Chapter 27: “Love and Paradox” Part 2

“The light at the door is too bright,” she said. “It’s stinging my eyes. Not feeling great.”

“Really?” Qiao Lipan pressed.

“Really.”

“You know, you’re all alone in Shanghai, so far away. All I can hope is that you have a few friends to lean on—someone to spend the holidays with, so you don’t end up lonely and miserable.”

Fu Tingli laughed. “I’m not lonely or miserable now. Work keeps me busy. Don’t think I’m just sitting here all pathetic. I even met up with my high school classmates today.”

“Really? You were only in their class for a year, and they still remember you?”

“Yeah, they remember me crystal clear.”

Qiao Lipan sighed over the line. She knew her daughter’s temperament well. That line about “I won’t harm her anymore” had sounded all wrong, nagging at her as a mother. Relentless, she pressed,

“So, you and that friend of yours—are you really done? No way to patch things up?”

Fu Tingli pulled her gaze away, lowering her eyes as she recalled Kong Liyuan’s attitude right before they parted.

Adults in this world weren’t divided into neat black-and-white categories. They didn’t throw childish tantrums at the first sign of trouble, assuming eternal estrangement.

Tomorrow morning, they would still be the unremarkable on-set assistants and the hardworking female lead.

Once the movie wrapped, Fu Tingli would fade into just another anonymous string of numbers and letters—an ID in the system—while Kong Liyuan remained that ageless celebrity, her face beaming from screens in streets and alleys day and night.

Soon enough, even Shanghai’s winter would be over.

“It’s probably not a full fallout.”

As she said it, she felt like she could hear her own bones creaking.

Those bones peeled away from her body, crushed savagely by the shadowy chill of the door in front of her.

It left her breathless, unable to summon even a hint of pain. In the end, she could only add softly,

“We’re just… not on the same path anymore.”

~~~

Li Qiao’s video call came through just as Kong Liyuan sat with the window open, gazing at the night sky that seemed on the verge of sinking into the earth’s core. She was smoking a cigarette that had nearly burned down to her fingertips.

Behind her loomed a darkness so thick it threatened to swallow her whole. In front stretched a wall adorned with taxidermied bird specimens, and a cigarette trailing gray-white wisps of smoke from its glowing ember.

Li Qiao’s call felt abrupt.

But Kong Liyuan closed her eyes for a moment, answered it, and stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray. She must have pressed a little too hard—her fingertip stung.

Over there, it was daytime. Li Qiao lounged on a chair by the pool in loose, lightweight sweats, sunglasses propped on her head as she soaked up the sun.

The moment the call connected, she shoved the sunglasses up onto her hair and flashed her usual squinting smile.

“Why don’t you turn on the light? It’s pitch black—I can barely make out your face, and even that’s blurry.”

Kong Liyuan exhaled the last remnants of white smoke from her lungs. The haze lingered before her like a silent, reluctant attachment.

She glanced at Li Qiao’s exaggerated expression, then flipped on the light as requested. She lit another cigarette but didn’t smoke it, just held it between her fingers, letting it burn slowly.

Finally satisfied, Li Qiao’s eyes darted to something off-screen, and her tone shifted. “Whoa, your smoking habit’s gotten worse lately? Is that all from tonight?”

Kong Liyuan followed her gaze to the ashtray on the table, visible in the video frame, piled with several crushed stubs.

“About that,” she said offhandedly. “Haven’t smoked many.”

“That’s not many? And I remember you saying you were going to quit.”

Li Qiao knew Kong Liyuan had smoked before, but after returning four years ago, her habit had suddenly intensified.

She’d tried quitting multiple times, with relapses like this during quiet nights—but only occasionally, one or two.

It had only been half a month since they’d last talked. How had her craving spiked so much?

Kong Liyuan stared at the cigarette burning between her fingers and sighed.

“It’s harder to quit than I imagined.”

Li Qiao watched thoughtfully for a moment, then said casually,

“By the way, can you wrap up that movie before June? How’s everything going this year? Want to come over?”

“We’ll see,” Kong Liyuan said, leaning back lazily in her chair. “Depends on the situation then. It’s only January now, right?”

“I’m just checking in.”

Li Qiao said, then grabbed a glass of blue drink from her side of the video and downed it in one go. Grinning, she added,

“Honestly, you live such an empty life. A young, beautiful actress with a killer figure—why smoke to kill time? You should throw a party, invite some young crowd, and go wild.”

As Li Qiao spoke, Kong Liyuan’s gaze remained fixed on the cigarette in her hand, intently watching the ember creep along its length.

Most of the time, she wasn’t actually smoking. She simply had the habit of wanting to repeat the process all over again once the cigarette had burned down to ash.

She didn’t respond to Li Qiao’s words.

So Li Qiao narrowed her eyes and ventured boldly, “You’ve met up with that Little Bird of yours again, haven’t you?”

Kong Liyuan’s lowered eyelashes trembled faintly.

She offered no reply, and Li Qiao’s expression suddenly turned incredulous. Then she let out a sigh, as if to say, “I knew it.”

“I knew it.”

That was exactly what Li Qiao said next. She removed her sunglasses, settling into a posture ready to listen.

“Come on, tell me. What’s the situation?”

“There’s really nothing much to tell.”

Kong Liyuan tilted her head back slightly, her gaze unfocused as she stared at the birds covering the wall.

“I asked her if she wanted to be with me, and she said no. She said I’d only end up hurting her.”

“I would hurt her, that’s true.” The words slipped out afterward, so soft that the smoke seemed to swallow every syllable, like a murmur to herself.

“And then?”

Li Qiao grew serious all of a sudden. She had already taken the sunglasses off her forehead and slipped on a pair of gold-rimmed glasses.

“And then?”

As Kong Liyuan recalled what had just happened, she felt utterly drained, suspended in a hazy void. Yet everything around her felt sharper than ever, in perfect clarity.

“Then I kept pressing her—did she love me back in California?”

At this point, she noticed Li Qiao watching her face with rapt attention.

So she flicked the lighter. A blue flame leaped to life, blurring the focus of her vision. Kong Liyuan gave a thin, fleeting smile before continuing.

“She said… maybe.”

Li Qiao showed no reaction to that, as if the answer itself didn’t matter. She simply asked, “And what about you?”

“Me? What about me?”

“Do you love her? Or, put another way, how did her words make you feel?”

Kong Liyuan could feel the faint flicker of the blue flame playing across the side of her face. It was as if those three days—and everything that had happened since returning to Shanghai—were flowing silently through the air around her, seeping into every inch of her skin.

That stretch of memory was, for her, mostly fragmented and incomplete.

It was like a once-perfect mirror shattered into countless shards, scattered across the floor, each piece catching the light in a thousand different ways. Only fragments remained truly sharp.

After she got back, Li Qiao had told her it wasn’t her fault. Forgetting was perfectly normal. Even for anyone else, those three days from four years ago would have started to fade into vagueness over time.

Let alone for her.

Kong Liyuan remembered the Band-Aid she kept tearing at, the fistful of golden hair she clutched, forcing Fu Tingli to bite down until her tongue bled. She remembered the tears spilling from those hazel eyes, the kiss that choked the breath from her lungs until it hurt, the moment she nearly lost control and lunged for the steering wheel. She remembered every step taken through that blood-red dawn, and the searing pain of scrubbing away the tattoo after her return—the pain she used to force the memories to stick.

But even now, as she turned those events over and over in her mind, so many details had slipped away. All that lingered was the pain… and everything they had shared amid it.

If Fu Tingli hadn’t brought it up tonight, the word “love” never would have crossed her thoughts.

It felt far too foreign to her.

Compared to love, hate had always come far more easily.

There had once been someone who must have hated her with every fiber of her being. Sometimes that person would speak of guilt, claiming she ought to love her instead. Other times, she would suddenly slice open her own wrist and wrap her blood-slick fingers around Kong Liyuan’s throat.

In the end, amid roaring flames, that person had smiled in twisted delight and told her this: From the moment she was born, she had received too much love from the world—far more than her share. And so, she deserved to die in it.

Love, though, was far more difficult. It demanded that one give… and receive. Yet it blurred the line between blessing and curse.

Kong Yan would face the camera time and again, proclaiming her his most beloved daughter—his only one. He kept her in the glare of the flashbulbs, forever his perfect, flawless little girl.

But when she returned from California covered in wounds, Kong Yan had furrowed his brow at those photos, slamming a stack of them onto the table in fury. He declared he would never accept a daughter like that.

Jiang Man had probably loved her once, truly. But even that love had blurred amid her fading memories. Without the surviving images, Kong Liyuan might not even remember her face.

All she could recall was how, out of love that burned too fiercely, Jiang Man had lost control in a frenzied car crash. A sharp object pierced her body, and she slowly turned into a corpse right before Kong Liyuan’s eyes.

In the end, only Kong Liyuan had survived.

She often thought back to that night after the accident. White sheets draped over two bodies. Kong Yan and her uncle Du Wei stood before them, arguing in hushed, heated tones.

“You’re just here to grab a piece of the inheritance now, aren’t you?” Kong Yan spat. “Acting like you cared so much about your sister? Where were you when she had postpartum depression? You never spared a word for her—or her daughter! All fake concern!”

Du Wei jabbed a finger at Kong Yan’s nose. “Shameless! Who’s the real hypocrite here? Don’t think I don’t know about those heartless things you’ve done. Watch out—do too many rotten deeds, and karma will come for you!”

Kong Liyuan hugged her knees to her chest, huddled in endless darkness. She pressed repeatedly at the gauze on her wrist, watching the blood seep slowly through.

In that creeping ache, an incongruous thought surfaced: In the eyes of someone who despised her utterly, she had already claimed too much love from this world. She deserved to perish in it.

She had been too young back then, convinced that love should mirror the films she’d seen—or the versions she’d witnessed and endured firsthand.

Like “Even heaven and earth must one day end, yet this hate goes on without cease”: a madness without reason, a drunken frenzy, where loving or being loved felt like fire itself, reducing all that sticky intensity to a handful of pale blue ash.

Later, as she grew older, Kong Liyuan had played countless roles of love… and of its absence. The outwardly flippant but inwardly fierce and brave femme fatale; the desperate young mother clawing her way up from society’s dregs, only to be swept into becoming a killer; the outwardly perfect but inwardly repressed and unraveling young woman in a film about dysfunctional families; the steadfast, conservative police officer with a split personality…

Each time she stepped out of a role—each time she lived through someone else’s story and withdrew her soul back into her own—she couldn’t help circling back to that one moment.

As if she could still see those two white sheets, the cold pallor of the bodies beneath. As if she could see her ten-year-old self tugging those sheets even tighter with wet fingers that reeked of antiseptic, her face devoid of emotion as she wondered: Would it be better to pull one over herself? To lie down beside them?

The memories after that dissolved into nothing but cold white flickers, blurring into oblivion.

And so she emerged from those world-shaking tales, turning instead to reflect on the “loves” she herself had received.

Each time, that abstract notion she’d long understood etched itself a fraction deeper: Not everything was as beautiful as the stories made it seem.

Love was, from the start, an ugly, decaying thing—so profoundly selfish.

With a soft click, the lighter went out. The blue flame vanished, plunging the room back into silence.

Kong Liyuan released her grip on it. Her fingertips had gone numb.

The cigarette had burned down to the filter. She ground it out viciously, the pain bordering on senselessness.

And yet she smiled, not too lightly or too heavily, before murmuring softly,

“I can’t love her.”

Love was the one thing she could never give.