Li Wuhui didn’t reply for a long time.
She stood there quietly.
Like a ghost nailed to a tree trunk and set ablaze, yet always downplaying it to the outside world, as if she had never felt the pain.
Qiu Yiran lowered her eyes.
Her gaze lingered on her empty pant leg for a few seconds.
She didn’t avoid Li Wuhui.
Just like before, she picked up the prosthetic leg from nearby and wrapped the red, swollen folds at her residual limb with the prosthetic socket.
She fully donned the cold prosthetic leg.
She pulled down her pant leg.
She smoothed the hem neatly.
Then she looked up and stared straight at Li Wuhui, repeating, “You’re awake?”
Li Wuhui seemed to snap out of a dream only then.
Her gaze shifted away instantly.
Her whole person retreated once more into the shadowy dimness, pacing vaguely around the area for two circles. “I…”
Her voice sounded dry from the aftermath of pain.
“Are you feeling better?” Qiu Yiran asked.
Even just looking at Li Wuhui’s expression and condition, she already knew the other’s pain had likely been stopped.
Qiu Yiran relaxed a little.
She went over to pour Li Wuhui a glass of water. “Your things are all in the jacket on the side.”
With that, she moved to go around and get it for Li Wuhui.
“No need.” Li Wuhui blurted out.
Qiu Yiran had no choice but to stop in her tracks.
Li Wuhui silently parted her lips.
She pushed the IV stand over, took the jacket, but her gaze involuntarily lingered on Qiu Yiran’s leg.
“And you? Are you feeling better?”
Qiu Yiran hadn’t expected Li Wuhui to ask. She paused for a moment, sat back down, leaned against the wall, and smiled. “While you were sleeping just now, I went and got a number, saw my old doctor, and got some medicine prescribed. It’s pretty good.”
She was telling the truth.
Li Wuhui could tell it was the truth too. She nodded and stopped looking at Qiu Yiran’s leg. “Did I sleep for a long time?”
“Not long, two or three hours.” Qiu Yiran answered.
But the next second, she saw Li Wuhui’s expression suddenly change, and she hurriedly asked, “What’s wrong?”
Li Wuhui didn’t answer her right away.
Instead, she quickly pulled out her phone from the jacket pocket. The screen’s blue light reflected on her pale face, showing a mess of messages.
But Li Wuhui spent less than a minute receiving and handling all of them.
Then, seeing the annoying IV needle in her hand, she decisively called the nurse over to have it removed.
Even when the nurse advised her that the bottle of fluid had just been hooked up, she refused outright. Afterward, she put on a cold cap, threw on her jacket, and hastily grabbed her things to head out.
Only after all that was done did she look up and see Qiu Yiran—
As if only then realizing Qiu Yiran was there. She paused for two seconds and said, “I have to go.”
Qiu Yiran looked at Li Wuhui’s lips, which still hadn’t regained color, at Li Wuhui’s messy curls hastily tucked under her clothes, at Li Wuhui’s face, still beautiful and languid even in sickness…
She couldn’t quite name her own feelings.
Perhaps seeing the scene just now, she should have blamed Li Wuhui for wrecking the body she had painstakingly nursed back to health, or advised her to put her health first.
But, but.
No one understood better than her how desperately Li Wuhui had wanted to seize all of this back then.
“I’ll take you.”
So Qiu Yiran just said that. “It’s hard to get a cab right now.”
Li Wuhui didn’t object to this.
They had always shared this unspoken understanding—they had long decided to prioritize this above all else.
The road from the hospital to the high-speed rail station took more than fifteen minutes. Li Wuhui bought a new high-speed rail ticket, and the timing wasn’t tight.
Once in the car, Li Wuhui suddenly remembered something. “I’ll reimburse you for today’s expenses.”
“Okay.”
“Through the platform or another way?”
“The platform’s fine.”
Perhaps the residual limb had been rubbed too badly—even the nerves ached along with it. Qiu Yiran couldn’t help but rub her leg.
Then Li Wuhui suddenly said, “Take it off.”
Qiu Yiran froze.
She had thought Li Wuhui had kept her eyes tightly closed since getting in the car. “What?”
Li Wuhui slowly opened her eyes.
She gazed at Qiu Yiran through the reflection in the car window. “Isn’t it uncomfortable?”
Qiu Yiran fell silent.
She couldn’t deny it. “No need. We’ll be there soon anyway.”
Perhaps because she herself had been made so disheveled by illness. Li Wuhui didn’t mock her stubbornness. “Does it still get uncomfortable often?”
“No.” Qiu Yiran denied it.
Then, from the reflection in the car window, she caught Li Wuhui’s clearly disbelieving look. She added, “And it’s been so long now. I’m used to it.”
“Used to it?”
Li Wuhui gazed at Qiu Yiran’s reflection in the car window.
She didn’t know exactly how Qiu Yiran had gotten used to it. If she could, she hoped Qiu Yiran could teach her too.
But Qiu Yiran wasn’t looking at her.
So she closed her eyes again, paused for a moment, and asked, “How did you get here?”
How did she get here?
Asked this, Qiu Yiran felt a bit dazed herself. She looked at the street scenes flashing by outside the car—over two years, such a small city had gone from unfamiliar to feeling like a place where she might die.
“I don’t know.” Qiu Yiran said. “Back then, I just wandered around and ended up here.”
“Then why stay?” Li Wuhui pressed, seemingly unable to understand her choice. “Even if you didn’t want to stay in Paris back then, why not go back to Suzhou?”
“I don’t know.” Staying here was something Qiu Yiran had never really planned either. “Maybe because no one here knows me.”
“Is no one knowing you such a good thing?” Li Wuhui’s voice drifted over from the side, passing through those cheap, rough street scenes, very soft and light. “I didn’t think there was really a Fake Paris in this world.”
“Me neither.”
Qiu Yiran knew full well, of course, that on the day they first met, almost everything Li Wuhui had told her was a lie.
Li Wuhui didn’t believe in aliens, nor in the story of the Annecy Love Bridge.
Whether it was taking her to say she wanted to conquer Paris, or taking her to the bar to listen to Mamma Mia… that day’s encounter might have been a script tailored just for her.
But she hadn’t expected—
That now, the two of them had actually reunited in the very place the other had casually mentioned back then.
“And how did you get here?” Qiu Yiran asked. She couldn’t figure out how Li Wuhui had appeared out of thin air.
“I don’t know.” Li Wuhui’s answer was similar to hers. “Passing through, I guess.”
Qiu Yiran nodded.
She believed Li Wuhui was telling the truth. Since she might have come here by chance, Li Wuhui might have too.
Maybe there really were such coincidences in the world.
Qiu Yiran thought.
When they hit the next red light, she noticed Li Wuhui hadn’t moved for a long time. She turned to check on her—
Li Wuhui had maintained the same posture since getting in the car.
As if catching up on sleep. But her complexion did look a bit better, and she wasn’t breaking out in cold sweat like before.
Qiu Yiran breathed a sigh of relief.
But she also glimpsed the two strips of white tape on the back of Li Wuhui’s hand, with edges peeling up.
The fine blood vessels on the woman’s hand showed through her paper-thin skin, clearly chilled.
Qiu Yiran couldn’t help but look a couple more times.
Li Wuhui seemed to notice her gaze and suddenly opened her eyes.
The light turned green right then.
Qiu Yiran quickly averted her eyes, paused for two seconds, then reached out to turn up the car AC temperature.
From the corner of her eye, she saw Li Wuhui directly rip off those two strips of tape from the back of her hand.
She did it without any change in expression, as if the bruises from the needle on her hand weren’t her own skin.
So Qiu Yiran couldn’t help but ask, “Are you very busy?”
Busy enough to not even have time for one more bottle of IV or half an hour more sleep?
Li Wuhui seemed somewhat weary.
But hearing her words was like a reminder. She pulled out her phone to check. “I have a mountaineering ad shoot tomorrow in Switzerland. I have to catch a flight tonight.”
“In the snowy mountains?”
“Yeah.” Li Wuhui seemed to have very low body temperature—her fingers were frozen white, and the bluish veins on the back of her hand stood out.
But she tapped away at her phone while saying, “Everyone’s waiting for me. I can’t not go.”
Going to the snowy mountains in this cold?
With needle marks from painkillers still on her hand, having just fainted from cramps… heading to the snowy mountains now?
Dressed so lightly for the snowy mountains?
Qiu Yiran nearly blurted all that out.
But a loud honk jolted her awake—
So she had to accept that they no longer stood side by side, that she could no longer casually say such overstepping words.
“The medicine the doctor prescribed for you is in the back seat.”
Qiu Yiran gripped the steering wheel tightly with her knuckles. “Don’t forget to take it later.”
Li Wuhui frowned at something on her phone, unsure if she even heard Qiu Yiran.
A long time passed before she said, “Okay.”
Qiu Yiran didn’t speak again for the rest of the trip.
When they arrived at the station, she showed no intention of getting out to see her off, just stared expressionlessly straight ahead.
Li Wuhui’s gaze lingered on her profile for a moment, then on her legs curled up in front of the car seat for a while.
She couldn’t help but think back—
Every time they parted before, Qiu Yiran would rest her hand by the car window, gaze at her with a smile as she walked away, and sometimes even unbuckle her seatbelt to get out and give her a warm hug.
She remembered that in winter, this person always felt so warm, like the aura of a campfire.
Looking any longer would make her miss the train. Li Wuhui had to withdraw her gaze.
She pushed open the car door and got out. Shadows of people hurried by on the roadside, and the cold wind whipped through.
Li Wuhui pulled down her cold cap.
She went to the back seat to grab the big bag of medicine the doctor prescribed. But the moment she opened the door, she froze—
Because in that big bag she had assumed was just medicine, there were also two packs of moxa patches and hand warmers.
“They might not be much use. You’ll still need to take painkillers if you have to.”
Snowflakes fell in the wind, landing on Li Wuhui’s ears. Qiu Yiran’s voice drifted over from the front. “But the weather’s cold, and… your hands are so cold. You can’t just let them stay that way.”
The light and shadows inside the car were dim and gray, wind blowing wildly in. Li Wuhui kept her head down, her breathing so light it was almost inaudible.
After Qiu Yiran left, she had always treated recklessly the body Qiu Yiran had nursed back to health.
Maybe at first she had thought of it as revenge against Qiu Yiran, but after so much time passed, she had gotten used to it.
Used to it.
She had always thought that was what “used to it” meant—used to things being bad, used to the pain, used to life without Qiu Yiran.
But now Qiu Yiran appeared.
And without any effort, shattered that habit of hers, making her suddenly realize in this moment—
That being used to something could once have been such a good thing.
“Got it.”
Snow blown from behind wet her eyelashes, moistening her eye sockets. The phone in her coat pocket buzzed incessantly, urging her to hurry and leave. Li Wuhui picked up the big bag and closed the car door.
“Li Wuhui.”
She turned, only to hear the car door behind her again—it was Qiu Yiran hastily getting out of the car, dashing a few steps toward her in the swirling snow, then barely stopping, calling out to her from behind.
In the snowy night, her tone sounded wistful, yet also like harboring a sliver of hope.
“You… should be doing well, right?”
