After the summer solstice, rain came and washed through the city — and the days that followed in Nancheng were unreasonably, almost offensively beautiful.

Come the weekend, Yunque called Xu Linda and asked her to come along while she looked at apartments.

Before this, Xu Linda had already suggested Yunque move in with her — the school dormitory wasn’t comfortable, she’d said, why not just come stay together.

These years had done nothing to diminish Xu Linda’s family’s prosperity.

Her parents doted on her endlessly. When she finished university and showed no inclination to become a nine-to-five office worker, they simply bought her a large open-plan apartment in the heart of the city, so she could live as she liked and pursue her career as a beauty content creator.

Xu Linda had made something of it.

She hadn’t been the most dedicated student, but she was extraordinarily gifted at building a following online. Without putting in too long of a grind, she’d accumulated nearly eighty thousand followers. Between brand deals and merchandise, she earned enough each month to cover her lifestyle comfortably.

Of course, living alone for a long stretch of time grows lonely.

That was why she’d been persistently nudging Yunque to come over.

Yunque had been characteristically vague about it — saying things like “we’ll see” and deflecting further questions until Xu Linda stopped pressing. Then, out of nowhere, the girl announced she wanted to rent a place.

With a very specific location in mind, too: the development just behind Yuhua Private School — the Xinyue Xiangfu complex.

It hadn’t been open for more than two years. Even the smallest unit — a one-bedroom — ran two thousand yuan a month in rent. For a teacher’s salary, that wasn’t exactly pocket change. There were other options that were just as close to the school, but Yunque had fixed her attention on that one, like she’d made up her mind and nothing would budge her.

That whole morning, they visited several units with the agent. One had bad natural lighting. Another had furniture she didn’t like. Another was too expensive.

But truthfully, none of those things were what made Yunque hesitate.

She’d saved a reasonable amount over the years. The rent wasn’t what was holding her back. She just wanted to test something — a feeling, a chance — whether there was any possibility of a certain kind of coincidence.

But when she thought it through, she knew it was impractical.

A development that size, with thousands of units, thousands of residents — the odds of running into a specific person were nearly impossible.

And yet, somehow, she couldn’t stop herself.

Even knowing the odds were slim, she still clung to some faint, stubborn hope, dragging Xu Linda along from morning through four in the afternoon, until they’d seen nearly everything available — and still hadn’t committed to any of them.

It didn’t feel like apartment-hunting at all.

More like waiting for something.

To make it up to Xu Linda, Yunque offered to treat her to dinner.

Xu Linda was so hungry by that point that she barely had the energy to be choosy. She pointed at the nearest place with a decent-looking interior — a fast-casual restaurant just steps away — and the two of them went in.

When the food had arrived and they’d started eating, Yunque said, unhurriedly: “I ran into Lu Rangchen again a few days ago.”

Xu Linda was mid-bite of wonton. She blinked. “When?”

“The morning after we ran into him by chance — Old Liu had called Deng Jiao’s family in, and he came.” Yunque kept her eyes down, picking the cilantro out of her bowl. “It turned out Deng Jiao’s brother is Deng Zhe.”

Those two words hit Xu Linda like a fish bone caught in her throat.

She sat there for a second, then said: “Are you sure?”

Then she actually thought about it — Deng Zhe had mentioned, back when they were young, that his mother had given him a baby sister. A little terror, apparently. Very difficult to manage.

Yunque nodded. “Certain.”

She added: “Word is that after his family went under, he opened a small shop inside Lu Rangchen’s club.”

Her tone was measured, but a faint note of something regretful came through anyway.

After all, she’d known him for a long time. It would be strange to discuss him with complete indifference.

To her surprise, Xu Linda took it in stride far better than Yunque expected.

Hearing that someone she had once yearned after — in the way you yearn for things at a certain age — had faded into the ordinary, Xu Linda felt no pleasure in it. Only a kind of quiet wistfulness.

She smiled slightly and said: “He used to talk about how much money the family had — always said there was more than they could ever spend. And now look.”

Deng Zhe had spent a lot on Xu Linda, back in those days.

He’d genuinely treated her like a good friend, like a little sister.

Later, Xu Linda had come to understand exactly what that meant. She’d quietly stopped all contact after that.

You can’t stay friends with someone when the feelings were never equal to begin with.

But whatever the case, the warmth of that younger time still had weight.

Xu Linda asked Yunque whether Deng Zhe seemed to be struggling badly — whether there was anything he needed. She said she could quietly do something to help, if so.

Yunque shook her head and said she didn’t know enough, but that she’d ask when the chance came.

Xu Linda gave a generous, easy nod, then remembered she hadn’t asked the important question. She looked at Yunque curiously. “So what about you and Lu Rangchen? Did you talk? Did anything happen?”

Just hearing that name made something shift inside her without permission.

Yunque’s throat tightened. “It was all surface-level. Nothing worth saying.”

Xu Linda got to the point. “Does he have anyone right now?”

Yunque thought of what Deng Jiao had said, and shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

If he did, a girl as direct as Deng Jiao would have said so already.

Xu Linda pressed a hand to her chest, relieved. “Okay, good. But seriously — why did you end things with him so definitively back then? Was it all because of your mother? Guilt?”

It was a question Xu Linda had asked before.

But in those days, Yunque had been in such a fragile state that she’d never answered properly.

Here, now, things were entirely different.

She was no longer the Yunque she used to be.

After a moment of thought, Yunque said honestly: “Guilt was part of it. But the other part — I genuinely felt like there was no future in it.”

“Not just the pressure from his family — ours too.”

She couldn’t bear to watch Lu Rangchen grieve his mother for her sake. And she was afraid of what she might do to him in the process.

“Love sustains you when love is there,” Yunque said. “But what about when it isn’t?” Her lashes dipped slightly. “Nobody can say how feelings like that end.”

At the bottom of it, she had been selfish.

She was afraid of being the one who got left behind.

Afraid she’d end up hating him — or that he’d end up hating her.

Afraid that once all the tenderness had worn away, they’d limp apart in wreckage, with nothing worth remembering left between them.

Xu Linda listened, then couldn’t help asking: “But if you’d thought it through even then — why did you come back? Isn’t that contradicting yourself?”

It was fair. It was contradictory.

And yet — choosing to come back despite that contradiction was exactly what had made Yunque feel, for the first time in a while, that she was alive again.

She picked the last piece of cilantro out of her bowl and said: “It might be because — at the end of last year, I got seriously ill—”

She hadn’t finished the sentence when a voice cut through from somewhere slightly behind and to the left — not directed at either of them, but toward the cashier counter.

Low and smooth and resonant, settling into the air with quiet force, landing on the heart with the weight of something much heavier.

He said: “I called ahead to order two bowls of corn and pork wonton — to go.”

The shop owner recognized him and smiled. “Perfect timing — I just finished packing yours.”

She handed over two bags of takeout and tucked in a can of juice.

Lu Rangchen tilted his chin up slightly. “Thanks.”

His peripheral vision didn’t drift toward Yunque’s direction for even a fraction of a second. He said what he needed to say, then turned, stepping easily around the counter toward the door that led into the residential complex behind the restaurant — and disappeared.

Her heart lurched straight into her throat.

Yunque’s eyes followed him instinctively until, within seconds, that tall figure had moved entirely out of sight.

Xu Linda, across the table, was seated at an angle where she couldn’t see any of this.

She noticed Yunque had gone quiet and looked up. “What illness — how come you never mentioned it before?”

Yunque’s brow furrowed faintly. Something inside her went flat and still all at once.

She set down her chopsticks, grabbed her bag, and said quickly: “I need to step out for a moment. Go ahead and eat.”

Xu Linda was confused. “What for?” she started to say.

But Yunque was already gone — not waiting, not listening.

Long-legged and quick, she was out the door before the words had finished.

She’d gone through the back entrance.

Fortunately, she spotted him — saw Lu Rangchen turn the corner into the building diagonally ahead.

And then, before she quite knew what was happening, Yunque was inside the building’s lobby.

Unit Twelve, Building One.

She noticed that much on her way in, without meaning to.

Then she was inside the elevator vestibule.

Two lifts side by side — one descending, which had already stopped at level negative-two. The other ascending, climbing floor by floor. She watched it move and couldn’t tell which floor it would stop at.

Standing there watching the numbers change, Yunque suddenly felt that she had lost her mind.

At seventeen, she had been more raw and vivid — and yet she hadn’t had this kind of recklessness. Now, at twenty-eight, she had no idea when or why she had developed it — this willingness to run headlong at things without knowing where they’d lead.

A brief pause of clarity. Her shoulders eased.

She stepped back half a step, like someone giving up the chase — preparing to leave.

Then — the kind of reversal that catches you completely off guard.

At the moment she turned, the figure she’d been carrying in her thoughts for so long appeared beside her, as if he’d materialized from nowhere.

Still the same — tall and unhurried, impossibly composed, a presence that filled the space around him.

Hands in his pockets. That loose, easy posture. Standing at her side like a wall — the height difference between them was extraordinary.

Yunque felt something drop inside her.

She saw his face in full, and forgot, for a moment, how to breathe.

Lu Rangchen didn’t move.

He tilted his gaze down at her, that detached and slightly cold expression carrying a subtle edge of amusement, and gave a lazy, knowing half-smile. “Ms. Zhu. Quite a coincidence.”

The drawling sarcasm was completely unguarded — openly mocking, laid out between them where anyone could see it — and there was no question that he’d known all along.

He’d seen her follow him here.

He’d watched her standing there staring at the elevator numbers with that dazed, lost expression.

Just imagining it, Yunque felt the heat of embarrassment.

Let alone this moment, with Lu Rangchen staring straight at her, as if he could see right through her at any second.

“……”

The tips of Yunque’s ears went red.

But even so, she kept herself composed. She looked at him steadily, turned calmly back to face the elevator, and delivered a lie without missing a beat.

She said: “It is a coincidence — running into you here too.”

There was a faint, pointed undertone in that — as if she were equally unenthused to see him.

She genuinely couldn’t help it.

Couldn’t help matching his sharpness with a little of her own.

In this particular game, this woman had never once lost.

Lu Rangchen could never quite read her.

He’d never been able to tell, when she had loved him, how real it had been.

That dull, draining feeling came back. Layered on top of the fatigue from the trip back from the capital, he didn’t have it in him to keep going with this. He gave a light exhale that was almost a laugh, said nothing.

And then — mercifully — the elevator arrived.

Lu Rangchen stepped in, long strides easy and unhurried. Just as he pressed the button for his floor, he saw Yunque follow him in calmly, along with two strangers behind her.

She ended up standing beside him — there was no other option.

Lu Rangchen didn’t move away either. He just stood there, hands in his pockets, that cool, self-possessed quality of his both arrogant and sharply present. Not even a flicker of his peripheral vision cast downward.

The more he was like that, the more Yunque refused to show anything.

And so, for that brief stretch of time, the feeling was strangely familiar.

Like being pulled back a few years — even the twenty-odd centimeters of height difference between them was exactly the same as it had always been.

The only real difference was that before, Lu Rangchen would always reach down and take her hand. Now, the closest their bodies got was the brush of fabric against fabric.

Thinking about that, Yunque pressed her lips together and tightened her grip on the strap of her bag.

Just as the elevator doors slid shut, the two strangers behind them each pressed their own floor numbers.

That was when Yunque registered the number Lu Rangchen had pressed.

Sixteenth floor.

She was staring faintly into nothing when Lu Rangchen turned his head and said: “You haven’t pressed your floor.”

Entirely ordinary. No edge to it this time.

Yunque looked up at him. Her gaze was steady. “I did press it,” she said. “Twenty-fifth floor.”

But she hadn’t pressed anything. The twenty-fifth floor had been pressed by one of the strangers behind her.

So she borrowed it.

Lu Rangchen had seen enough to know that this woman’s ability to maintain a front — whether at seventeen or eighty — would always be ironclad.

Something in him finally gave way — a short, quiet laugh escaped him. He said: “Ms. Zhu is quite busy. What brings you here?”

He didn’t look at her again.

Not a single trace of anything extra moved across his expression.

He watched the elevator climbing toward sixteen, and Yunque, unhurriedly, spun him a story: “It’s the weekend. Coming by to do a home visit for a student.”

Sure enough — as she finished that sentence, the doors opened on sixteen.

Lu Rangchen glanced at her.

That look was full of something indecipherable — some current moving beneath the surface that she couldn’t quite name.

But in the end, he didn’t call her out.

He stepped out, his retreating figure unhurried and unyielding.

When he was gone, Yunque could finally breathe properly again.

But her chest had gone cold.

She descended from twenty-five and went back to the fast-casual restaurant.

The moment she sat down, Xu Linda stared at her. “Where did you go just now? You came back so fast.”

Yunque didn’t hide it. She said: “I went after Lu Rangchen.”

Xu Linda nearly choked. “Lu Rangchen?”

She looked left, looked right. “Lu Rangchen was just here?”

Yunque reached for the bottle of water on the table, twisted it open, and took a small sip. Her lips, pale and lightly luminous, glistened faintly as she said: “He walked right past us.”

It took Xu Linda until this moment to finally — slowly — put it all together.

She slapped the table. “Zhu Yunque,” she said. “Zhu Yunque. So this whole day has been for this.”

All that reluctance about the apartments.

It was never about the apartments. It was all about whether she might cross paths with him — and with any luck, figure out which building he lived in.

And somehow — somehow — fate had actually delivered.

The way Xu Linda was looking at her could only be described as a whole new level of respect.

If this had been seventeen-year-old Yunque, she would have deflected immediately, denied everything, and changed the subject.

But twenty-eight-year-old Yunque didn’t do any of that.

Twenty-eight-year-old Yunque simply gathered her long hair into a knot with a hair tie, as if she’d only just realized she was hungry — reached for her chopsticks, and started eating the bowl of wonton that had gone cold.

—

Lu Rangchen had been gone for four or five days.

During that time, his cat had been in Li Tie and Zhou Jin’s care.

They’d been good about it — the apartment was spotless by the time he got back.

The fat cat, meanwhile, had grown so accustomed to being fed by various hands that he regarded Lu Rangchen’s return with an almost insulting level of indifference.

Lu Rangchen didn’t have the energy to care.

He didn’t even bother eating. He left the takeout on the kitchen island, dropped onto the sofa, and lit a cigarette.

Then he looked up — and his gaze landed on the ashtray, where a dark jade charm sat threaded on a black braided cord.

The braiding was rough. Someone had painstakingly re-woven it for him, years ago, and ever since he’d never replaced it — not even when the gold thread began to fray and unravel. He had never once thought to change it.

He hadn’t noticed, until now, just how many years he’d been wearing it.

Maybe he’d been lying to himself all along. Whenever he went through a stretch of not wearing it, it seemed like bad luck found him — the car collision on the way back from the capital, then a dispute between a staff member and a client at the club over membership card terms.

Then he’d come back. And he’d run into that infuriating thing.

Always that same air of total innocence. Those eyes, clear as glass. And the ability to lie through her teeth without breaking a sweat — a home visit, she’d said. Lu Rangchen ground his back teeth together, irritated enough that a quiet, exasperated laugh slipped out. She had a lot of nerve.

But when the internal fuming was done, he found himself going back to something she’d said.

In the wonton restaurant, she’d said: at the end of last year, I got seriously ill.

So — what illness?

He searched through his memory and couldn’t find an answer.

The pale smoke curled and drifted. By the time the ember was nearly close enough to burn his fingertips, Lu Rangchen pressed the cigarette out.

His gaze fell on the jade charm, unfocused.

And in a way he couldn’t quite account for, he suddenly felt something like regret.

Regret that the few words he’d said in the wonton restaurant hadn’t come even slightly later.