Chapter 1

Chapter 1

When my phone lit up at 1:17 in the morning, I was sitting on a bench in a hospital corridor.

A weather alert popped up on the screen: Rain is expected soon in a place you often visit. Please avoid low-lying roads.

I stared at the words “a place you often visit,” and something seemed to clench around my heart. It wasn’t my office, it wasn’t my home, and it wasn’t the hospital. It was a cemetery at the foot of a mountain in the south of the city.

Then a second message appeared.

The sender was Xu Nanzhi.

She wrote: Liang Yanzhou, I don’t think I can hold on much longer.

I shot to my feet, my knee slamming into the edge of the bench. The pain was so sharp my vision went black for a moment.

Xu Nanzhi was my wife.

Two years ago today, she left me.

I had repeated that sentence countless times in therapy, like reciting a medical record that belonged to someone else. My doctor had me say it while looking into a mirror, write it down, set reminders for myself around the anniversary of her death every year.

But every time her name appeared on my screen, I still forgot.

I forgot the cold date carved on her gravestone. Forgot how light her urn had been. Forgot that when our daughter Xiaoman first called out “Mommy,” there had been only a photograph in front of her.

I grabbed my coat and ran.

The nurse on duty called after me, “Mr. Liang, you haven’t picked up your follow-up results yet!”

I didn’t look back.

The rain had already started falling, washing the tiles outside the hospital entrance until they gleamed. I stood by the curb trying to hail a car, my fingers shaking so badly I couldn’t even tap the app open. When the driver asked where I was going, I gave him my home address, then changed my mind after the car pulled away.

“No. Take me to Wutongli.”

Wutongli was the old residential complex where Nanzhi and I had lived after we got married.

It was also the place where she had sent me her last message.

The first time I met Xu Nanzhi, it wasn’t in some romantic setting.

That day, I had gone to the psychiatry department to pick up medication for my mother. At the entrance, a girl was crouched in front of a vending machine, earnestly reasoning with a can of orange soda that had gotten stuck.

“You’ve already taken my money,” she said. “You can’t do this to people.”

Of course, a vending machine wasn’t a person, and it couldn’t be reasoned with.

I watched her for a while, then walked over and slapped the side of the machine. The soda dropped with a thunk. She looked up at me, her eyes bright, as if they had just been rinsed clean by the rain.

“Thanks.” She handed me the soda. “I’ll give you half.”

I said, “How do you split one can?”

She thought about it. “Then you take the first sip, and I’ll drink what’s left.”

Only later did I learn that she had just come out of the consultation room that day, a diagnosis of severe depression with anxiety tucked inside her bag. She smiled as if nothing was wrong, but her cuffs were buttoned up tight. Even in summer, she refused to roll up her sleeves.

We truly got to know each other because of a stray cat named Doubao.

Every evening, Nanzhi would go to the alley behind the hospital to feed it. During the time my mother was hospitalized, I often smoked downstairs and watched her crouch by the wall, pouring cat food into a disposable lunch box.

When she petted the cat, she was very gentle. She called it “Teacher.”

I asked her why.

She said, “Because it knows how to live better than I do. When it’s hungry, it meows. When it’s cold, it crawls into a cardboard box. When it doesn’t feel well, it hides. It doesn’t pretend it can endure anything just so other people won’t worry.”

I didn’t understand back then.

I just thought she was interesting.

Many years later, I finally realized that those words hadn’t been a joke. They were a cry for help she had handed to the world.

Unfortunately, I saw it far too late.