paused for two seconds. His jaw shifted slightly, and he looked at her sideways.

Cold and forbidding. No warmth whatsoever.

“Something you want?”

Zhu Yunque looked up at him, neither subservient nor aggressive. “I’m Deng Jiao’s teacher.”

“I need to speak with you about her English grades.”

Her voice was perfectly steady, with no trace of pretense — as though she really was a teacher going out of her way for a student, seizing the opportunity to talk with a guardian.

Lu Rangchen fixed her with a deep, contemptuous gaze. “And if I don’t want to?”

He tilted his chin. “Do you know what time it is?”

His sharp throat worked as he spoke.

That had once been her favorite part of him.

Zhu Yunque’s eyes shifted faintly. She drew a barely perceptible breath. “Then give me a way to contact you, and come to the school when you have time.”

She said it with complete propriety.

Lu Rangchen found it utterly incomprehensible.

He gave a sudden, uninhibited laugh, tilting his head to appraise her — half mockery, half teasing. “And if I won’t give it to you, are you going to follow me home tonight?”

Deng Jiao’s eyes went wide.

It was the first time she had ever seen Lu Rangchen speak to a woman in that loose, taunting way.

And this woman was her English teacher.

Yet Zhu Yunque was completely unmoved.

She looked at Lu Rangchen with an almost stubborn persistence, and in the depths of her eyes lay an unsolvable, deeply buried resolve.

It was at that moment that Deng Jiao raised her hand weakly. “Um — Teacher — he’s not my guardian…”

Zhu Yunque’s gaze finally shifted to her face.

There was none of the dawning realization Deng Jiao might have expected.

Deng Jiao had been about to explain further when Lu Rangchen cut her off abruptly, his manner forceful and pressing. “Did you hear that? I’m not her guardian.”

His magnetic voice was low and resonant as a cello, no longer playful — this was a warning. A command. A dismissal.

Lu Rangchen fixed his deep, heavy gaze on Zhu Yunque for a long moment, then gave a cold laugh. “There’s no reason for you to have my number.”

He swung his long legs into the car and shut the door behind him without a shred of chivalry. A sharp crack.

A wave of hot air and dust swept up in front of Zhu Yunque.

She instinctively squinted and closed her eyes. Her hair and the hem of her dress flew up together.

When she opened her eyes again, the man’s untamed, ungovernable figure had already driven that black SUV deep into the night.

Like a dream.

Lu Rangchen drove Deng Jiao back to the tennis club.

She and her brother Deng Zhe both lived there.

The club’s only small convenience store had been run by Deng Zhe. Business had been going fairly well — until that afternoon, when debt collectors had come to cause trouble, smashing the place into a wreck.

He had already been at his wit’s end when Deng Jiao’s incident occurred on top of everything.

When Deng Zhe received the phone call, he couldn’t help but burst out laughing despite his exasperation.

Lu Rangchen happened to still be there, and seeing the state of things, he voluntarily helped handle the matter with Deng Jiao.

When she returned, Deng Jiao received a thorough scolding.

The girl’s eyes were as swollen as two walnuts, and she shouted back at Deng Zhe: “If I don’t work, can you manage on your own? You know as well as I do how much Dad owed when he died!”

At that, Deng Zhe went silent.

Then, as if on cue, rain began to fall outside, washing away the heat of the night.

Lu Rangchen took a bottle of beer from the cooler. His tall frame leaned against the doorway, watching the downpour, drinking in an idle, unhurried way.

Before long, the shouting inside the back room quieted.

When the two siblings came out, Lu Rangchen’s beer was already half gone.

Deng Jiao went upstairs to shower.

Deng Zhe, heavy with exhaustion, took a bottle from the cooler, clinked it against Lu Rangchen’s in a proper toast, and leaned against the other side of the doorframe.

The inside of the store was a disaster.

The doorway, by comparison, felt almost peaceful.

Lu Rangchen glanced at him briefly. “If you need money, just say so.”

Deng Zhe grinned and shook his head. “Not yet. I can manage for now.”

He had enjoyed wealth and comfort for much of his life — he wanted to see whether he could make it on his own.

Perhaps afraid that Lu Rangchen would bring up money again, he quickly changed the subject. “By the way, I heard from my sister that you ran into someone today.”

Lu Rangchen’s hand paused.

The liquid in the bottle swayed.

Deng Zhe’s lips curved into a sly grin.

Lu Rangchen looked at him with undisguised displeasure and raised an eyebrow. “What did Deng Jiao say?”

“Just that you made a face at her English teacher tonight, and even teased her. My sister’s worried the teacher will give her a hard time.”

Deng Zhe hissed. “I was pretty surprised. I asked her, who’s your teacher — what kind of charm does she have, to get that kind of reaction? And she said it was their school’s new English teacher. Gorgeous, apparently. Hugely popular. Name is Zhu Yunque.”

Lu Rangchen raised the bottle to drink, then stopped mid-motion. At the sound of that name, he went still, the emotion in his eyes darkening into something unreadable.

The atmosphere fell silent.

The sound of the rain filled the air from every direction — tangled, dense, oppressive.

Until Deng Zhe remarked, half-jokingly, “Still holding a grudge after all these years.”

The answer was a brief silence.

Lu Rangchen tilted his head back and took a long drink. The bubbles, slightly rough on the palate, slid down his throat. He stared ahead, and gave an indifferent, dismissive laugh. “I forgot about her long ago.”

Deng Zhe paused and looked at him. “Then do you still love her?”

The sound of rain seemed to swallow the question whole. Lu Rangchen’s handsome face remained cold and unreadable. He said nothing.

This time, the silence stretched on far longer.

After some unmeasured amount of time, Lu Rangchen gave a self-deprecating curl of his lips. A hoarse sound rolled from his throat. “I forgot about her long ago.”

That heavy rain had come out of nowhere.

Zhu Yunque stepped out of her taxi and walked back to the dormitory through the downpour.

The dorm supervisor who lived in the room next door saw her come in this late, drenched like a drowned cat, and immediately and warmly pressed cold medicine into her hands.

Apparently noticing something was wrong with Zhu Yunque’s mood, the supervisor even knocked on her door specifically to ask whether she had anything weighing on her mind, and whether there was anything she could do to help.

Zhu Yunque forced a small smile and shook her head.

Nothing needed helping. The thing weighing on her mind was beyond anyone’s ability to fix.

After the supervisor left, what remained of Zhu Yunque’s energy seemed to drain out of her completely. With the last of her strength, she changed her clothes, showered, turned off the light, and lay down on the bed.

A moment later, her phone lit up.

WeChat from Xu Linda.

Xu Linda: 【Is this real? Lu Rangchen?? You actually ran into him???】

Xu Linda: 【He was your student’s guardian???】

Xu Linda: 【What happened between you two? Did he say hello to you? Did you catch up?】

In the dark, messages sprouted one after another, their screen light brightening the night.

Zhu Yunque struggled for a while, pushed through a headache, turned on her side, picked up the phone, and typed slowly: 【Nothing happened.】

Xu Linda: 【?】

Xu Linda: 【I don’t believe you. You’re lying.】

Xu Linda: 【Back then, after you left, he was such a wreck. And you were his first love — there’s no way he felt nothing.】

Staring at a screen full of disbelief.

Zhu Yunque’s throat felt thick. 【I’m not lying. He looked at me like I was a stranger.】

Zhu Yunque: 【I asked him for his number, and he didn’t give it to me.】

Xu Linda: 【……………………】

Apparently unsure what to say, a long string of ellipses followed. Xu Linda’s messages went quiet for a long time.

Zhu Yunque stared numbly at the planks of the bunk above her.

A bare, simple bunk bed — like a coffin, trapping her inside, every breath stifling.

Finally, Xu Linda called her, tearing open a gap in the emotions she had been containing.

Xu Linda began by asking how she was doing right now, then started walking through all her theories for why Lu Rangchen might have acted the way he did. But before she could finish working through her many hypotheses, Zhu Yunque suddenly interrupted.

“I deserved it.”

Xu Linda was lost. “What do you mean, you deserved it?”

The words fell.

A silence like death.

When she spoke again, Zhu Yunque’s voice was misted with something like water — a faint laugh, a quiet shake of her head. “When I first got overseas, he came and asked me to get back together.”

“…”

“I said no.”

Her eyes burned with heat.

Her voice was rough, saturated, very quiet. “He won’t want me back.”