Looking back on it later, a great many things that happened that year had, in fact, left traces that could be followed.

In the summer after Zhu Yunque’s college entrance exams, Feng Yanlai’s business had grown steadily larger. She had secured a storefront near one of the universities at a very low rent, the monthly allowance she sent Zhu Yunque was higher than expected, and she had replaced her car with an expensive second-hand one.

There was also the man’s tie left on the sofa, the pair of men’s slippers she occasionally noticed in the shoe cabinet, Feng Yanlai’s increasingly distant relationship with Cheng Liru, and that peculiar reaction when she found out Zhu Yunque and Lu Rangchen were together.

Zhu Yunque still remembered her saying, “It’s not that your mother wants to meddle in your love life — I just worry you’ll get hurt.”

At the time, Zhu Yunque hadn’t understood why being in a relationship — just an ordinary relationship — had made Feng Yanlai so certain she would get hurt.

Until she answered that phone call.

Xiao Chen had been reluctant to say too much at first, speaking haltingly around the subject, but Zhu Yunque kept pressing until she had no choice but to open up.

She said the clothing store had been wrecked — the flagship location, the high-end one in the city center.

At the time, Feng Yanlai and Lu Dingzhong had been in the back rest area talking, when it happened that Cheng Liru arrived with a few close friends to shop for clothes. Seeing that Feng Yanlai wasn’t out front, Cheng Liru asked Xiao Chen where she was, saying she’d brought afternoon tea for her.

Xiao Chen wasn’t entirely sure what their relationship was, but from the way Cheng Liru spoke, she seemed to assume the two women were friends.

And since Cheng Liru’s group of friends had taken a genuine interest in the store’s clothing, Xiao Chen — thinking of the sales figures — hadn’t given it much more thought, and pointed Cheng Liru upstairs to the rest area.

Cheng Liru smiled, thanked her, and went up to see her.

What came next was an incident.

No one knew exactly what Cheng Liru saw or heard up there. By the time Xiao Chen registered what was happening, shouting had already broken out overhead.

Cheng Liru was gasping with fury, barely holding herself together, and cried out several times that they had no right to do this to her. The friends she’d brought downstairs heard it, changed expressions at once, and rushed up to see what was happening.

They walked straight into the sight of Lu Dingzhong, standing between two women in his well-pressed suit.

One look, one thought back to what Cheng Liru had just cried out — and even the least perceptive person in the room would have understood.

The group promptly turned the situation into a full-scale confrontation.

Those women were all women of wealth and standing, the kind who had spent their younger years fighting their own battles against affairs and second women. Now, seeing their friend wronged, with the offending parties right in front of them, there was absolutely no question of sitting back.

They were nothing like Cheng Liru in terms of restraint. Without another word, they went straight for Feng Yanlai.

Feng Yanlai was the one in the wrong here. She had no position to speak.

Lu Dingzhong, perhaps out of some instinct to protect his own face, moved to shield Feng Yanlai, and also tried to pull Cheng Liru aside — suggesting they deal with it at home — but the more he acted this way, the further it enraged Cheng Liru and her friends.

Cheng Liru, pushed past the point of caring about the composure she’d worked so hard to maintain, let the image go entirely. Life had already come to this — dignity was pointless now. What had been a confrontation between three people became a brutal, ungainly free-for-all.

A crowd of women descended on Feng Yanlai and Lu Dingzhong and wouldn’t let go. Xiao Chen tried to step in to help, and was shoved straight back.

The small two-story shop devolved into chaos. Feng Yanlai was shoved, her hair yanked, dragged out like an animal to the ground floor, the sounds of screaming unceasing.

Lu Dingzhong was afraid they’d do real damage, so he tried to intervene a few times. The women, incensed, stopped sparing him too. One of them, a rather solidly built woman, grabbed his tie and slapped him across the face, shouting at him — you shameless kept man, and you still dare to protect the mistress!

Lu Dingzhong, however cold and composed, had a breaking point. The one thing he had always refused to tolerate, the thing he bristled at most, was being called a “kept man.” The moment those words landed, he stopped pretending and pushed back, shaking himself free and pulling Cheng Liru toward the exit.

The scene grew increasingly savage.

Cheng Liru, pushed to her absolute limit by Lu Dingzhong, had a cardiac episode and fainted.

The moment Cheng Liru collapsed, the women stopped. They lifted her into a car and drove to the hospital, and Lu Dingzhong, now sobered, remembered his wife and went with her.

People with money were like this — wherever they went, they took up all the space and feared nothing.

They walked out without concern for the crowd gathered at the entrance, or the people filming on their phones, drove straight to the expensive private hospital nearby, and left behind a ransacked store and Feng Yanlai — slumped against the stair railing, hands over her face, crying.

Feng Yanlai’s blouse was torn, the corner of her mouth was bruised and swollen, her forehead was bleeding, and her hair was in disarray.

She cried until her voice gave out entirely.

As though she had spent every last scrap of dignity she had ever possessed.

—

Zhu Yunque arrived in Nancheng at four o’clock in the afternoon.

By then, Feng Yanlai had had her injuries treated and gone home, with Xiao Chen seeing her back.

Zhu Yunque had stayed in touch with Xiao Chen throughout, and once she knew the situation, she went straight home by taxi.

She had left in a rush — barely any luggage, just the one bag — and was using Liang Tian’s backup phone. Feng Yanlai’s phone had also been broken in the incident.

Feng Yanlai had been about to go out and buy a new one.

She had just finished getting ready and was about to head out the door when she found Zhu Yunque standing there.

December in Nancheng had a damp, penetrating chill.

She had traveled from the capital in a thin wool coat, her long hair loose around her shoulders, her face pale and fine-boned — a certain delicate, cold clarity about her, as though she had walked through the snow to get there.

The feeling the two of them carried — mother and daughter — could be strikingly similar at times like this.

That air of composure, as though their blood ran cold, as though nothing in the world could truly bring them down.

It was difficult to make sense of. Impossible to understand how, even now, even after all this, Feng Yanlai could still look so composed — and how, in the instant she saw her daughter walk through the door, she had the presence of mind to pull her other arm through her coat sleeve.

Feng Yanlai said, “Xiao Chen told me your phone broke too. That works out — let’s go together and get new ones.”

She reached for the keys on the table. Zhu Yunque let the security door swing shut behind her and stepped inside.

She had no intention of going out.

She blocked the doorway.

The two of them looked at each other for a moment. Zhu Yunque’s expression was unreadable. “Why,” she asked quietly.

Her voice was soft. But it was like a thin, sharp blade — one careless pass, and it cut straight through everything Feng Yanlai had been working to hold in place.

Feng Yanlai swallowed quietly, her mouth tugging at an expression that was too painful to be a real smile. “And here I thought you came back because you were worried about me.”

Zhu Yunque’s fist closed silently at her side, fingernails pressing into her palm — a dull, grinding ache.

She still asked. Stubbornly. Why.

Why, when Cheng Liru had been so good to her, would she do something like this and hurt her.

Why, when there were so many other people she could have chosen, did she have to destroy someone else’s family.

Was she that greedy for status and comfort?

Did she have such an appetite for taking things that belonged to other people?

Spoken by anyone else, those words would not have cut so deeply. But coming from Zhu Yunque’s mouth, they stripped Feng Yanlai down to bare skin.

Every carefully maintained dignity, every lie she had told herself to get through the days — all of it became fragile and unable to withstand the slightest pressure.

Feng Yanlai finally broke.

The tears she had barely dried welled up again in an instant. But the emotion beneath them was fury, raw and out of control.

She said, “You want to know why? What other reason could there be? For love? Please. I did it for a better life for you and me! Yes, I wanted things I didn’t have — so what? Is that wrong? Ask every woman in the world if she’s never wanted more!”

“Do you think the money I used to raise you was easy to earn?”

“Do you think it’s so simple for a woman on her own to build something from nothing?”

“Am I invincible? Do I not need someone to lean on?”

“What right do you have to judge me? You, of all people, have no right!”

Feng Yanlai sobbed, her voice breaking apart, “Every piece of clothing on your back, every cent you’ve ever spent, was earned by your shameless mother with a man’s help! What right do you have!”

“I’m the one who was beaten! I’m the one who was humiliated in front of everyone!”

“You’re the one who gets to stand here untouched!”

“They all did this to me — why do you have to do the same? Why do you have to?!”

Feng Yanlai collapsed against the table leg, cover her face and crying, like a helpless child, tears streaming freely down her face as she said over and over, “I was wrong, I know, is it not enough that I was wrong? I shouldn’t have come back. I shouldn’t have.”

And even as she said it, she hit herself hard across her already injured cheek.

Four, five sharp slaps, setting her face alight with burning pain.

Zhu Yunque bit her lip until it was nearly bleeding, and finally stepped forward to stop her.

Red-eyed, she hauled Feng Yanlai up from the floor with both hands. Feng Yanlai crumpled against her and sobbed — gasping for breath between sobs, sniffling, smearing tears and mucus across her coat, fragile as someone whose whole world had come apart.

The crying was unbearable to hear — heartrending and suffocating all at once.

She cried in halting, broken sentences: I was wrong, I really was, I know I was.

—

That afternoon, afraid that Feng Yanlai might do something drastic, Zhu Yunque gave her a sedative tablet.

Once Feng Yanlai was asleep, she went out.

By then it was dark outside, and snow had begun to fall.

But Nancheng’s snow was different from the capital’s — the flakes were small, so soft they dissolved the moment they touched the ground.

Zhu Yunque went out in a kind of numb haze, boarded the subway in that same haze, and made her way to the nearest shopping center to buy a phone.

There happened to be a brand running a sale.

She picked out two without much deliberation.

When the SIM card was transferred over and working again, Xiao Chen called.

It was past closing time, and the call reached her.

Xiao Chen had been badly shaken by the day’s events, and with no way to talk to Feng Yanlai about it, she called Zhu Yunque instead to say she wanted to quit.

Retail work was retail work regardless of where you did it — there was no real reason to stay somewhere this stressful. Getting on the wrong side of ordinary people was bad enough. Getting on the wrong side of people with money and influence was simply inviting trouble for no reason.

Zhu Yunque didn’t need the explanation — she understood without hesitation and agreed without hesitation.

Xiao Chen was relieved. She was a considerate person, and before getting off the phone she told Zhu Yunque that she’d straightened up everything at the store that needed to be handled, but some of the fixtures — display cases, ornamental items that had been smashed — still needed to be dealt with. She asked Zhu Yunque to come and take a look when she had a chance.

Zhu Yunque agreed. She said she’d head over now.

Just before hanging up, she told Xiao Chen calmly that her wages would be transferred to her account on time.

Xiao Chen couldn’t help herself and asked how Feng Yanlai was doing.

Zhu Yunque stood at the roadside, hailing a taxi.

Her voice was flat and quiet as she said, “She’s alright. She’s asleep.”

Xiao Chen asked, “You’re really not going to report it? Feng Yanlai was beaten pretty badly.”

The fingers at her side tightened almost imperceptibly. Zhu Yunque pressed her lips together. “No. It’s not worth the trouble.”

There was something hollow in the way she said it.

Because she knew that reporting it wouldn’t accomplish much. The one who would end up humiliated was still Feng Yanlai.

Besides — in truth, Feng Yanlai had brought this on herself.

The world seemed vague and careless, but in reality it tallied everything precisely. No one got to cheat the ledger.

She arrived at the store to find it in disarray.

The damage was real.

At least the display window glass was intact — otherwise she wouldn’t even have been able to secure the shop for the night.

Xiao Chen had been as thorough as her word. The rubbish had been swept, the clutter sorted. Zhu Yunque only needed to assess what else would need to be done.

But after she watched the security footage, she decided — leave it.

There was nothing that needed to be done.

Truly nothing.

The one thing she was reluctant to let go of was the framed photograph on the counter — a photo of the two of them.

It had been taken after Zhu Yunque finished high school, on the day Feng Yanlai drove her to Jingda to start university. They’d taken it together at the campus gates.

Feng Yanlai had been so proud that day, beaming with her arms around her daughter.

Afterward she’d had the photo printed and framed, and placed it in her most successful store. She used to say that whenever she looked at Zhu Yunque, no matter how exhausted she was, she always found the will to keep earning.

But the photograph had been stepped on.

The glass had been shattered and scored by the impact, and the image of the two of them was scratched and blurred beneath it.

Zhu Yunque stared down at the photograph, motionless, and a slow, belated sense of everything falling apart crept through her.

She thought — how did things end up like this, so suddenly.

It had all been fine just yesterday.

She’d called Feng Yanlai last night. Feng Yanlai had said she’d send her a red envelope, and told her to go out and enjoy her birthday.

And Lu Rangchen had said he’d gotten the villa outside the Third Ring Road ready — they could throw the party there that night.

Even Liang Tian had said she was envious. She’d said Zhu Yunque was so lucky.

And then one morning, everything had changed.

Was this some kind of curse?

It seemed like every time her birthday came around, every time she wanted Lu Rangchen to be part of it, something went wrong.

Zhu Yunque didn’t even know what Lu Rangchen was doing, or where he was. It felt as though she had lost even the courage to reach out to him.

She couldn’t help wondering — did he resent her?

Was he angry with her right now? Was that why he hadn’t reached out all this time?

Was he going to stop looking for her from now on?

Question after question flickered through her mind, a jumble like a badly put-together presentation.

And as she sat there thinking, the edge of the picture frame caught her finger — a small cut, but it stung with a sharp, thin thread of pain, and blood welled up in a slow bloom of red.

It was that pain that pulled her back.

The new phone on the coffee table was ringing. She had no idea who it was.

Zhu Yunque suddenly felt exhausted. A dull ache had settled at her temples. She had no desire to answer — she almost pushed the coffee table drawer open to look for a bandage.

And then the door of the shop was pushed open.

Softly, barely a sound, as if someone was trying not to disturb the quiet inside. Even the footsteps were contained.

Zhu Yunque heard it and, without thinking, said, “I’m sorry, we’re not open today.” Before the last word had faded, she looked up — and found Lu Rangchen standing there, hands in his pockets, still in the same deliberate stance.

Still that same lean, clear-featured face, with something deeper and more subdued than usual about him now.

By any comparison —

Lu Rangchen looked far more tired than her.

And yet even so, he lowered his gaze and looked at her with the same unhurried patience as always — the same easy, indulgent expression he always wore when he looked at her.

Then he let out a quiet, faint laugh, his voice low and offhand, as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened at all, as he said, “What are you staring at?”

Lu Rangchen raised an eyebrow slightly, his voice carrying a slight hoarseness. “Don’t recognise your own boyfriend?”

The words settled. Two seconds of silence.

Zhu Yunque pressed her fingers over the sting of the cut, and her eyes suddenly stung with tears.

—

Lu Rangchen had come from the hospital.

The incident involving Cheng Liru had caused considerable commotion, and even after her condition had stabilized, her emotional state was still far from recovered.

Lu Dingzhong had been badly hit.

Once he confirmed that Cheng Liru was not in danger, he didn’t return to the hospital to see her — he couldn’t face the humiliation.

The ones who stayed at Cheng Liru’s side were only Lu Rangchen and Lin Zhi, who had come from the capital to be there.

They stayed until Cheng Liru fell asleep, then stepped outside to talk.

One of the women who had helped during the confrontation turned out to be a distant relative of Lin Zhi’s. That relative had given Lin Zhi the full account, and Lin Zhi had been so furious her eyes had gone red. She declared that she was going to go back there and cause another scene.

It was Lu Rangchen who stopped her, brows drawn together, something sharp and dangerous in his voice as he told her flatly to stop making a mess of things.

When Lu Rangchen wasn’t in a temper, Lin Zhi always treated him as the younger one between them.

But she couldn’t deny it — the moment he got angry, the force of his presence could silence anyone.

Lin Zhi held her tongue, but her frustration built until she couldn’t contain it, and she turned on him. “Don’t tell me you’re actually going to let her off the hook — for that Zhu Yunque’s sake.”

Lin Zhi was the kind of person who repaid every grievance in full.

After what had happened, she had no way of accepting Zhu Yunque.

As it happened, she’d read the situation correctly.

Lu Rangchen had been intending to shield Zhu Yunque from the start.

They were standing outside the ward. Lu Rangchen took a hard drag on his cigarette, then ground it out and said, “Can you not make my life more difficult? What does any of this have to do with her?”

“Of course it has something to do with her!” Lin Zhi raised her voice. “Do you think your mother is going to accept you two together after this? If I were you, I’d break up with her right now — spare your mother the extra grief later. What awful luck!”

She was formidable in an argument, sharp-tongued and merciless.

Most of the time, Lu Rangchen simply couldn’t be bothered engaging with her.

But this time, Lu Rangchen actually laughed — a laugh that was entirely contemptuous — and said, “Two people made the mistake, and you want to pin it on one of them. Without Lu Dingzhong’s wandering eye, was Feng Yanlai supposed to force him into anything?”

The last line went up a fraction, drawing a glance from a passing nurse.

Lin Zhi’s retort died before it left her mouth.

Because it was true — an affair did take two. Collective punishment was a different matter.

Lin Zhi, sobered by his words, had nothing left to say.

By the time she opened her mouth again, Lu Rangchen had already started walking.

Lin Zhi stamped her foot. “Hey — where are you going? You’re not staying with your mother?”

Lu Rangchen didn’t answer. His lean silhouette slipped away and he was gone, car already moving.

By then, it had begun to snow in Nancheng.

A genuinely beautiful night — but the traffic snarled because of it, fraying every nerve.

Lu Rangchen’s craving for a cigarette came on badly. While the traffic held him still, he smoked two, coughing through them until that knotted pressure began to ease.

Throughout it all, his thoughts kept returning to Zhu Yunque.

He had actually tried calling her in the morning, but the call hadn’t gone through.

Then came the flight, then finding Cheng Liru, then hours of being occupied. By the time he thought to call again, it was already this late — and through all of it, Zhu Yunque had never reached out to him.

As if she had known he was busy. As if she understood that it wasn’t the right time.

The feeling that left him was difficult to sit with.

Lu Rangchen couldn’t quite name it. If he had to — he’d call it fear.

But what exactly he was afraid of, he couldn’t say.

He didn’t fully understand Zhu Yunque.

He didn’t know what she would be thinking, how she might feel, after learning that Feng Yanlai had been so badly hurt. Whether she might harbor some resentment toward him, or feel something else entirely.

Then again, he thought about it and almost laughed at himself.

What did any of this have to do with the two of them? Neither of them had done anything wrong.

With that thought, Lu Rangchen found he wanted to see her more urgently.

Last night had still been fine.

The two of them had dinner together, and he’d walked her back to her dormitory, and they’d stood under the building and held each other and kissed, and the birthday gift he’d prepared for her was still on him now.

And yet the two of them had somehow ended up completely cut off from each other.

Thinking of that, Lu Rangchen tried to call her again.

Predictably — still unable to connect.

He put his phone aside and drove with no particular destination in mind, and in what felt like some turn of fate, found himself in front of the store where everything had taken place.

He’d heard Cheng Liru mention that store long before this.

Cheng Liru had praised it often — how Feng Yanlai was beautiful and smart and had impeccable taste, how everything she curated for men and women alike was lovely. She had even said she planned to take Lu Rangchen there at some point.

And now the person she had described in such glowing terms had become the one who hurt her most.

The more Lu Rangchen thought about it, the more ironic it seemed. He parked outside the store, half-curious to see what kind of place had produced someone like that.

But the moment he stepped out of the car, he looked through the glass of the display window — and saw Zhu Yunque inside.

A small, slight figure, her profile clean and delicate, sitting there in a kind of daze, staring at nothing in particular.

The light wasn’t very good. It gave the whole scene a quiet bleakness.

Lu Rangchen stood outside the window and looked at her. His throat moved, and something ached, very gently, in his chest.

That image — that moment — stayed vivid enough that years later, Lu Rangchen would still find it returning to him in the small hours of the night.

A young woman with her lashes cast down, tears falling without a sound, one drop, then two, each one clear and perfect.

Lu Rangchen always came back to the same thought.

Maybe it was that second.

That exact second, when the great turning hand of fate decided that the two of them would part ways.