Come to think of it, the first time Deng Jiao had ever heard about Lu Rangchen’s ex — the one who had hurt him badly — was from one of his good friends.

About a year ago, more or less.

Li Tie and Zhou Jin had just started dating, and they came together to attend a gathering at Lu Rangchen’s club.

That period had been a good one — a few of Lu Rangchen’s top-performing athletes had won several consecutive competitions, bringing in solid earnings and earning the club a real reputation in the process. Everyone was in high spirits, so they headed out for a barbecue to celebrate. That was the night Deng Zhe brought Deng Jiao along.

She was an outgoing kid — open and easy with everyone — and quickly became the center of the evening.

She could jump into almost any conversation and hold her own.

At some point, the topic drifted to Lu Rangchen’s love life. Someone mentioned that a woman had been pursuing him quite aggressively lately — she’d bought an annual club membership just for the chance to see him regularly.

When someone else was the subject, Deng Jiao wouldn’t have paid much attention.

But when it came to Lu Rangchen, she practically grew extra ears to take it all in.

He was simply too striking to ignore.

One hundred and eighty-eight centimeters, broad shoulders, long legs, excellent style, and a face that, with a bit of grooming, could slot comfortably into the top tier of any entertainment industry — the first time Deng Jiao ever laid eyes on him, her heart had burst open like a flower, and she’d immediately wanted to claim him as an older brother.

And yet — who would have guessed — that this walking magnet of a man hadn’t been in a single relationship since she’d known him, all the way back to 2018. Year after year, women came and went trying to catch his attention, every type imaginable — and not one of them ever made the cut.

There was even a stretch of time when Deng Jiao had started to wonder about his orientation.

She’d been genuinely worried he might be gay — and even more worried that he and Deng Zhe might be together.

That particular concern, fortunately, didn’t last long. Because no matter how she looked at them, both men radiated a very straightforward kind of masculine energy — and, more to the point, she’d once overheard Deng Zhe mention that a gay man had shamelessly tried to pursue Lu Rangchen and had gotten punched for it.

Deng Zhe had laughed himself sick telling it.

Word got around to the whole club eventually.

Even the security guard at the entrance had an opinion: “Aiyo, this Manager Lu, his standards are too high. Find a decent girl and settle down — wouldn’t that be better?”

Lu Rangchen, of course, was completely impervious to such comments.

He couldn’t even be bothered to listen.

So Deng Jiao never really got a window into his romantic life — until that gathering.

Once grown adults start drinking, they love to let things spill — and without any apparent concern for whether Lu Rangchen wanted them to, they started dragging out bits of his past.

They said that years ago, he’d been in a relationship. A significant one. His first love, actually.

The girl had been intensely pure and quietly aloof — his “moonlight,” the unreachable kind. They’d been drawn to each other in high school, but hadn’t actually gotten together until university.

Lu Rangchen had been in a dark place for a long time over her.

And her? She’d packed up and gone abroad, then started dating some wealthy second-generation guy over there.

Li Tie — who had apparently witnessed the whole thing firsthand — brought it up with a bitterness that hadn’t faded. He was still put out on Lu Rangchen’s behalf. He bit down on a skewer and said with a sardonic edge: “That girl — looked sweet enough. Turned out she had absolutely no romantic sentimentality. She was something else, honestly. Someone at Lu Rangchen’s level — she could pick him up and put him down without even blinking.”

The table went quiet. Everyone exchanged glances, drifting toward Lu Rangchen, who was sitting off to the side, silent.

Lu Rangchen’s fingers held a cigarette. He took a long drag, crushed it out, and said: “You really never do get tired of chewing on my old history, do you.”

Then he gave a flat laugh, pushed to his feet, and said: “I’m going to settle the bill. You all continue.”

That was the kind of energy that most people didn’t push against.

Even Deng Zhe fell quiet.

But Li Tie wasn’t most people. Of everyone there, he was the eldest, and Lu Rangchen had called him “Tie-ge” on his better days.

Li Tie had never forgiven that woman.

He said that before the breakup, he’d tried to talk her around — she’d seemed to agree, seemed willing — and then turned around and did it anyway.

And even after that, Lu Rangchen had still couldn’t let go of her.

He’d held on for half a year before finally getting on a plane to Australia.

The fallout from that decision had been enormous — his relationship with his family had cracked, his relationship with his mother had frozen over entirely.

For months, his bank accounts had been frozen.

Through all of it, Lu Rangchen had held his ground on his own — entering competitions, earning money, sustaining himself.

And what had he gotten in return?

Nothing.

The girl hadn’t even agreed to see him. She’d sent her new boyfriend to meet him instead.

When Lu Rangchen came back from Australia, he went into a kind of quiet collapse that took a long time to crawl out of. Afterward, the easy vitality that had once characterized him simply never came back — as if the experience had worn him down and left someone subtly different behind.

Li Tie’s feelings on the matter were clear. He resented what had happened.

But Deng Jiao — who had been listening, rapt — spoke up at this point, her expression open and earnest: “Couldn’t Rangchen-ge just date someone new? That way he’d forget about the other one quickly, wouldn’t he?”

You had to hand it to younger people for their directness.

It made Zhou Jin, sitting beside Li Tie, burst out laughing. “That’s actually a solid idea,” she said. “Maybe you should tell him that.”

Deng Jiao blinked, confused.

Deng Zhe sighed and put a piece of grilled shrimp on her plate. “Here — eat something, so your mouth is too full to say anything.”

By the time he said that, Lu Rangchen was already walking back with a fresh round of drinks.

A few of the team members read the room.

Someone kicked off a lighter mood, and soon enough the whole table was laughing again.

But Deng Jiao spent the whole rest of the evening turning the story over in her mind.

In the end, she wore Deng Zhe down and managed to extract a little more from him: that Lu Rangchen had only ever been in that one relationship.

Just that one.

And it had used up nearly everything he had to give.

After that night, Deng Jiao’s whole image of Lu Rangchen could be summed up in one phrase: an absolute, pure-hearted romantic who had loved exactly once and spent the rest of his life carrying it.

She’d also never imagined, not for a second, that “the woman who ruined him” — the one Li Tie called a heartbreaker, the one Deng Zhe called Lu Rangchen’s only girlfriend and irreplaceable “moonlight” — would turn out to be their new English teacher.

Deng Jiao looked at Yunque with a kind of reverent, wide-eyed awe.

One of her defining traits was that she simply admired strength in other people.

And the fact that Yunque — someone who had effortlessly held someone like Lu Rangchen in the palm of her hand, when so many others couldn’t even get him to glance their way — had to have something to her. Deng Jiao couldn’t help feeling deeply impressed.

Though that look in her eyes was perhaps a little too obvious.

Even Yunque couldn’t help but feel a flicker of amusement. “What’s that expression about?” she said.

“……”

Deng Jiao swallowed. Inside, she thought: it’s admiration.

But then she caught herself — wait, this was the English teacher who had hauled her in here to get in trouble.

She shrank back immediately.

The girl’s moods moved like weather.

And it was hard to say what hope she’d been nursing in that moment, but Yunque said, voice mild: “How are you sure you haven’t gotten the wrong person?”

Deng Jiao blinked. “Well — you said so yourself.”

“What did I say?”

“You said you dated him.”

“There’s more than one person who’s dated—”

“No,” Deng Jiao cut her off. “It’s only ever been you.”

The certainty in the girl’s eyes wasn’t something you could fake.

Yunque held her gaze for several seconds as the emotions churning inside her gradually steadied.

Deng Jiao ventured cautiously: “Did you think Rangchen-ge had been with someone else?”

“……”

Yunque’s expression shifted, almost imperceptibly. She picked up the insulated cup from the desk.

The lid was loose.

She turned it, unconsciously tightening it, and said: “Let’s talk about what actually matters.”

She looked back at Deng Jiao, and her tone returned to the measured firmness of a teacher’s. “Are you really planning to keep letting Lu Rangchen cover for you, and pretend nothing happened — is that it?”

Deng Jiao’s expression animated again immediately. “No, I’m not doing that, Teacher — I wasn’t trying to get away with anything. My brother asked Rangchen-ge to come in his place.”

Yunque did not look convinced.

Deng Jiao explained: Deng Zhe couldn’t leave the small supermarket to run itself, and so this past year, all the parent meetings and school calls had been handled by Lu Rangchen.

“Rangchen-ge lives really close to here. The development right behind our school — he drives over in under five minutes. My brother doesn’t have anyone else to ask.”

“And he’s honestly more reliable than my brother.”

“My brother’s brain is basically just a calculator for money these days.”

“Don’t worry, though — Rangchen-ge already knows about the bar thing. He gave me a serious talking-to last night.” She glanced at Yunque, visibly sheepish. “I won’t go back. Ever.”

The girl’s voice had a tightness to it.

She did seem more cooperative than she’d been the night before.

But the volume of information buried in those words was considerable. It took Yunque a moment to absorb it all before she realized — Lu Rangchen lived in the development right behind Yuhua Middle School.

……So the two of them had actually been living that close to each other.

In the brief pause that followed, Yunque asked: “Your brother — he’s running a supermarket now?”

Deng Jiao nodded. “After the family went under, he set up shop inside Rangchen-ge’s club. He’s there all the time. Barely ever comes out.”

Yunque was quiet.

There was something unexpectedly poignant about that.

Just a few years, and a man who’d had everything — comfort, ease, a future that seemed to extend without limit — had been folded back into the ordinary world, into the work of small daily survival.

Perhaps it was the sense of connection through Deng Zhe.

Whatever it was, Yunque found herself looking at Deng Jiao with more gentleness.

In the end, she couldn’t bring herself to say anything severe. She only told the girl to study hard and not give Deng Zhe any more reason to worry.

Deng Jiao was sensible enough to know how to receive that.

She said earnestly that she wouldn’t, and promised she was going to take her studies seriously from now on.

Yunque gave her a small, reassuring smile, then reached into her drawer and took out a bar of imported chocolate — her slender fingers extending it toward the girl. “Don’t eat it in class,” she said.

In that instant, Deng Jiao’s eyes went hot.

All at once, she understood why so many students in the class adored this teacher.

She also understood why Lu Rangchen had never stopped thinking of her.

Someone who looked so cool from the outside — and was so warm at the core. That kind of contrast was hard not to be captivated by.

Deng Jiao tucked the chocolate into her pocket, sniffed once, and said: “Thank you, Teacher.”

She was about to leave — but stopped mid-turn.

She looked at Yunque, her voice dropped so low only the two of them could hear, filled with a kind of knowing that asked for no confirmation: “Would you and him get back together?”

Yunque’s hand stilled around the ballpoint pen. Her heartbeat stumbled, missing one beat, somewhere in the fog of that question.

A few seconds of silence.

Yunque heard her own voice, a little strained, something quietly restrained in it: “We’ll see how things go.”

Honestly, a question like this — by her old habits — would have gotten a “not sure,” a “don’t know,” or a straightforward redirect.

She had never liked letting people see inside her.

But in that moment, for reasons she couldn’t quite name — maybe instinct, maybe something else entirely — she answered.

She thought: Deng Jiao might pass this along to Lu Rangchen. Or she might not.

She had no idea how Lu Rangchen would react, or what he would make of it.

Maybe he no longer cared at all. Maybe he would laugh it off.

But whatever came of it — she had said it, and that was that.

She didn’t regret it.

The rain fell through that day in a soft, persistent murmur, all the way through to eight or nine in the evening.

By that hour, Nancheng’s night had only just begun to come alive.

Lu Rangchen had just wrapped up business at the club when a call pulled him over to Zhou Jin’s side.

Li Tie had called — he was working late and couldn’t go with Zhou Jin to look at wedding dresses, so he’d asked Lu Rangchen to accompany her instead. Lu Rangchen had good taste, and he was living on his own at the moment. No reason to be sitting alone at home.

Lu Rangchen thought it was ridiculous, but said something vaguely insulting and showed up anyway.

So it was, while Zhou Jin was trying on dress after dress, that Lu Rangchen received a message from Deng Jiao.

Deng Jiao only got her phone back in the evenings after school. True to form, she typed everything at once and sent it directly, without any consideration for whether Lu Rangchen was in the mood to read it.

The messages landed in a rapid sequence, lighting up his screen one after another.

At the time, Zhou Jin was turning in circles in front of him, asking whether this one looked good.

Lu Rangchen gave it a perfunctory glance, murmured something noncommittal, snapped a photo to send to Li Tie — and then his eyes landed on Deng Jiao’s barrage of messages.

The girl always launched at him like a little machine gun whenever she had something to say.

But for some reason, that day, he found himself with the patience to actually look — and so he read to the very last lines.

Deng Jiao: 【I asked her if she’d get back together with you, and she said — we’ll see how things go!!! 】

Deng Jiao: 【What do you think that means!!!!!!!】

Deng Jiao: 【Is she trying to get your attention!!!!!!】

Three messages. Exclamation marks like knives.

They cut through something in his chest. His brow drew together without his permission.

He couldn’t have said exactly why.

But a restless, tangled feeling had been dogging him since morning — something he couldn’t shake loose — and now it seemed to have sharpened.

The half-smoked cigarette in his hand was pressed hard into the ashtray — even the heat of the ember at the tip burned at his fingertips, and he didn’t register it at all. He turned the phone over and set it face-down.

Zhou Jin, across from him, noticed his expression and stopped. “What’s wrong?”

Lu Rangchen didn’t answer. He picked a piece of candy from the table, unwrapped it, tucked it into his mouth, and said there was nothing. Then he stood and stepped outside for some air.

That angular, clean-cut face of his — even when something was bothering him, it showed differently than on other people. And in these past few years, the quieter, heavier quality he’d developed was more difficult to be around than his younger self had ever been.

Zhou Jin chose not to poke at him.

After a while, not finding anything she liked, she changed back into her regular clothes and went to find him outside.

By then, Li Tie had finished work.

He suggested they all go out for a meal together.

But Lu Rangchen said no — he wasn’t in the mood for it. He said he wanted to go back to the club and check on things.

Li Tie looked him over, and something about his expression reminded him of the man Lu Rangchen had been during certain stretches of years past. He said, with a laugh: “What’s up with you — acting like your ex just came back looking for you.”

A throwaway remark, said just to tease.

But Lu Rangchen didn’t make a sound.

And his expression grew several degrees heavier.

Li Tie was at the wheel. In the passenger seat, Zhou Jin turned to look at him and gave Li Tie a small, telling glance.

Li Tie cleared his throat and tried again: “What’s actually going on?”

That was a genuine question.

Lu Rangchen just sat there, loose and heavy, looking out the window at the thick dark of the night, mind somewhere far away, expression blank and cool.

After a long silence, he said: “Help me look after the cat for a few days. I’m going back to the capital to spend a little time with my mother.”

Lu Rangchen was nothing if not impulsive. Once he said it, he actually went that same night.

Didn’t even pack anything. Just got in the car alone and drove to the airport.

It was just past midnight by the time he landed in the capital. He didn’t say a word to anyone — went straight in, showered, and went to sleep.

The next morning, when Cheng Liru saw him, she was genuinely pleased. She fussed over him, asked how he was doing, asked what had made him come back so suddenly.

Lu Rangchen couldn’t quite explain it himself.

He sat on the sofa, giving something that barely passed for a smile, and said there was nothing — he just felt like coming back.

To look at where his roots were. To see where his heart was.

To figure out whether certain people, certain things, were still worth looking back on.

As it turned out, those few days in the capital were good ones — easy, full, with a pleasant kind of vitality to them.

After the divorce from Lu Dingzhong, Cheng Liru had, within a few years, met a suitable businessman. They were well-matched in temperament and had fallen into a quiet sort of love together. Though they hadn’t officially married, they lived together and got along better than most couples did.

The businessman was good to Lu Rangchen as well — knowing he had come back, the three of them gathered at home for several meals together.

Seeing Cheng Liru content and thriving put Lu Rangchen’s mind at ease. He went with her to a temple a day later — Cheng Liru had insisted on praying there on his behalf, asking for help in matters of the heart.

She said: “You’re already this old, and you can’t stay single forever. Everyone in the family is worried. I’m not going to push you into matchmaking meetings — but don’t stop me from making every effort I can.”

Lu Rangchen found her impossible to argue with. He thought for a moment and gave in, smiling. “Fine. Today you can buy the whole temple, and I won’t say a word.”

Cheng Liru gave him an exasperated look, but brought him along to pay respects at several shrines, visit the deity associated with love and marriage, and deposit a considerable sum into the merit box — only then was she satisfied.

Lu Rangchen walked quietly in her wake the whole time, drawing more than a few glances from young women they passed.

But for some reason, only one face kept rising in his mind.

Sunlight falling across her. The morning breeze lifting her hair. Skin pale and smooth as fresh milk, lashes long and curled, every angle of her face refined and beautiful, impossibly lovely from wherever you looked.

She was twenty-eight now.

Yet that clean, almost untouched quality about her was exactly the same as it had always been — unchanged.

He even found himself wondering: how many other men must there be, like him — who had been wounded by her and, despite it all, had gladly spent years of their lives held in place by her?

Lu Rangchen glanced down, the corner of his mouth pulling without much force, and suddenly felt that none of it was particularly amusing.

It didn’t matter how far you went, or where you hid.

She occupied territory that had always been his heart.