Of course she had missed him. How could she not?

She had missed him so much that on the plane, each time she closed her eyes, she could trace the shape of him perfectly in her mind. She’d wondered whether he was still upset, whether he had slept. She’d wanted to say so many things to him.

Anything at all, really. Just as long as she was saying it to him.

But when he was actually standing in front of her, holding her — the feeling became something else entirely.

Somehow, all of it became impossible to express.

Those emotions, that ache — they lived in her eyes, caught in her throat, waiting to ignite in the instant their gazes met.

She couldn’t have said how that first kiss began.

Zhu Yunque only knew that she was the one who moved first, leaning tentatively toward him, searching for his lips.

And then that tentative, butterfly-light touch became the spark that lit a fire.

Lu Rangchen drew her in, coaxing her lips apart, kissing her urgently and fiercely. He pulled her down onto the sofa, and beneath the softness of the cushions, with him pressing close and holding her in place, she felt as though she might sink entirely.

Helpless, weightless — she could only loop her arms around his neck and hold on, like clutching the only foothold in the depths of a dark sea, the one thing that could keep her from being swept away by the churning sensation rising all around her.

Zhu Yunque’s mind drifted back to high school.

Xu Linda had told her that teenage boys were all a little unpredictable. A few of them had apparently whispered about certain things behind closed doors. She’d even heard some almost unbelievable rumors — like how someone from a certain class and someone else had been spotted leaving school together and slipping into a small inn.

Back then, both of them had worn entirely innocent expressions, yet couldn’t quite stop the imagination from wandering.

Xu Linda had said, who knew what Deng Zhe was really like — maybe he’d already had his head turned by all that long ago.

Zhu Yunque had stayed quiet, though her thoughts had unavoidably drifted to Lu Rangchen.

She had wondered what Lu Rangchen was like.

What kind of girl he would like. How he would behave toward a girl he cared for.

Someone with his kind of untamed temperament — restrained and proper with others — what would he be like with a girlfriend? Would he have the same thoughts any teenage boy would? Would he, in private, think about those things?

No conclusions ever came.

No girl had ever been liked by Lu Rangchen.

He was the cold moon above the mountain — to be admired from afar, never touched — and so no one had ever seen what he looked like when he was truly moved.

Yet how could the Zhu Yunque of that time have ever imagined that one day — everything she had once wondered about, everything she had envied others for — would all find its way to her.

Lu Rangchen’s love. His possessiveness. His recklessness. His forceful, domineering hold.

He wasn’t someone who kept himself restrained and composed at all times.

He was only like that with people he didn’t care for. With the person he loved, he would lose control.

Like right now.

The air conditioning wasn’t on.

The temperature in the room wasn’t particularly gentle either.

When the clasp at her back was undone entirely, the coolness of the air made her shudder sharply — but in the very next moment she felt the burning dryness of Lu Rangchen’s palms, as if his touch alone might absorb her completely.

A flood of inexplicable shame crawled up from the base of her spine, spreading all the way to her heart. The throw pillow she’d been gripping was pressed into deep, uneven creases.

And through it all, the kiss never stopped.

Like a fine, steady rain — drawing her forward, meeting her, sustaining her.

Sustaining a soft, yielding expanse of earth, through the whole of that early autumn morning, unhurried, allowing the slow undoing.

Then at some point, she bit down on Lu Rangchen’s ear.

The pressure wasn’t much — more like retaliation than anything, or the effort of holding something back.

Lu Rangchen swallowed a low laugh. And stopped.

He stopped provoking her, pressing soft, soothing kisses along the curve of her ear, murmuring, “Zhu Yunque — your nerves really are something. You’re still not pushing me away, even now.”

Zhu Yunque kept her arms around him.

Held on tight, lips pressed firmly together, saying nothing.

Lu Rangchen could actually read her quite well. She was, in a word, reckless.

Had he truly pushed further just then, she would have endured it without a sound — even in a moment like this, she remained composed in a way that defied all reason, as though she had already made up her mind about it, already accepted whatever might come.

The more Lu Rangchen thought about it, the more it ached. The more he couldn’t bear it.

A genuine ache, from somewhere deep.

He found himself wondering — if he really hadn’t been able to stop just now, what would have happened? Would she have been frightened? Would she have cried?

That thought alone made him pull her into his arms, settle her in his lap, reach over for the small blanket beside them, and drape it around her. Then he lowered his head and pressed a reverent kiss to her forehead.

Zhu Yunque rested her head against his chest and breathed in, slow and shallow. “So does that count as making it up to you?”

Lu Rangchen genuinely hadn’t expected those to be her first words.

A beat of silence, and then a quiet, helpless laugh escaped him.

Zhu Yunque tilted her head to look at him — eyes slightly flushed at the corners, wearing that quietly disarming expression she always seemed to carry.

She always found a way to get under his skin.

Lu Rangchen’s throat moved. He tugged up the corner of his mouth and said, “You’d already made it up to me long before this.”

“When?”

Lu Rangchen brushed his thumb against the faint dampness at the outer corner of her eye and said, “The moment you decided to come find me.”

Zhu Yunque let out a quiet, exasperated breath. “You’re awfully easy to appease.”

Lu Rangchen glanced down at her with a smile. “If I were any harder to appease, what happens when my girlfriend gets scared off?”

They held each other’s gaze like that.

Then without any particular reason, Zhu Yunque pulled herself up and kissed him again.

Lu Rangchen always let her do as she pleased.

He even made sure to steady her at the waist while she kissed him, and helped tuck the blanket more securely around her.

Looking back on it later —

That was a rather reckless morning by any measure. No preparation of any kind — emotional, practical, none of it — and yet the two of them had charged headlong into it anyway. Even though they stopped short of going all the way, something had irrevocably shifted between them.

It was as though in the space of a single breath, the distance between them had collapsed to nothing, and there was nothing left that could come between them.

After Zhu Yunque showered, she lay down on his bed for a while.

His apartment was quite spacious.

And yet somehow there was only one bedroom. Even the cat had its own space — but apparently, she was on her own.

Zhu Yunque thought back to what had happened between them not long ago.

The cat had been right there the whole time, watching. Zhu Yunque wondered if it had understood what it was seeing. The thought made her laugh involuntarily.

A long while passed before Lu Rangchen came out after his shower.

When he found Zhu Yunque lying in his blankets, blinking sleepily without any intention of drifting off, he curved his lips and lay down fully clothed, pulling her into his arms.

They couldn’t sleep at first.

So the two of them talked, sharing things with each other that hadn’t been said before.

Zhu Yunque lay in the curve of Lu Rangchen’s arm, Lu Rangchen’s hand wrapped around her wrist, fingers tracing light, slow patterns across the bone, while he talked about Lu Zhitao.

He said Lu Zhitao had been the family’s treasure.

When they were young, Lu Zhitao had received far more of their parents’ affection than he had.

Lu Rangchen was small then and didn’t understand. He assumed that neither Cheng Liru nor Lu Dingzhong loved him, so he had grown up willful and restless. But Lu Zhitao had genuinely adored him as her younger brother — she was always trying to find ways to make him happy.

Often, when Cheng Liru refused to buy something for him, Lu Zhitao would buy it herself, even when her own pocket money was barely enough.

But Lu Rangchen was the type who couldn’t bring himself to back down.

When he dug his heels in, he never gave in — and even at thirteen, he refused to soften up or let himself get close to Lu Zhitao.

He kept a tight, unyielding expression on his face from start to finish, impossibly guarded for someone so young.

Back then, Lu Dingzhong said he was unmanageable, that he’d amount to nothing when he grew up, and directed all his patience toward Lu Zhitao instead.

But then — Lu Zhitao had an incident at eighteen.

That year, she had quietly, one-sidedly fallen for a classmate in her year.

A shy kind of longing, carried in silence — all of it written into her diary.

She had been careless with her trust. That diary was found by a girl who had seemed to be a close friend, and before long it had passed from hand to hand through the whole class.

Sometimes you couldn’t help but recognize how strange inheritance could be.

Lu Dingzhong and Cheng Liru were both striking in their own right — yet the children they produced were a study in contrast, one remarkable, one ordinary.

The ordinary one was, naturally, Lu Zhitao.

Lu Rangchen’s looks had been exceptional from childhood — even when he went entire days without cracking a smile, there was never a shortage of girls trailing after him.

Set against him, Lu Zhitao only felt more self-conscious about her own appearance.

She was emotionally perceptive and tender by nature, at once fragile and deeply kind.

The diary incident made no small stir throughout the class. Word was it had been passed around for others to read. The boy she had been in love with inevitably found out. He had all the makings of someone exceptional — only his character failed to match his outward gifts. What he showed the world and what he was behind closed doors were two entirely different things.

Not long after, rumors spread that he had been mocking Lu Zhitao in private conversations with his friends.

He said that aside from her family background and passable grades, she didn’t have much going for her.

Lu Zhitao was at that age when the body was still growing — nearly one meter seventy, perhaps a hundred and thirty-some jin. A perfectly normal physique for a girl her age, and healthy at that. But because of a few words from that wretched group of boys, she became the object of ridicule for the entire class.

The comments all amounted to the same thing: someone of her appearance, daring to secretly like their school’s most admired boy.

The diary scandal had only just been suppressed by the teachers when Lu Zhitao faced another wave of verbal abuse.

Lu Rangchen was still young at the time, and didn’t know the full details of what had happened. He only knew that Lu Zhitao cried often in those months, and that Lin Zhi was constantly coming by the house.

And then, not long after — Lu Zhitao developed depression.

The last thing to break her was Lu Dingzhong.

Lu Dingzhong had always maintained that Lu Zhitao was simply letting her teenage emotions get the better of her. At first, he didn’t take it seriously, and saw no need to transfer her to a different school.

By the time her symptoms had grown significantly worse, he and Cheng Liru talked it over — and their response was simply to put her in hospital, have her take medication.

It wasn’t as though there were no better approaches.

But Lu Dingzhong had spent so long being the most certain person in every room that he had no capacity to hear anyone else’s counsel. In the end, he forced Lu Zhitao into the hospital.

The tragedy happened that same year.

After Lu Zhitao came home from the hospital, her condition didn’t improve — it deteriorated, and far more alarming behaviors began to surface.

In that period, Cheng Liru was consumed by tears, and she and Lu Dingzhong fought day and night, relentlessly.

Lu Dingzhong had a research project demanding his attention. Rather than face it, he simply walked out on the household and moved into the staff quarters at the university.

It was in that stretch of time that Lu Rangchen began watching Lu Zhitao more closely.

She was his sister, after all. Blood ran thicker than anything. He was young, but somewhere beneath the surface, the worry lived in him instinctively.

During that period, a boy would sometimes come by. Just to look in on Lu Zhitao.

At first he came with a teacher’s accompaniment. Then later, he came on his own a few times, and the two of them would sit and talk in the small garden at the house.

Lu Zhitao’s mood seemed better when he was there. But not long after each visit, she would sink back into the same bleakness.

And then — not long after — Lu Zhitao was gone.

That day was overcast. Cheng Liru had an errand to take care of, and asked Lu Rangchen to come home early after school to keep Lu Zhitao company.

Children are children.

Lu Rangchen couldn’t quite recall afterward why he had dragged his feet that day. Maybe a friend had called him out to play. Maybe something had caught his eye on the way home. Whatever it was, by the time he arrived, the house had already changed beyond recognition.

The housekeeper was someone from out of town who struggled with communication and wasn’t particularly observant. By the time she noticed anything was wrong, Lu Zhitao had already taken the medication.

All of it.

So much of it.

She was rushed to the hospital. They couldn’t save her.

That same night, Cheng Liru fainted from crying. Lu Dingzhong looked as though he had been struck by lightning — as if he had aged ten years in a single moment.

Cheng Liru’s parents and siblings, relatives of every kind from every direction, came rushing over. Without exception, they all turned their fury on Lu Dingzhong.

Lu Dingzhong said nothing. He stood and took it all, silently.

Thirteen-year-old Lu Rangchen stood in a corner of the hospital, watching everything in front of him with something between terror and numbness.

He stood there for a very long time, and then it came to him — his sister, his sister bound to him by blood, the only one he had — was gone.

At this point in the telling, Lu Rangchen paused, his breathing barely audible, the silence carrying something gentle about it.

But Zhu Yunque had long since blinked her eyes red. She looked up at him and asked, “Lu Rangchen — do you blame yourself?”

Lu Rangchen tilted his head slightly toward her, lowering his gaze to meet hers. His throat moved. He made a quiet sound of acknowledgment.

It was a side of Lu Rangchen Zhu Yunque had never seen before.

The Lu Rangchen she knew was always untamed and unhurried, moving through everything with effortless ease, as though nothing in the world could truly challenge him.

But now that Zhu Yunque had drawn close enough to reach the inside of him — close enough to reach his heart — she realized that wasn’t quite right.

He was, at his core, a person of immense emotional depth.

And he was not invincible.

Something in Zhu Yunque’s chest quietly softened.

She shifted in the curve of his arm and rested her hand against the lean line of his waist, a small, warm creature settling in — and held him back, gently and completely.

She said, “It had nothing to do with you. Truly. Even if you had come home that day, it wouldn’t have changed anything.”

“A person who has already decided to leave — they’re just holding on, day by day, waiting. And when the thing finally comes that breaks them, no amount of effort on your part could have stopped it.”

Lu Rangchen heard the grief in her voice and understood that she was feeling it for him. He looked down at her with a slight smile.

He knew she was feeling sorry for him. It was deeply warming — settling — a feeling that no one else could give him, and that no one else could replicate.

He drew in a quiet breath, tilted his head just slightly, and pressed his lips to Zhu Yunque’s forehead. “I know. I don’t dwell on it. Don’t carry this on my behalf — I’m alright now.”

Zhu Yunque studied him with earnest attention. “Then why were you in such a bad mood yesterday?”

Lu Rangchen’s voice carried a faint, muffled laugh. “Maybe we should leave that topic alone.”

Zhu Yunque refused to let it go. She even poked him in the ribs.

Lu Rangchen endured her until he’d laughed enough, then gave her a look of exaggerated gravity. “If I tell you, and you end up upset on my behalf, will you still want to hear it?”

It was the first time the two of them had ever held each other’s gaze with such singular focus.

Only now did Zhu Yunque notice how long Lu Rangchen’s lashes really were — the fold of his double eyelids was lovely, his eyes so dark and deep that when they looked straight at you, they had an uncanny ability to unravel your thoughts.

It took real effort to pull herself back to the matter at hand. She said, “Is it that your parents found out about us and they don’t want us to be together?”

Lu Rangchen genuinely admired Zhu Yunque.

She was sharp.

That kind of clarity — the kind that seemed to see through everything — sometimes unsettled him a little.

He couldn’t suppress a laugh. “My mom’s alright with it. It’s my dad — this time was actually a falling-out with him.”

It was as the Cheng family matriarch used to say — Lu Rangchen and Lu Dingzhong must have been sworn enemies in a past life. No matter how they looked at each other, neither one could find anything to approve of. Something trivial, dropped between the two of them, could set the whole thing alight.

But that was still the truth of it — a father was still a father.

Somewhere in Lu Rangchen’s heart, he wanted to be recognized by him. Whether it was his studies, his ambitions, his vision for himself — he wanted his father’s acknowledgment. And he wanted the person he loved to be recognized too.

Honestly.

Lu Rangchen had never liked anyone the way he liked Zhu Yunque.

Back when he had first arrived in the capital from Nancheng, if Deng Zhe and the others happened to mention Zhu Yunque’s name, he would feel this gnawing, unsettling restlessness that he couldn’t account for.

It was only later that he understood what it was.

That was what liking someone felt like. Liking them deeply.

So deeply that he — prideful as he was — was willing to bow his head and accept it.

So he wasn’t going to give up. Not for anything.

Lu Rangchen reached out and lightly pinched the tip of Zhu Yunque’s nose. “Are you afraid?”

Zhu Yunque looked at him, quite composed. “What would I be afraid of?”

Lu Rangchen gave a quiet scoff.

He thought to himself: that’s just who she is.

She looked fragile on the outside — the kind of person who seemed like a strong wind could knock her down — but inside, she was stronger than almost anyone.

Lu Rangchen nodded in genuine agreement. “Fair enough.”

Then he leaned close to her ear, deliberately raising trouble, and said, “Besides — you’ve already seen my private…”

Even the strongest resolve had its limits when it came to him saying something indecent.

Zhu Yunque’s ears went red in an instant. She covered his mouth with her hand. “Be quiet. Don’t say another word.”

Lu Rangchen just laughed, his shoulders shaking with it.

Zhu Yunque decided he was truly impossible.

And yet that impossibleness had her completely ensnared, and she couldn’t do a thing about it.

She pressed her lips together, ears burning, refusing to look at him anymore. It took Lu Rangchen quite a while of coaxing before she finally relented and glanced his way.

Lu Rangchen took her chin in his fingers, teasing her like a cat, and asked, “Does your mother not really like me either?”

Zhu Yunque didn’t spare his feelings.

She said yes directly.

Lu Rangchen asked why.

Zhu Yunque shook her head honestly and said she didn’t know.

Mothers and daughters often mirror each other in certain ways.

From the outside, Zhu Yunque was difficult to read.

But Feng Yanlai’s mind, even to Zhu Yunque, was a mystery — she couldn’t make sense of what drove her, couldn’t understand it.

Lu Rangchen asked again, “What if she opposes us being together? Are you afraid then?”

Zhu Yunque paused for two seconds, then shook her head. “No.”

Lu Rangchen curved his lips into a quiet smile and couldn’t help asking, “I’m beginning to wonder if there’s anything in the world that would actually frighten you.”

That didn’t sound exactly like a compliment.

Zhu Yunque gave him a mild, sideways glance and said nothing.

How could she not be frightened?

There were so many things she was afraid of.

Afraid of doing poorly on exams at the end of term. Afraid of missing out on her scholarship. Afraid of not becoming financially independent soon enough. Afraid of not being able to stay with the person she loved.

As for what Feng Yanlai thought — she genuinely couldn’t bring herself to care.

What she cared about was whether she had carved out enough space in the world for herself — whether she had the strength to live life on her own terms.

Gradually, drowsiness crept in.

Zhu Yunque closed her eyes, and through the soft edges of half-sleep she heard Lu Rangchen say something like, “Falling asleep already — I haven’t even gotten to ask you yet.”

Zhu Yunque shifted, letting herself be pulled more snugly into his hold, and murmured softly, “Go ahead.”

Lu Rangchen lifted the edge of her collar to look, and found that she still wasn’t wearing the jade Buddha pendant.

He asked her why.

Zhu Yunque said, eyes still closed, that she was waiting for him to put it on her himself.

Lu Rangchen smiled.

Then added, almost as an afterthought, “I looked into that thing afterward — apparently it can’t just be worn by anyone. There are certain restrictions.”

Zhu Yunque’s lashes fluttered. She was drowsy enough that her vision had gone soft and hazy — but she still managed to ask, “What kind of restrictions?”

Lu Rangchen’s lips curved with a hint of mischief, and he leaned close to her ear and said something low.

Zhu Yunque heard it clearly at the time. But even having heard it, she fell asleep regardless.

It wasn’t until that afternoon, when she woke up and lay staring at the ceiling, that she remembered what Lu Rangchen had said.

He had said — it couldn’t be worn during certain intimate moments.

And situations like what had happened between them earlier that morning — not during those either.

Zhu Yunque blinked at that for a few seconds. Then her ears went inexplicably red.

It was only after she woke properly and came back to herself that she realized just how bold she had been with Lu Rangchen that morning.

Though there was no use in regretting it now.

Adults were responsible for their own choices.

Case in point: not long after she woke that afternoon, she picked up her phone to find a string of missed calls from Feng Yanlai. Feng Yanlai seemed furious, and had sent a torrent of messages over their chat.

It came out later that Lu Rangchen had been the one to answer Feng Yanlai’s call.

Zhu Yunque had been deep in sleep, her phone buzzing relentlessly, and Lu Rangchen — protective to a fault when it came to her, unwilling to let even a phone call disturb her rest — had decided to handle it himself.

Besides, he genuinely wanted to speak with Feng Yanlai.

His possessiveness was probably driving some of it.

Every time he thought about Zhao Qijia, a real, visceral irritation rose in him.

So once he had taken the phone out of the room, he answered it.

Feng Yanlai was surprised.

But given her relationship with Cheng Liru, she was still polite toward Lu Rangchen.

Lu Rangchen was straightforward with her — said that Zhu Yunque was at his place catching up on sleep. That the two of them had been together for a while now, that they were very fond of each other, inseparable.

Feng Yanlai wasn’t naive. The moment the call connected and she heard his voice, she knew Zhu Yunque and Lu Rangchen were already firmly entwined.

What unsettled her was a different thing — a worry she couldn’t quite lay to rest.

The nature of it was somewhat puzzling. Lu Rangchen couldn’t quite work out why Feng Yanlai felt this way, given how clearly devoted he was to Zhu Yunque.

But in the end she didn’t say anything of consequence. And with the distance between cities, there wasn’t much she could do but let things go their own way.

The call ended.

While Zhu Yunque was asleep, Lu Rangchen slipped out for a cigarette.

Not wanting the smoke to reach her, he went to the kitchen side of the apartment.

When he was done, he went to the bathroom to wash Zhu Yunque’s undergarment.

He’d found something rather amusing while washing it.

The girl who looked so coolly detached and effortlessly alluring on the outside — and yet there, at the back of her undergarment, embroidered a small rabbit.

That detail became one of the few pieces of leverage he had over Zhu Yunque.

After Lu Rangchen told her, Zhu Yunque was mortified for a good long while.

Mortified, on one hand, that Lu Rangchen had washed her undergarment.

And on the other, embarrassed that during their first moment of real closeness, she’d been wearing something so casual and artless.

Well and truly a case of digging her own grave.

It took Lu Rangchen several days of coaxing to smooth things over.

When Zhu Yunque was in a genuine sulk, she was nothing like other girls — she couldn’t be won over with the usual tokens, flowers and cake and elaborate gifts. When she truly didn’t want to speak to you, she truly didn’t. Not one word.

She’d keep you on edge. Always half-wondering whether to glance over and check — was she still there? Still within reach? Could you hold onto her without looking away?

Or would you turn around and find she’d slipped off somewhere else entirely?

Lu Rangchen was genuinely stumped, and when gifts of every kind failed to make a dent, he simply started showing up constantly — turning up whenever he had the chance, and on his free days, even sitting with her through her classes.

In truth, Lu Rangchen’s schedule wasn’t particularly open.

After the National Day holiday he had joined the university tennis team, much as he had in high school, and most of his available time went to training.

Zhu Yunque had no intention of getting in the way of that. Once she felt she’d sufficiently “taught him a lesson,” she dropped the act.

Besides — the fact that Lu Rangchen was her boyfriend had already become something everyone at Jingda knew about, an established and undeniable reality.

Which was exactly why Xu Linda always said what she said: that Zhu Yunque looked soft and sweet and gentle, but her mind worked faster than most people’s, and she was remarkably calculating beneath the surface.

Lu Rangchen was not the kind of person who blended into the background at Jingda.

Xu Linda had initially worried that Zhu Yunque wouldn’t be able to hold onto him.

But Zhu Yunque had done it without any apparent effort at all.

She put on a pout and a few days’ worth of feigned cold shoulders, and the man was dutifully walking her to class and back, still muddling through his own training obligations, and somehow also calling her at meal times to order delivery for her and asking whether she had eaten on time.

Before long, everyone knew — the wealthy, impeccably handsome young man from Guomao had been thoroughly claimed by the girl from the English department, Zhu Yunque. Not even the most devoted dog could be as devoted as he was.

Lu Rangchen heard this and laughed, genuinely exasperated.

But there wasn’t much he could do.

There were moments when he found he even enjoyed it.

He enjoyed sitting with Zhu Yunque in class, her right hand taking notes while her left stayed tucked in his.

He enjoyed eating with Zhu Yunque — her appetite was small, but she always wanted to try a little of everything, so Lu Rangchen let her take whatever she wanted, and when she couldn’t finish, he finished it for her.

He enjoyed their late-night drives together, sitting close in the car with hands interlaced.

And he enjoyed every weekend, when Zhu Yunque would come stay at his place for two days. They’d always start with a film, and then, without quite knowing how it happened, they would end up in each other’s arms, kissing, and then sinking slowly, helplessly deeper into one another.

He bought Zhu Yunque many sets of new undergarments — all in muted, understated styles. The small rabbit was never worn again.

Later, as his training schedule intensified, she would come after class every day and sit quietly on the long bench beside the courts, earphones in, working through her listening exercises, occasionally glancing up to catch a glimpse of him.

Because she was so pretty, she’d attract a look or two from the other team members from time to time.

Which would promptly earn those team members a sharp glare from Lu Rangchen.

Before long, whenever they saw Zhu Yunque, they’d greet her as their captain’s girlfriend — and wouldn’t dare to look her way properly.

Zhu Yunque’s disposition was entirely capable of holding its own in any setting. When they called her that, she never blushed or deflected — she simply smiled with easy composure and accepted it.

In short — those two months, for both of them, made up an extraordinarily beautiful stretch of time.

The days flew by as if in the blink of an eye, and in what felt like no time at all, Zhu Yunque’s birthday arrived.

The 30th of December.

That day, a heavy snow fell over the capital.

Though the cold there was a different kind from Nancheng’s.

Zhu Yunque remembered it clearly. She woke up that morning to a stream of warm messages from people wishing her happy birthday. Xu Linda had already sent a gift — it would arrive today.

After replying to everyone, she waited and waited — and nothing came from Lu Rangchen.

And not from Feng Yanlai, either.

In those two months, Feng Yanlai had mostly left her be. But on a day as important as her birthday, she would always send a red envelope on time.

For reasons Zhu Yunque couldn’t explain, the two most important people in her life had both gone quiet.

Time ticked toward the start of class.

Still nothing from either of them.

She couldn’t quite say why — it was supposed to be a happy day, the sky was an especially heavy grey, and on the way to her lecture, she dropped her phone and cracked the screen.

Completely shattered. The touchscreen was unusable, and calls wouldn’t go through.

She had no choice but to borrow Liang Tian’s backup phone. After class, back at the dormitory, she tried to reach Lu Rangchen.

She called for a long time. No one answered.

And yet just last night, Lu Rangchen had told her he’d take her to pick out a cake at lunchtime, and throw her a birthday party that evening.

Both dormitories together, plus some friends from the team.

He’d even already settled on a venue.

Yet now — Zhu Yunque couldn’t reach him.

Lu Rangchen was not someone who broke his word.

Zhu Yunque couldn’t explain the anxious knot tightening in her chest.

And then, just at that moment, an unfamiliar number rang through.

Zhu Yunque frowned and, on instinct, picked up. She was about to speak — when a young woman’s voice came through, clearly unsettled, the kind of voice that carries the aftershock of something frightening.

The woman said, hurriedly, “Is this Zhu Yunque? I’m Xiao Chen, the shop assistant at your mother’s clothing store.”

The voice was trembling at the edges, barely composed, as she said, “Can you come back right now? Your mother’s been hurt — she’s at the hospital getting treated.”