Chapter 17 Part 1

Bang!

The door slammed shut.

In the blink of an eye, Xie Anqing’s hurried footsteps faded down the hall.

A car started in the yard. The phone she’d thrown onto the bed, low on battery, suddenly flared with a blinding light.

Chen Li came back to herself as if waking from a daze. Her gaze jerked, and she belatedly realized she’d fallen into that infuriating state again: unable to explain why, her mind suddenly blank and helpless. A loss of composure that only ever seemed to happen to weak people.

She stared at the bedroom door, a black hole in the darkness. Her nails dug slowly into her palm. The blankness in her eyes turned dark and frightening.

Fine.

She wasn’t innocent when it came to deliberately provoking Xie Anqing.

But apart from provoking her, had she ever bound Xie Anqing’s hands and pinned her to a bed like that? Had she ever forced her mouth open and kissed her as if she meant to kill her?

No, right?

She hadn’t laid a finger on her.

But what about Xie Anqing?

Chen Li pressed her stinging lips together. The taste of blood in her mouth kept returning, pooling there again and again. Should she swallow that last trace of saliva, still carrying Xie Anqing’s taste, like she’d just done? Or should she bend over and spit it out in humiliation?

Anger born of shame closed in on her from every side.

Chen Li couldn’t endure it for another second. As if she couldn’t feel the pain, she stepped barefoot over the hard buttons scattered on the floor and went back to her room.

The storm had blown the window open. Rain had soaked the desk. Her computer, camera, phone, lipstick—everything she’d left there was drenched, each item reminding her of her wet arm.

That same chilling sensation, like a snake coiling tightly around her.

Still just as hateful.

Chen Li strode to the low table and pulled out a tissue.

Her phone lay beside the tissue box. Rain had gotten into it, and the slightest movement made its screen flicker on and off as if a ghost were tapping it. After flashing repeatedly, it settled on the home screen: thirteen missed calls from her talent manager, one from W, and twenty-one WeChat notifications.

One message was from W.

It had arrived just seconds before the call dropped.

Unlike her talent manager’s anxious messages, it contained only five characters: 【Call me back.】

The five characters took up one line. The message above was clear as day.

It was from after Chen Li had once again been challenged by W and angrily told her, “If you can’t stand how I do things, you can leave.”

W had written: 【It’s not that I can’t stand what you’re doing. I just want to remind you that she lives alone, just like you do.】

Chen Li knew.

She’d seen it clearly on the very first day she arrived.

So what?

She’d been living like that since she was a teenager. Was it really so hard?

W had written: 【A-Li, someone living alone has nowhere to fall back on. There’s no one standing behind her. You know that.】

And if people kept pressuring and taking from them, it was the same as driving them into a corner.

Chen Li knew that, too.

The moment she filled in the rest of the sentence in her head, a deafening buzz and a clap of thunder went off together. The shock made her fingers tremble, and she dropped the last dry tissue.

She couldn’t wipe her arm. The cold sensation began to spread beneath the storm.

The sounds around Chen Li suddenly grew distant, as if a thick pane of glass had dropped between her and the world. The wind and rain were right beside her, striking her arm, but she couldn’t hear them. Time seemed to abandon her; space seemed to imprison her. Trapped in a cramped, suffocating glass enclosure, she crashed against its walls, turning over and over.

A hidden switch had been touched by accident. Everything replayed before her eyes as if delayed: the tense, heavy profile of Xie Anqing when she’d been startled in the passenger seat; her slight, lonely figure kneeling by the river to mend the safety net; Lu Yu’s startled expression when Xie Anqing casually requested an extension to her term; the way she liked having flowers in the yard because she was afraid of coming home to an empty house; the exhaustion of a job she’d done for six years.

It seemed she had been living with the hardship of being alone all this time.

But she wasn’t hard-hearted enough to spread that hardship across other people and other things. The pressure had piled up day after day into a mountain.

Chen Li didn’t know what lay on that mountain.

She only knew that when the pressure built high enough, it didn’t take much—some not-so-terrible provocation and a couple of slightly out-of-line remarks—to push someone past the limits of reason.

Someone with no one to catch her, no way back.

Then, wasn’t the anger she’d been pushed into understandable?

“…”

The emotion raging in Chen Li’s chest scattered.

Her hand curled in on itself, then dropped. It brushed the jasmine plant she’d moved in from the windowsill not long ago.

The flowers were still blooming, droplets rolling over their petals.

As Chen Li watched them, she suddenly realized that Xie Anqing’s red-rimmed eyes in Huang Huaiyi’s study had looked remarkably like the pair she’d seen just minutes ago.

They had seemed so vulnerable, yet at some point had become a sharp axe, splitting open the thick glass that enclosed Chen Li.

The distant sounds in her ears rushed back without warning. She heard Xie Anqing say, “Chen Li, I’m grateful to you. I looked forward to you coming. But I could never love you.”

The cold certainty of her words came with a crack of thunder. Like countless needles, they plunged into Chen Li’s nerves all at once, pain spreading everywhere.

Chen Li was stunned. She couldn’t believe words could do so much damage.

But that was how it was.

The initial impact was explosive. The aftershock lingered.

Chen Li straightened quickly, clamping her teeth over the breath she’d half exhaled. Only then did she manage to choke back the sound about to burst from her throat.

The octagonal table that had fallen from the balcony was still tumbling in the rain.

Chen Li stood straight, calm.

When the longest bolt of lightning that night split the storm, Chen Li turned to look north, toward the river. The lone grave had been swallowed by the downpour, but the willow tree was still straining to spread its branches. Like a broken umbrella, unable to keep anything dry, yet still trying to shield it.

Its stubborn effort seized Chen Li’s attention.

She stood motionless, watching it.

The pain in her nerves began to fade, one thread at a time. Suddenly, she wanted to know who had planted that willow tree, and who it stood for.

…Who knew.

Chen Li’s rigid back shifted. A tearful voice reached her ears.

“Auntie! Auntie!”

That voice didn’t match the Xie Huaixia in Chen Li’s memory. Her heart sank, and she instinctively headed for the door.

Soaked through, Xie Huaixia rushed at her the moment she saw her. “Auntie! I can’t get through to Mom! Was she swept away?”

“The year before last, she nearly got swept away when she saved Sister Beibei.”

“Did she go out again this year?”

Xie Huaixia’s tears and rain soaked Chen Li’s clothes. Their weight dragged her shoulders down.

The pressure made her think clearly.

Her reason returned little by little, and her memories began to resurface. At one point, the words in the private message on Weibo came sharply into focus.

She should have seen this scene in Xie Anqing’s description: the sky and earth as if they were about to split open, everything helpless before the storm.

Or maybe it was more real and brutal, just like what Xie Huaixia was asking now.

【Every time there’s a torrential rainstorm, someone here gets hurt.

Getting hurt is the least of it. Being swept away and rescued is lucky.

Some people have to wait day after day for the rain to stop and the sky to clear before they can even hope to find the body.】

She’d received that message one day when she opened her phone.

Reading it alongside the messages around it, she had thought the person on the other end of Weibo was terrifyingly calm, able to speak so lightly even about life and death.

She couldn’t help analyzing what kind of person would write that way. The words had conjured countless possibilities in her mind, countless scenes, each one leaving her astonished and full of pity.

That was why she’d come.

…But after getting here, there hadn’t been a single moment when she’d truly remembered why.

Crack!

A tree split apart in the storm. The sound tugged at Chen Li’s taut, trembling nerves. She shuddered violently and heard Xie Huaixia ask, “Auntie, does that mean I don’t have a mom anymore?”

The child’s terrified crying sounded especially piercing on a night like this.

Especially those words.

They cut through Chen Li’s eardrums like a knife. She couldn’t dodge them. All she could do was endure.

“No.” Chen Li said.

Xie Huaixia heard something wrong in her voice. Her crying stopped abruptly, and she looked up.

“Your mom called your aunt five minutes ago. She’s fine,” Chen Li said.

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Then why can’t I reach her now?”

“No signal.”

Xie Huaixia’s mouth crumpled. Tears welled up again.

Chen Li had a feeling that if neither Xie Yun nor Xie Anqing came back tonight, Xie Huaixia would keep crying like this.

Would they come back?

Chen Li didn’t know. A flash of the darkness that had clung to Xie Anqing as she left passed through her mind, colliding with something Xie Xiumei had said the night Xie Anqing had a fever.

“Are the only people left on the village committee you and Xie Anqing? You’re both always rushing to be first.”

Chen Li hadn’t seen it herself, but she could imagine.

She’d seen too many people and too many places. She didn’t have to think to picture it.

The moment she did, she took an unconscious half step forward, then quickly stepped back. She pushed her disheveled hair away, tied it up again, changed into practical clothes, took Xie Huaixia’s trembling hand, and strode out.

Two minutes later, at Huang Huaiyi’s house next door, Chen Li glanced at Xie Huaixia, who was in Huang Huaiyi’s arms.