Old Snow is Hard to Melt

Qiu Yiran was twenty-six that year when she used all her savings to acquire a taxi. She drove it day and night picking up fares everywhere, but the moment passengers got in and spotted the disability marker on the taxi, most of them turned around and got right back out.

Someone asked her why she didn’t try something else. She rubbed her left leg, which ached to the point of numbness, and smiled good-naturedly. “I’ve done other things.”

Li Wuhui was twenty-four that year when she took the stage at a Major Fashion Show as the opening model. She shot to fame in one go, sweeping through major fashion weeks to become the undisputed “runway queen.” Her mixed-race face carried an innate hazy allure and ended up on the covers of magazines sold around the globe. Everyone in the fashion world knew her name.

For a long time, the two women had no connection.

Occasionally, while Qiu Yiran drove her taxi picking up fares, she would catch sight of Li Wuhui’s alluring face on a magazine stand and steal a few extra glances.

But from some day onward—

Qiu Yiran encountered something strange.

A few days every month, a woman who was dead drunk would hurl stones at the window of her rental apartment—the one that had already been broken and never fixed.

In the dead of night, the stones clattered loudly.

When she pushed open the window and looked down, she always saw the woman’s hair tousled by the wind, her indifferent gaze, and her bloodless thin lips.

She was quite beautiful—a bold, intense beauty that dared to love and hate with wild abandon.

—It was Li Wuhui.

Qiu Yiran tried covering her ears to ignore it, to not look, but she couldn’t hold out. She could only grab her old jacket, prop herself up slowly on her crutch, go downstairs, pick up the high heels and bag the woman had casually tossed by the roadside, and help her into the taxi.

Her friends here didn’t understand the fashion world and asked who this woman was.

She scrubbed the taxi inside and out until it gleamed, helped Li Wuhui inside, then limped through a puddle, head lowered as she smiled casually.

“Sort of a friend. The kind we’ve broken up with.”

【That was in Paris, amid a snowfall so old it refused to melt even now.】