Chapter 4: “Red Wine Cigarettes”

Inside the cashmere gloves was a garage access card.

Fu Tingli followed the address printed on it and discovered that it belonged to a local centralized private rental garage. The gray card bore the garage’s name along with an embossed exclusive parking spot number.

This meant that as long as she had this card, Fu Tingli could find Kong Liyuan again.

In all her imaginings of their reunion—no matter how dramatic, exaggerated, or realistic—none had ever ended with a close-up shot of Parking Spot No. 334.

Just as she had never pictured Kong Liyuan riding in on a horse to reenter her down-and-out life.

But after mulling it over, she could guess why Kong Liyuan had left the card behind. She wanted Fu Tingli to come find her.

The woman she had met in California four years ago had reappeared. They had shared the most intimate moments, embarked on the boldest adventures… That scorching summer, which had burned for just three days and nights, was like a massive ticking time bomb to the superstar Kong Liyuan now.

Managing her public image was Kong Liyuan’s job.

Fu Tingli remembered those words clearly. She also knew full well that her own reappearance wasn’t good news for Kong Liyuan.

So Kong Liyuan needed to make sure this bomb never went off. And the way to do that? Meet in a secluded, secure spot first—then decide on the next move.

Perhaps with threats. Perhaps with bribes.

Fu Tingli understood the logic. She knew Kong Liyuan’s position all too well. And yet she resisted it inexplicably. Irritation bubbled up inside her without reason.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to be.

Once home, she tossed the garage access card onto the table and dialed her mother Qiao Lipan’s number without much thought.

Huge transparent glass windows were shrouded in cold fog, reflecting her weary, dazed pallor—and the chaotic crisscross of an old street below.

That old street marked a stark divide between the city’s faces.

On one side lay Shanghai after 10 p.m., ablaze with lights like some futuristic dreamscape. On this side lurked cold, shadowed alleys tucked into corners—Shanghai all the same.

It was the snapshot of every city clawing toward modernity: multifaceted, fractured, and divided along clear lines.

Her old life had been spacious and sunlit. She loved waking to sunlight spilling across her back through massive windows, collecting vintage cars. On fine days, she’d pick one at random from the garage, crank up some thumping music, toss in a bouquet airlifted from mountain meadows, and cruise along feeling young and invincible, as if the whole world were hers. Even fresh back in Shanghai, she’d snapped up a three-hundred-square-meter studio smack in the city center without a second thought—back when she hadn’t even noticed that dividing line.

Now she crammed into a dim-lit, drafty rental so narrow the door had to be yanked tight just to turn the key. Only then did she finally see it:

That line had always been crystal clear.

Sculpture was a money pit. Without family backing, the path was brutal. She’d stuck to pure art for a decade. But she never imagined the family business would crumble overnight, saddled with crushing debt—too much to claw her way back alone.

Worse, pulling her investment from the studio right before launch had soured things with her old classmates and partners. Life was rough, and she still fretted over Qiao Lipan, saddled with debts abroad.

At first, Qiao Lipan had hidden the failed investment from her. Somehow she’d scraped together a nest egg as Fu Tingli’s safety net, urging her to head home and launch the studio without worry.

By the time Fu Tingli found out, she was already settled back in China. There was no way she’d let her mother shoulder the debt while she burned cash chasing dreams in Shanghai.

So she’d yanked her funding decisively. Sold off the vintage cars in her name, the property she’d bought domestically—everything wired straight to Qiao Lipan.

Even as Qiao Lipan tore into her over the phone.

“Have you lost your mind, using your pocket change to bail me out? Your studio was about to open—withdrawing now? What are your partners gonna think? You’ve studied art half your life—without that studio, how do you even survive here? Sell the house and sleep on the street? Live off hawking little clay figurines or pinching veggie dumplings in some diner?”

Fu Tingli fired right back without hesitation. “I’m the one who’d lose my mind letting you fool me into coming home. You take on that debt abroad while I swan around in a luxury flat, studio open, cruising in convertibles? People would talk behind my back the second the doors opened.”

Cars and houses were just things.

At twenty-four, in the prime of youth, with hands, feet, and dreams—she figured she had nothing to fear.

But twenty-odd years of plenty had left her soft. No lacks, no hardships. No one had taught her how to hack it in a rundown rental with paper-thin walls piping in the neighbors’ snores and kids’ shrieks, no elevator for the six-flight climb, hot water trickling slow under weak pressure…

Shanghai’s endless, knife-sharp winter. Hundreds of resumes vanished into the void.

Maybe it was the scramble of juggling debts and smoothing rifts, but Qiao Lipan’s voice sounded drained on the line. They barely chatted before she rang off.

Fu Tingli was terrified of the cold.

No-AC winters were torture: hands and feet that stayed ice no matter how long she slept, her body curled fetal just to cling to body heat.

And the dreams—one vivid, exhausting wave after another.

Dreams of vintage car radios spilling light, airy tunes; her fingers drumming the window to the beat; California’s thirty-six-degree sunset…

A hazy drift of familiar, faint smoke. Then, as it cleared, the woman pillowed at her waist, black straight hair fanned across her skin.

Steady breaths ghosting her midriff. Idling fingers toying with Fu Tingli’s soft golden curls.

A fleeting kiss, and then that scent seeping into every pore, every crevice.

Shadows wheeled with the light, dusk hung unreal; they floated high above, or lounged in a car bound nowhere, supine amid a flood of hot, untamed vitality.

She jolted awake sweltering. Limbs frozen, but a thin sweat sheening her back. Dawn nowhere in sight; she rose and poured herself water.

Gulped it down until her hammering heart slowed. Her eyes caught the garage access card on the table.

Lost in a daze, the dream lingered—dragging her mind to last night’s crew dinner.

First day of shooting: the whole team booked out a hotpot joint. Her appetite had been off lately; a few bites and her stomach rebelled. She bolted to the bathroom, hand clamped over her mouth.

Vomited her guts out.

On the way back, hotpot fumes wafted from the private room, bleaching her face another shade paler. She skipped it, leaning by the corridor window to breathe.

The door creaked open behind her. She turned. Dingy yellow lights smeared with chill mist; a woman in a pale trench coat emerged, gaze lowered, posture ramrod straight—the belt carving elegant lines at her waist.

Fu Tingli hadn’t processed it yet.

The woman lifted her eyes. Across the corridor’s stuttering shadows, their gazes locked.

One meal, and Kong Liyuan had swapped outfits and makeup entirely. Every crease in that trench coat looked like the painstaking chisel work of an ancient Greek sculptor.

Fu Tingli glanced down at the red oil stain blooming on her own jacket from the hotpot broth—its pungent reek impossible to ignore.

She let out a soft laugh, then looked up to hold the gaze of the woman just steps away.

Faced with her own bedraggled mess, she met it head-on, frank and unashamed—a scrap of youthful defiance.

Kong Liyuan stared for a beat, then slid her hand from her pocket—as if meaning to approach.

But the next instant, a girl about her age bundled in a scarf dashed up. “Teacher Kong, this way! That’s the smoking section—don’t mix it up.”

“You know smoke makes you want to hurl.”

The utterly foreign words made Fu Tingli’s fingers twitch involuntarily.

She couldn’t stop pitting that summer, drenched in red wine burst-bead cigarette haze, against this barren, silent winter.

Until a gust sliced in through the open window. She coughed, the winter chill jarring her very soul loose.

Over there, Kong Liyuan paused a few seconds. She murmured something soft to the girl who’d rushed up. Then she wheeled about, heading straight this way.

“Teacher Kong.”

Fu Tingli spoke first, her eyes curving in a soft, limpid smile.

“Careful—the wind’s picking up here. I’m heading in.”

It halted Kong Liyuan mid-stride. Fu Tingli slipped back into the hotpot-choked room.

The California woman had been fierce and willful, hooked on cheap red wine burst-bead cigarettes. Shanghai’s Kong Liyuan brimmed with tolerance—but smoke set her off.

She had to tell them apart. That was what Fu Tingli told herself.

Still, some things nagged at her, impossible to shake—like that garage access card stuffed into the gloves.

She downed a bellyful of scalding water and burrowed back into bedding gone cold. Eyes shut in a haze, she tossed and turned—but sleep wouldn’t come.

She figured she’d writhed long enough. Yet when her eyes cracked open, the clock read just three a.m.

In that bleary glance, she spotted the incomplete flying bird sculpture on the bedside table. A necklace dangled casually from it.

One look at that sculpture, and she thought of her. It was like the woman had nailed some indelible mark into her memory—making everything linger forever.

And so, she began to dislike the sculpture. Yet on the day she returned home to pack her luggage—when her bags were already nearly bursting at the seams—she inexplicably took it with her anyway.

Perhaps it was her OCD that shackled her, convincing her that completing the Flying Bird Sculpture would mark the end of that story.

Jumbled memories flooded her mind. She gazed dazedly at the Garage Access Card, rubbing her restless heart beneath the icy blanket. Then, as if compelled by some unseen force, she reached out and picked up the necklace draped over the sculpture.

Her fingers traced the letters “Zoe” etched into it.

Maybe it was the access card that would bring that summer to its close?

But if she went to that garage now… could she see Kong Liyuan?

~~~

Fu Tingli felt like she must have lost her mind.

It was nearly four in the morning in Shanghai’s biting winter, and she was struggling to dangle her head over the edge of the bed, fishing out the necklace that had accidentally slipped into the crevice along the bedside. It emerged dusty and gray.

Hunching her shoulders against the cold, she clutched the necklace and the well-worn access card as she stood outside a garage whose massive doors were slowly swinging open toward her.

The doors parted gradually, revealing a vast, unlit space where the pitch-black cold air swirled like a vortex ready to swallow her whole.

She stood frozen at the threshold, lost in a daze. Just three months earlier, she had leisurely driven out of her own garage in California, tires rolling lazily over sun-warmed asphalt under an endless sky.

Her life’s creed had burned bright and impulsive back then: Never do what you don’t want to do, and never hold back from what you do.

But times had changed. She had done countless things she never wanted to, left even more that she did undone. What to do or not do was no longer judged solely by desire.

Right now, she knew the access card clutched in her hand was nothing but a hot potato. To toss it away, she had to step through those doors just once.

The garage was a vast, shadowy expanse—this was Parking Spot 344—and it echoed with emptiness and chill, dotted only by a few sleek sports cars parked haphazardly in the corners.

Illuminated by the dim glow of her phone flashlight, they gleamed heavy and black, like lonely stars abandoned in the void.

Of course, Kong Liyuan wasn’t here. It would take a ghost to appear at this hour.

Fu Tingli lingered in the darkness for a moment.

She let out a soft chuckle, her breath misting in the frigid air. Then she pulled the access card from her pocket, intending to leave it on the window of one of the cars that showed faint signs of recent use.

As long as she left the card here, Kong Liyuan would understand: she had no intention of blackmailing her.

The card tugged the necklace free from her hastily stuffed pocket, and it dangled from her numb, frozen fingers with a faint whisper of metal slicing the air.

Her movements paused.

She was just about to set the card on the car window when the low rumble of an engine echoed through the cavernous garage.

Warm air blasted toward her next, like a fine, enveloping net that wrapped around her chilled, rigid body.

The slow, steady hum of tires approached from behind, and yellowish-white headlights spread out like a vast web across the floor.

Fu Tingli turned, but her eyes lagged by a split second. The warm breeze from above rustled against her face, driving the cold from deep within her lungs.

She couldn’t help but cough.

The headlights cast a hazy glow that filled her vision. She raised a hand to shield her eyes and peer at the car rolling straight toward her, but everything remained blurred.

Not until the vehicle pulled to a stop right in front of her. With a soft click, the lights extinguished, and the warm airflow tousled the strands of her hair, still damp from the earlier drizzle.

Her hair—somewhat long and disheveled—floated lightly, framing a pair of eyes that felt etched into her very bones.

It was the final night of those three California summer evenings. She had woken on the sickbed with a grimace.

The same breathtaking eyes had watched her, framed by the woman’s silken locks falling softly beside her face. They sharpened from blur to crystal clarity beneath Fu Tingli’s weakly tracing fingers.

Then they had faded back to haze as her strength gave out, accompanied by the faintest sigh.

And now, they appeared once more in this way.

Kong Liyuan finally pushed open the car door. In Fu Tingli’s hazy vision, she stood silently gazing at her, her black trench coat and long hair billowing in the wind.

Fu Tingli snapped back to reality as if from a dream. Her empty hand faltered, and she shoved the necklace back into her pocket.

Four in the morning, and the first faint light of dawn crept in, snuffing out the silent night and giving birth to the long, chaotic day ahead.

Dawn—the moment when even the clearest dreams burned away in utter illusion.

How could Kong Liyuan possibly be here?