Chapter 68
—The things that happened back then, if you want to know, I can tell you.
The moment she dazedly opened her eyes, Jian Xin saw the message from Yan Lu. She instantly felt much more energetic and replied right away.
Yan Lu didn’t reply in a second like she usually did.
Jian Xin rubbed her eyes and glanced at the time Yan Lu had sent the message—seven-thirty in the morning!
Oh, she just went to sleep this morning, then it’s fine!
It was eleven now, and Yan Lu had only slept for less than four hours. She probably wouldn’t wake up until the afternoon.
With this thought, Jian Xin got up and washed up, then wandered around the kitchen.
It wasn’t the holidays yet, so she was the only idle person at home.
Huang He had left a bowl of egg fried rice in the kitchen, which was the lunch she had prepared for Jian Xin in advance.
Jian Xin heated the egg fried rice in the microwave for two minutes, took a piece of fermented tofu from the refrigerator, and sat at the table, eating while scrolling through her phone.
After finishing a bowl of fried rice, she washed the bowl and chopsticks, then lay back on her bed and took a comfortable nap.
She felt that she was in a very good mood.
It was a feeling of relief.
Although Yan Lu had not yet woken up, and they had not started to talk about anything, Jian Xin just felt that the knot hidden deep in their hearts might be untied today.
So she had a dream.
In the dream, she had learned to swim, and she and Yan Lu had gone to the beach.
The little Corgi with a tail was chasing a little duck with flapping wings, leaving a string of small maple leaves and plum blossoms on the beach, deep and shallow, with a brilliant smile.
The dream ended quickly. Jian Xin suddenly had a whim, picked up her phone, and searched for swimming lessons in Jincheng.
She had swum so many times when she was a duck. She thought that now she was no longer afraid, and she should be able to learn some things that she could never learn before, right?
Yan Lu woke up a little after three in the afternoon.
After waking up, she sent a message to Jian Xin, saying that she would first go downstairs to walk the dog, get something to eat, and then come back to talk to her in detail.
Jian Xin was not in a hurry, just held her phone and waited patiently on her bed.
Perhaps because she had woken up a little late, Yan Lu was too lazy to cook for herself, so she took Xin Xin and Cauliflower and casually found a beef restaurant near the community and sat down.
A short while later, Jian Xin received a picture of beef noodles from Yan Lu, as well as a silly picture of Xin Xin on the floor, looking very greedy.
It was a little after four when Yan Lu returned home.
The two of them sat in front of their computers, wearing headphones, and connected on a voice call.
“I took a look at the old account last night.” This was the first thing Yan Lu said.
“Mmm,” Jian Xin replied. “I guessed.”
“I’ve said it before, I don’t hate you.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“I also knew about your family giving my dad two hundred thousand before you told me.”
“Is that so…” Jian Xin was taken aback for a moment and asked curiously, “Did my mom tell you?”
“I heard it myself,” Yan Lu laughed. “Your house’s soundproofing is just so-so. It’s not very suitable for raising very noisy small animals.”
“…” That’s true.
When she has money to buy a house in the future, the decoration must use the best soundproofing materials, so that Xin Xin and Cauliflower won’t disturb the neighbors in the middle of the night.
“What happened back then, I was the one who broke the promise first. I know you can’t get over it, but I also have my grievances,” Yan Lu said, opening her thermos, looking at the steam rising from the cup, and sorting out her thoughts, she continued, “At that time, something happened that made me particularly at a loss. I had thought of facing it with you, but your attitude made me feel that it was unnecessary.”
“…” Unnecessary?
“It’s not that I felt you weren’t worthy. At that time, I was the one who felt I wasn’t worthy,” Yan Lu said with a bitter laugh. “In the days I was looking for you, I was alone in the homestay, and I kept thinking, and thinking—what kind of person were you in the past?”
“In my heart, you have always been a person who is not afraid of anything. I always feel that no trouble can make you retreat, and no matter how many difficulties, you can always solve them with ease,” she said. “But how come one day, you were no longer the person you used to be.”
“…Because I’ve never been as amazing as you imagined.”
“I know, but I only found out after a long time.”
Yan Lu said that many times, a person just can’t figure some things out at the moment, and it takes a long, long time, looking back, to understand a little bit.
At that time, she just felt that Jian Xin should be like that.
If she suddenly wasn’t, it must be her problem.
She had turned Jian Xin into that state. She was the only trouble in Jian Xin’s world that could not be solved.
She thought that she was stuck in the mud, and it was Jian Xin who had pulled her up.
But in fact, she was the mud, and she had dragged Jian Xin down.
She said that the Yan Lu of that year had not resented Jian Xin.
Even if she had heard the most hurtful words, she had only hated herself, for dragging the sun into the winter night, and pulling the moon into a black hole.
From then on, even the only light was covered in dust because of her.
So, she had lost the courage to face everything with Jian Xin.
“What exactly happened that year?” Jian Xin asked, suppressing the sourness in her heart and tentatively asking.
Yan Lu took a deep breath and let it out heavily.
She started to talk about what had happened that year.
The Yan Lu of that year was full of anticipation, wanting to go and see Jian Xin’s concert.
But a sudden accident had shattered all her plans.
Yan Guihong was dead. He had fallen into a river after getting drunk, and when he was found, he was already pale and swollen.
But what did that have to do with her?
That was just a person who had sold her a long time ago. She had never thought that she would have any interaction with him in this lifetime.
But that was what she thought, and it didn’t mean that others also thought so.
Yan Guihong’s parents, that is, her grandparents, and those messy relatives, were too lazy to help him when he was alive, but now that he was dead, they wanted to skin him and pull out his tendons, and squeeze out his last inch of flesh and blood.
So they remembered, Yan Guihong’s daughter who had been “sold” to a rich family in the city.
Yan Lu didn’t know what these people were up to, and she didn’t know what methods they had used, but they had actually contacted her through her current school and insisted that she go back to give Yan Guihong a final send-off.
She had said over and over again on the phone that she would not go back, and the relatives on the other end of the line had threatened to come and find her and settle the accounts of raising her for so many years.
She was so scared at that time that she didn’t even dare to turn on her phone for several days and only dared to communicate with Jian Xin on the computer.
Those relatives did not come to her in the end.
Perhaps they felt that the travel expenses were too expensive, and the accommodation was also expensive, and they didn’t want to spend this wasted money.
Three days had passed, and Yan Lu had not seen any more news from her family, and she was a little relieved.
She thought that Yan Guihong had been dead for so many days and should have been buried, and she had escaped this ordeal.
But it turned out that Yan Lu had thought things were too simple.
On the fifth day after Yan Guihong’s death was reported, she woke up to find that her work was full of various small accounts, and in the comment section, they were posting things like “raising a daughter in old age and not sending her off,” “unfilial daughter,” “heartless,” and “ungrateful wolf.”
When she checked the IP, they were all in Nanjiang.
The passing readers kept asking questions, and she was in a panic, but besides reporting the comments and waiting for the administrator to delete them, she couldn’t do anything else.
Those comments were deleted and then came back, and their tone became more and more agitated.
They were making up some groundless accusations, saying that her family had worked so hard to raise her and send her to school in the city, but she had attached herself to a rich family and had forgotten her roots after going to university.
Faced with the endless malice in the comment section, and the curious and gossipy look of her familiar readers, she seemed to have returned to many years ago, the moment she had seen Yan Guihong chasing her downstairs from Jian Xin’s house.
Many people were watching on the side, watching that rotten person drag her home.
They clearly didn’t know anything, but they also seemed to feel that she should be wrong because of Yan Guihong’s words.
Her hands and feet were cold, so cold that it was as if something was wrapped around her body, constantly dragging her into the depths of a cold pond.
Why?
Why did these people find her school, and why did they know her pen name…
She didn’t know, she couldn’t figure it out.
So many years had passed, and she thought that she had long since escaped that place, but she had never thought that she had already escaped so far, and she would still be entangled by everything she had once hated.
This time, even Jian Xin was not by her side.
Had the Yan Lu of that year thought of telling Jian Xin about this?
She had.
But every time she opened Jian Xin’s chat interface, she would think—what is Jian Xin doing at this moment?
The band’s concert is about to start, and Jian Xin must be working hard to rehearse the program.
If she were to bother Jian Xin with such troubles, it would make things very difficult for Jian Xin, right?
Yes, that was what Yan Lu had thought at that time.
She could feel that their relationship was becoming more and more fragile, so she had carefully maintained that shaky relationship, and she didn’t dare to let Jian Xin see even a hint of her own weakness and shame.
But there were no friends in the dorm with whom she could talk about her feelings.
So she had cried for a long time at the screen full of undeletable comments, cried until her heart was pounding, she had difficulty breathing, and her fingers were stiff and numb.
So uncomfortable, so uncomfortable that she didn’t know what was the point of living like this.
But in the end, she still mustered up her courage and wanted to solve this matter by herself.
She had given her “family” a call and asked them to stop this malicious rumor-mongering.
They didn’t think they were spreading rumors, just that she was a real ungrateful wolf.
For the sake of peace, she chose to go back for a trip and deal with this matter.
She thought, there were still a few days before Jian Xin’s concert.
She would go back to Liang County for a trip, deal with these messy things, and then immediately go back to Yuecheng to catch the plane to the Capital. It should be in time.
So she had bought a plane ticket back to Nanjiang and had immediately taken a car to Liang County.
Those familiar and unfamiliar relatives, although they seemed to have a kind smile on their faces, were all detestable.
Yan Guihong had been dead for six days, and because they had not been able to agree on who would handle the funeral, it was only when Yan Lu arrived that he was moved from the hospital to the funeral home.
This person, no one respected him when he was alive, and no one respected him when he was dead.
Yan Lu passed by the coffin and inadvertently glanced at the ugly corpse, without a trace of sympathy, just feeling that he deserved it.
The farewell hall of the funeral home, as well as the costs of cremation and buying a grave, were all paid for by her, his daughter.
The funeral money was collected by her second uncle.
These relatives had changed their attitude from the phone and online, and had praised her a lot to the outside world, saying that she was now studying at a very good university in a big city, and would definitely have a bright future, and would be a child who would earn a lot of money.
This kind of glory, which had nothing to do with them, they also had to take a share of.
What was she thinking in her heart at that time?
Too much time had passed, and Yan Lu also couldn’t quite remember.
She just felt that it was very disgusting, every part of it was very disgusting.
She followed the Taoist priest that her family had hired, and in a small room with many candles lit, she knelt and kowtowed, and finally returned to the mourning hall and drank a cup of tea.
The mourning hall was very noisy, and many people were playing mahjong loudly. She came to the outside of the mourning hall, took a small stool, and sat in a relatively quiet place, from day to night.
There were also many strangers outside, chatting in groups of three or five. She was not interested at all, just looked up at the stars in the sky quietly.
She couldn’t quite understand why she was here.
When she opened her article’s backstage, all the comments that had come to cause trouble had been deleted by the administrator, and the comments that were still asking “what happened” had also been cleared for the reason of “not related to the chapter content.”
It was as if nothing had happened.
She breathed a sigh of relief, but she also felt that there was something still pressing on her heart, and she couldn’t escape.
On the day Yan Guihong was cremated, she held the small urn, and in the funeral procession, she walked obediently through the motions, like a puppet on a string, her whole body numb from head to toe.
In the end, her nightmare was buried.
When no one was paying attention, she stomped on the grave mound a few times, as if she were shouting something silently.
—You’re dead, so be quiet, and don’t come and disturb my life anymore.
“And then?” Jian Xin asked cautiously.
She knew that things would not be so simple.
Her guess was not wrong, and things were indeed not so simple.
Yan Lu told her with a soft laugh that later, she had bought a high-speed train ticket from Nanjiang back to Yuecheng for that day, and just as she was about to go and catch the car from Liang County to Nanjiang, she was stopped by her relatives.
She was caught.
It wasn’t that she was tied up, but there were too many of them, and she couldn’t explain it clearly, and she didn’t know how to escape, so she was taken back to her grandparents’ house.
So many people, all talking at once about the inheritance.
Although Yan Guihong was a drunkard who was so poor that he had to mooch off his various relatives, he had a house and a shop under his name that would distribute money regularly.
These were all things that his grandparents had bought for him before he had become addicted to alcohol and gambling, and now it was time to divide them up.
But there were a lot of people in the family, and how to divide them was another problem.
They were so noisy, and they argued until their faces were red.
Yan Lu was too anxious, so anxious that she just wanted to escape quickly.
Her second uncle saw her anxiety and told her to write a statement voluntarily giving up her inheritance.
She wrote it without a second thought.
She didn’t want a single penny of this broken family’s money. It would be disgusting to spend it even if she got it.
But she hadn’t expected that after she had written this thing, signed her name, and pressed her fingerprint, her relatives’ faces had instantly changed.
They started to settle the accounts of raising her for so many years and wanted her to spit it all out.
She said that she was still a student and didn’t have much money, and those people started to shout that they would go and find her new parents in Nanjiang.
She was terrified and just wanted to escape.
So she had some physical altercations with them.
Someone had broken her phone, taken her ID card, and had also locked her in a room.
She had never been so desperate. No matter how she cried and shouted, no one cared about her emotions.
She really wanted someone to come and save her.
She thought of Jian Xin, and she also thought of her aunt and uncle.
But she was also afraid that if this kind of trouble appeared again, she would become a complete burden in Jian Xin’s and her aunt and uncle’s hearts.
The only people in this world who were willing to take her in and treat her well, if they always had to clean up these messes for her, they would probably also think that she was a bottomless pit that could not be filled, right?
She seemed to be able to only solve these things by herself.
So in extreme fear, she accepted this fate.
She used the money she had saved in three years to plug those greedy hearts.
On the day she escaped from Liang County, she looked at the broken phone in her hand, and besides fear, there was still fear in her heart.
She seemed to be unable to escape, no matter where she escaped to.
She had gone to school in Nanjiang, and after she graduated, it was not very difficult to find out where she had gone to.
Her pen name, besides Jian Xin, her good high school roommates also knew.
Her roommates knew, and it was hard to say if her roommates’ friends would know. She had no way of knowing who had spread the news.
As long as she still had a trace of her past, those people would always have a way to find her again.
She had escaped this time, then what about next time?
And so, with these messy fears, she took a bus and swayed all the way to Nanjiang.
She looked up at the purplish-red sunset, and thought of the date of that day, and the promise between them.
She thought, it’s too late.
She had missed the most important day for Jian Xin.
But she was in no mood to be sad or regretful.
Fear and after-fear continued to fill her whole person. She dazedly bought a ticket back to Yuecheng, back to school, back to her dorm, opened the laptop on her bed, and stared at the long string of anxious questions, in a daze for a long, long time.
Finally, she sent a simple message to Jian Xin.
After that, she had been thinking about a problem.
Should she tell Jian Xin about this or not.
She hadn’t come up with an answer, and Jian Xin had given her one.
—Their shaky relationship had probably long since been unable to bear any accidents.
So she had left, without looking back.
Yan Lu said that when she had suddenly left everything behind, it was not just to escape a person, but also to escape all of her past.
On the morning she had left the homestay with her suitcase, she had thought about whether she should find a quiet place to die.
But she found that she still didn’t want to die.
So she wanted to live again.
To let go of everything from the past, to go to a place where no one could recognize her, and to reshape her life.
“You’re right, you’re just an ordinary person. You’ll be in pain, you’ll be tired, and you can help me once, but you can’t help me for a lifetime,” Yan Lu said with a laugh. “I don’t need to treat you as an omnipotent existence. You’ve already been made so tired by me, and I don’t need to drag you down anymore.”
She said, and her words were also tinged with a hint of a show-off-like pride. “You see, the person who seemed to be unable to live without you in the past can actually take good care of herself.”
She said that she was actually very competitive.
This time, she had won.
What she had won was that from now on, she no longer had to look up to a person with insecurity.
Even after losing for a long, long time, she had never regretted her choice back then.
After Jian Xin had listened, she sniffed, and bit her lower lip to hold back a choke.
She didn’t know what kind of expression she should have at this moment.
Back then, when Yan Lu was at her most helpless, she had said those most hurtful words.
When a person needed her the most, she had only cared about her own grievances and had not been by her side.
Now that so much time had passed, what should she say?
It seemed that all words had become pale at this moment.
Only the words that fell from Yan Lu’s lips were so painless and itchless, as if the past pains had really been scattered by the wind.
Perhaps, they had really been scattered.
So they could finally say the words they hadn’t been able to say that year.
After a brief silence, Jian Xin’s emotions gradually calmed down, and only then did she say with a laugh, “Then congratulations.”
Yan Lu: “Just congratulations?”
Jian Xin: “Mmm… did those people ever come to you again?”
“No,” Yan Lu said. “If they do, I will sue them for blackmail and publicly declare that I have never owed them anything. What I should have paid back and what I shouldn’t have, I have already paid back all of it back then.”
“You’ve really become a lot tougher,” Jian Xin couldn’t help but sigh.
Yan Lu: “Yeah, if I had had this temper back then, you definitely wouldn’t have been able to stand it, right?”
Jian Xin: “Maybe.”
Yan Lu: “I knew it.”
Jian Xin: “But I can stand it now.”
Yan Lu: “So?”
Jian Xin thought for a long time, took three deep breaths, and finally mustered up the courage to ask softly, “So can we start over?”
Tears almost blurred her eyes in that instant.
From knowing each other, to being with each other, to being apart, and after seven years of separation, they had met again after all the twists and turns.
You’ve changed, and I’ve changed too.
A lifetime is not long, and it’s not short either. We remember many things, and we’ve also forgotten many things.
The fleeting years will always silently share many of the sorrows of a sad person.
The one after another of sunsets and moonrises have brought us to an age where we no longer worry and care so much.
I’m sorry that in the years I was with you, I had too, too many immaturities.
But those are all in the past.
Do we still have a chance to start over?
This time, let me chase you.
You, who once had the courage to let go of everything, can you give me a little more courage?
I want to try again with you.
—I always feel that our story has never ended.
The end of the story should be us going to see the sea together, us having a big villa together…
Or we walk into a bookstore, and the shop is playing my song, and your book is on display.
And also Xin Xin and Cauliflower, they’re so cute. I want to raise them with you, always, always together…
As Jian Xin was talking, her eyes were already unable to see anything.
She still wanted to say something, but a soft “okay” came from her ear.
Jian Xin: “Okay?”
Yan Lu: “Mmm.”
Jian Xin: “…Is that, the meaning of starting over?”
Yan Lu: “Mmm.”
“Then, then then then…” Jian Xin was suddenly a little nervous. “Then are you going home to see them this year? My parents have actually been missing you.”
Yan Lu: “Okay.”
Jian Xin: “Is it really okay?!”
Yan Lu: “If you don’t believe me, then forget it.”
Jian Xin: “I believe you!!!”
She shouted loudly.
The moment her words fell, she couldn’t help but laugh and cry.
How could it be like this? It was all like a dream.
The wish she had made on her last birthday had actually come true?
She hadn’t even had time to be happy when she heard a duck’s quack from the other end of the voice call.
So magical, she had been intermittently turning into a duck for over a year, and she hadn’t been able to learn even a single word of duck language.
But for a moment, she felt that she understood what that little duck was quacking about.
It seemed to be complaining to her, and also reminding her.
—Aiyo, I’m so tired!
This time you have to hold on tight, if you let go again, I won’t care anymore!
She thought, how could she possibly let go again?
They had already agreed, it was for a lifetime.
(End of main text)
