Chapter 3

Chapter 3

The instant the words left her mouth, the air seemed to freeze. Only the cicadas kept shrilling.

Something in my head snapped. I bit down hard on my lower lip, yanked off my delivery helmet, and gripped it in my hand before swinging it at Lin Hanyan like I had lost my mind.

If I swallowed this too, I might as well open a bun shop tomorrow and call myself a pushover for life.

My chest heaved violently as I cursed him out.

“Depression, huh? Pretending to be poor, huh? You like stabbing people where it hurts, huh?”

“No wonder your parents don’t love you, you animal. No wonder your dad beat your mom right in front of you. Why didn’t he beat you to death too?!”

“Today, I’ll do your damn father a favor and beat you to death myself!”

In the year Lin Hanyan and I had spent together, whether it had been an act or real feelings, we had once shown each other our softest wounds.

So I knew very well that the thing he could never let go of was his parents’ coldness and neglect, the fact that he had never experienced the love of family growing up.

And right now, that had become the weapon I used to attack and curse him.

Before either of them could react, I slammed the helmet into Lin Hanyan’s face several more times.

Overcome by rage, I gasped for breath. My long-term lack of rest made my head begin to spin.

The moment Shen Zhu brought up my younger brother, Jiang Qiluo, the sanity I had forced myself to maintain all afternoon shattered in an instant.

He was my reverse scale. No one was allowed to touch him.

Lin Hanyan still hadn’t fought back by the time Shen Zhu dragged me away.

He covered his mouth, his hands smeared with blood.

“Are you okay, Hanyan? I’m calling the police right now!”

“That crazy bitch has a death wish! How dare she hit you?! In a minute, I’ll have my dad-”

Shen Zhu’s furious voice was thick with tears, but Lin Hanyan grabbed her hand and shook his head.

“Don’t. Please.”

“This is… what I owe her.”

He straightened the hair I had messed up, then got to his feet and walked over to me.

He took a gold card from his pocket and handed it to me.

“The password is your birthday. I know there’s no fixing this anymore, but… forget it. I’m sorry.”

I let out a cold laugh. When I looked into his eyes, there was nothing left but ice and hatred.

“Die soon.”

I yanked the gold card hard from between his fingers, left him with those two words, and turned away.

There were seven hundred and seventy thousand yuan on the card.

After asking the boss of the outsourced delivery company to settle my wages, I quit.

My one-bedroom apartment was only twenty-three square meters. One glance was enough to take in the whole place.

Back then, Lin Hanyan and I had moved out of the dorm because he said the physical symptoms of his depression were getting worse, and he wanted me to stay with him every day.

At first, it wasn’t that I had no guard up against Lin Hanyan, who had barged into my life with nothing but reckless courage. But when I saw that he suffered from the same illness as my younger brother, my heart softened after all. I got confused.

For a while, even I couldn’t tell whether what I had felt for him was mostly love, or whether it had come from the endless guilt I felt toward my brother, a desperate need to make up for something.

All I knew was that I had been frantic, obsessive, wanting to help Lin Hanyan recover from depression.

As if, by doing so, the nightmare I couldn’t escape would ease a little.

Come to think of it, after a year, there was no small amount of stuff.

But all the matching couple items we had bought together were too glaring. In the end, I simply threw them all into the trash.

Listening to the whir of the old air conditioner, I stared at the ceiling. Slowly, I slipped free from the endless labor that had consumed my days and nights, and fell into a deep sleep.

In my dream, I no longer knew how many times I had seen Jiang Qiluo lying in that bathtub.

Drained of all color, he lay in a pool of crimson liquid. His entire body was pale as a porcelain doll, without warmth, without breath.

A pill bottle had toppled beside his dangling fingertips. His long lashes rested half-closed, curved just like they had been on countless nights when he waited for me to finish studying and dozed off.

Only this time, those eyes would never open again. He would never rub his sleepy eyes and ask when his big sister was going to bed.

On his phone, he had cleared every chat record with everyone. In the end, he left only one sentence for me: “Sis, I’m sorry.” And a transfer of 3,569.81 yuan.

That was all the money he had.

That year, spring was at its height, and Jiang Qiluo, a child blessed by the heavens, left in the finest season.

And I was trapped forever in that spring.