Yan Lie dragged his mattress to the living room and chose a spot near the window, so that when he pulled back the curtain he could watch the next morning’s sun rise from behind the tall buildings.

Fang Zhuo brought him two sets of newly bought blankets and helped him make the bed.

By the time they had finished tidying up, it was already two or three in the morning.

Even with two layers of cotton blankets, the rental apartment — which had no central heating — was still somewhat chilly. Without a hot water bottle, lying in bed, it would take a long while before one’s hands and feet grew warm.

Fortunately he had drunk a little alcohol earlier; the warmth it sent coursing through his body helped to fend off some of the winter cold.

Yan Lie didn’t take off his outer coat. He sat propped against the wall, took off his gloves, and scrolled through his phone.

Past his usual bedtime, Fang Zhuo found herself entirely free of sleepiness. But the air outside the blankets was cold enough to cut, so she had curled up into a ball and had no desire to move.

Her phone on the table kept vibrating, and on its heels three cautious little taps sounded from the wall on the opposite side — there was no need to wonder who the strange creature on the other side was, sending messages to someone in the middle of the night.

Fang Zhuo had originally been thinking of pretending to be asleep, but after hesitating for a long while, she picked up the phone and scanned the messages.

He Whose Name Burns Bright: Are you asleep?

Little Sun: ? No.

He Whose Name Burns Bright: Chat with me?

Little Sun: Cold.

He Whose Name Burns Bright: Burrow inside the blanket and type. Come up for air every now and then.

Fang Zhuo thought to herself, why on earth would I do something so ridiculous? But one hand left outside the blanket went ice-cold and stiff within a few minutes.

Little Sun: Can’t you sleep?

He Whose Name Burns Bright: Can’t sleep.

Little Sun: ?

He Whose Name Burns Bright: Can you stop being so brief? Sending text on QQ doesn’t use any data.

But it uses her hands!

He Whose Name Burns Bright: Today is the first time I’ve ever drunk alcohol. How does it make a person more awake? I’m incredibly wired right now.

He Whose Name Burns Bright: Do you think I’m drunk?

Little Sun: You’re not drunk.

Little Sun: But you are definitely acting like a drunk. [Going bald]

He Whose Name Burns Bright: [Heh heh heh]

He Whose Name Burns Bright: I was just browsing an online shop and stumbled on a store selling chicken coops. Why would they push that kind of shop to me?

He Whose Name Burns Bright: [Photo] Do you think Baldy would like it?

It was a straw-woven chicken coop.

Whether Baldy would like it, Fang Zhuo had no idea — but she had come to realize that Yan Lie’s love for the chicken mascot was rather hollow.

He’d remember it from time to time and buy it a house, but when he forgot about it, he didn’t even care whether it was male or female.

She would never be fooled by him again.

Fang Zhuo used silence to express her disagreement, hoping Yan Lie would figure it out for himself.

The phone continued to vibrate, messages lighting up the screen one after another, ceaselessly challenging Fang Zhuo’s nerves in the silence of the night.

He Whose Name Burns Bright: Actually, I was trying to pick a New Year’s gift for you — but I don’t know what you’d accept.

He Whose Name Burns Bright: Don’t know if you’d accept it, don’t know what you’d want to receive, but I want to give something.

Reading it, there was something oddly touching about it, like a sense of grievance.

Seeing that the other party showed absolutely no sign of stopping, Fang Zhuo lost her patience. She grabbed her coat from the edge of the bed, threw it over her shoulders, shivering violently with cold, then quickly hugged the blanket and hurried out of the bedroom.

When she came out, Yan Lie was blowing warm air into his palms. He looked up and saw her, straightened up, and said with a grin: “Oh? Did you sense my summons?”

Fang Zhuo said: “You’re so annoying!”

Ye Yuncheng was already asleep, so the two of them kept their voices very low.

Yan Lie shifted over a little, rolled up his blanket, and made a small space for Fang Zhuo.

Fang Zhuo sat down and said, helplessly: “Go on then — what else did you want to say?”

Yan Lie kept his head lowered, still typing.

Fang Zhuo was tempted to snatch his phone away, and said with exasperated amusement: “What is there that you can’t say to my face? I haven’t even got my phone out!”

Yan Lie said: “I’m looking for my to-do list and my shopping cart!”

Fang Zhuo stood to leave. Yan Lie quickly grabbed her blanket and backpedaled: “All right, I’ll stop looking.”

The two of them sat there in quiet, the endless, still darkness of the night at their backs.

Yan Lie mulled things over and finally let out a sigh, coming clean: “I don’t actually have anything important to say. I just can’t sleep and wanted to have a chat.”

Fang Zhuo said: “Then talk.”

And then Yan Lie didn’t know what to say anymore.

He couldn’t put his thoughts together.

When Fang Zhuo was beside him and he had the chance, he couldn’t think. He felt that simply sitting like this was already quite good, and he was worried that if he relaxed too much, he would say something strange, something out of place.

Fang Zhuo waited a moment, then, when he still didn’t speak, she eased her tone and took the initiative: “Why won’t you go home? Even if you slept on the floor in your own house, it would be more comfortable than sleeping here, wouldn’t it?”

Yan Lie paused, and answered after a moment’s pause: “I don’t want to go back.”

“You don’t have to answer if it makes you unhappy.” Fang Zhuo didn’t turn to look at him. In a voice as calm as if she were talking to herself, she asked: “Are your parents unkind to you?”

“There’s nothing specifically unkind about them….” Yan Lie tilted his head back and said slowly, “It’s hard to explain.”

Fang Zhuo had no understanding of what a normal family relationship should look like, but she knew, clearly, that this was a family Yan Lie did not find pleasant.

She thought back to the encounter with Yan Chengli the last time, and Yan Lie’s near-unguarded reaction, and analyzed it carefully in her mind. She concluded that Yan Chengli was probably a man who didn’t know how to communicate and tended to be domineering — and even someone as capable as Yan Lie had no way of handling him.

Fang Zhuo asked: “Have you told him? That you don’t like it.”

The person at her side drew a long, slow breath. Just when Fang Zhuo thought he had fallen asleep, he finally spoke in a low, quiet voice: “There’s no way to say it. They wouldn’t understand.”

Fang Zhuo murmured, puzzled: “Is that so?” Then again, Fang Yiming had at least had some self-awareness.

A moment later, Yan Lie said softly: “I’ll tell you, but tomorrow, you must forget all of it.”

Fang Zhuo said: “All right.”

Yan Lie: “And you’re not allowed to ask why about any part you don’t understand.”

Fang Zhuo: “Fine.”

Yan Lie deliberated, trying to figure out from which point to begin.

“They had many important things, all of which came before me — it was like that from the time I was small. They would leave me alone at home, and come back at midnight, reeking of alcohol.”

They always had so much accumulated experience, so many hardships that they had endured, and they never took a child’s feelings seriously.

“The demands of life” was a very convenient reason — it gave them the right to refuse to be understanding toward him, while requiring him to be understanding toward them.

Yet at his core he was also a selfish person, and he didn’t have the generosity to be so magnanimous.

“When people are at their lowest, everything goes wrong. They would quarrel and fight after drinking, smashing things around the house. But when they were criticizing each other, they could be remarkably lucid. I don’t understand what alcohol actually is — that it can leave in a person only the worst parts of themselves.”

Fang Zhuo had never been drunk either. She didn’t understand why anyone would dare let their reason vacate the premises to the point of losing control over themselves, but instinct told her that wasn’t how it was supposed to be.

She was a very diligent listener, and to all of the descriptions she only nodded.

Yan Lie raised a hand and rubbed at a patch on his temple, where a faint roughness of skin remained, hidden beneath his fringe.

He was very fond of touching that scar, and then letting his mind wander through all manner of confused thoughts — it had become a habit of his, and it could make him quickly grow cold and rational.

“I lived with my grandmother for a few years when I was young, and I wasn’t close to them. They tried to build some kind of connection with me — for a brief period. Then they found it wasn’t working, that I wasn’t an obedient child, and they gave up and threw themselves wholeheartedly into their careers.”

That had been the worst period of his life. Nothing short of chaos.

He had even wondered, at times, whether one of the reasons they had chosen to leave City A and start fresh somewhere else was that they didn’t know how to face him.

Yan Lie said with a kind of ironic lightness: “I’m not a vending machine — they can’t just put in a coin and expect me to dispense whatever they anticipated. The truth is, from the very beginning, they didn’t particularly crave my affection.”

Fang Zhuo was doing her best to think, only not saying anything aloud. She was always poor at handling things like this and never knew what kind of comfort to offer.

Based on her limited social experience, perhaps the best and most widely applicable approach at this moment would be to show Yan Lie how terrible Fang Yiming was, to prove that he wasn’t the only unfortunate person in the world. But Fang Zhuo knew that wasn’t the kind of comfort Yan Lie needed.

Yan Lie said: “I don’t understand it.”

Their past hardships had been real. In their youth, they had genuinely labored half their lives in pursuit of financial freedom.

What Yan Lie didn’t understand was this: goals as difficult as those, they had achieved over years and decades — so why was it that when it came to him, patience ran out? As if he were someone not worth investing in, someone who ultimately didn’t matter.

“Never mind.” Yan Lie said. “They just want me to become sensible on my own.”

Fang Zhuo finally found something she could respond to and quickly said: “You’re already very sensible — ideal son material…. I didn’t mean that I want to be your father.”

Yan Lie graciously didn’t make an issue of her slip of the tongue, and called her name in the dark: “Fang Zhuo.”

“Mm?”

Yan Lie turned to face her and looked into her eyes: “Do you think that my having these thoughts is… being overly dramatic?”

Fang Zhuo raised her voice a little: “Right, are you starting to accuse me of something I didn’t do?”

The corner of Yan Lie’s mouth curved upward. “Then I’ll give you a chance to defend yourself.”

“I don’t need to!” Fang Zhuo said. “If I didn’t think it, I didn’t think it — why would I need to defend myself?”

Yan Lie slid down into the blankets, lying back on the soft pillow, and called her name again.

“Fang Zhuo.”

“Mm?”

Yan Lie asked, quite ingeniously: “So will you patiently work to earn my favor?”

Fang Zhuo asked: “How much do I have right now?”

Yan Lie thought it over and said: “A great, great deal.”

“Good.” Fang Zhuo asked: “That’s quite easy to earn, then. When did I earn it?”

Yan Lie ran through the history in his mind, let out a low laugh, and said: “I gave it to myself.”