Jiang Qihuai bit down with a bit of force, making no sound, as if carrying some faint gloom, a little unhappiness and discontent.

The red light turned green. Tao Zhi pressed against him at the same time, pushing him away. Jiang Qihuai glanced at the traffic ahead, straightened up, and followed the flow of cars forward.

His originally lowered brows and eyes lifted slightly, and he seemed to be in a better mood.

Tao Zhi raised her hand and touched her lips with her fingertips. The pain had lessened, but it still felt a little numb.

“You bite people when you talk,” she said speechlessly. “Are you a dog?”

Jiang Qihuai said calmly, “I was just afraid you wouldn’t remember me.”

As the car drove along, the sky darkened at a speed visible to the naked eye. January was drawing to an end. With the New Year only half a month away, the streets had already been decorated with lantern strings shaped like firecrackers and red lanterns pasted with upside-down fu (福) characters. The festive air was strong.

Reminded by the sight, Tao Zhi thought of something. She turned her head, wanting to ask how he planned to spend this New Year.

Just as she was about to speak, her gaze landed on his cold and indifferent side profile. She hesitated and swallowed the words back down.

Grandpa Jiang was gone. She didn’t know what things were like in his family now—whether he would be spending the New Year alone.

Jiang Qihuai caught her movement from the corner of his eye. Looking straight ahead without turning, he said, “What is it?”

“Nothing,” Tao Zhi turned her head back, lazily leaning into the passenger seat and saying casually, “Doesn’t your master’s program take two years?”

“Normally it does,” Jiang Qihuai said. “But if you finish all your credits, you can graduate.”

Perhaps because Jiang Qihuai had always been the type of top-level genius, Tao Zhi had long grown used to it. So his good grades, skipping years through both university and graduate school, didn’t leave much impression on her. It wasn’t until she met the guy with the perm today that she suddenly realized—being able to complete two years of coursework at UPenn in less than a year was an unbelievably strong feat.

“In theory, it’s possible, but practically speaking, almost no one can do it,” she said with emotion. “How did you manage to graduate in under a year?”

Jiang Qihuai steered the wheel with one hand as he went up the overpass. “I didn’t rest.”

It took Tao Zhi a moment to react before asking, “You mean you were studying and working the whole time?”

Jiang Qihuai responded with a light “mm.”

Tao Zhi could hardly imagine it. She widened her eyes and asked, “Then how many hours do you sleep a day?”

“Three or four hours,” Jiang Qihuai said casually. “I’ve never slept much.”

Tao Zhi froze.

Even though there were a carload of words she wanted to say, she couldn’t ask anymore. She just couldn’t.

She didn’t know whether it was because of what he said, or because of the way he said it—so indifferent and unconcerned—that she suddenly felt her tongue as if rinsed with carbonated soda, stinging, bitter, and slightly fizzing.

Though he hadn’t said much, Tao Zhi could roughly imagine what his life had been like over these years. She had only guessed vaguely, yet she still had to stop herself in time from letting those mental images run any further.

She couldn’t think about it.

Whether he felt it was hard, whether he ever felt lonely, tired, or weary—all of it was something she couldn’t allow herself to think about.

After reuniting with him, Tao Zhi had never once asked Jiang Qihuai, “How have you been all these years?”

At first, she thought it was simply because she hadn’t thought of it. But at this moment, when she remembered the kind, faded smile of Grandpa Jiang in the cemetery, Tao Zhi suddenly understood.

It wasn’t that she had forgotten.

She had simply never dared to ask.

She was afraid of hearing him say that these past years hadn’t been good.

For the rest of the drive, Tao Zhi didn’t speak again.

During a brief stop to let another car pass, Jiang Qihuai turned his head and glanced at her. The girl was leaning against the window, eyes closed, her thick eyelashes casting a faint shadow. Her breathing was light and even, as if she were asleep.

When the car stopped, she almost startled awake.

“Are we home?” she asked, rubbing her eyes and stretching lazily.

Jiang Qihuai leaned over and reached out to unbuckle her seat belt. “Not eating?”

“Oh.” Tao Zhi mumbled vaguely, “I forgot.”

She opened the door and got out. The cold wind outside cleared her sleepy head. Standing by the street, she looked around before realizing where they were.

Following the street to the corner led to the night market. At the entrance was a convenience store, and further ahead was a barbecue shop—the one she had brought him to before.

Tao Zhi blinked. “Huh?”

Jiang Qihuai locked the car, casually tugged her scarf upward, and said, “Let’s go.”

Tao Zhi followed him to that barbecue shop. She hadn’t come here much after that time—she couldn’t even remember when she last did. Standing at the door, she glanced around.

The shop had doubled in size, probably having taken over the next unit. There were a few more waiters now; it was no longer just the owner bustling around the front.

Tao Zhi and Jiang Qihuai picked a seat by the wall and sat down. She watched as he ordered a plate of fried rice first.

It suddenly reminded her of high school—when she had brought him out for barbecue, and the boy hadn’t eaten anything else, only quietly ordered a plate of fried rice.

When the order was done, Jiang Qihuai handed the menu back to the waiter, then casually pulled two bottles of beer from the crate behind him. He popped them open and pushed one toward her.

Tao Zhi looked at him. “?”

“Still remember your habits,” Jiang Qihuai said. “Little drunkard.”

Barbecue meant beer—that was something she had told him herself back then.

Though she hadn’t drunk in years.

Tao Zhi hesitated only for a moment before decisively taking the bottle. She rinsed a glass clean and filled it to the brim.

Jiang Qihuai, needing to drive, didn’t drink. Tao Zhi, however, seemed to be enjoying herself. Maybe because she had abstained for so long, once he opened the floodgate, she couldn’t quite stop.

Her alcohol tolerance had always been poor.

After just two bottles, her eyelids were tinged red. Propping her chin with one hand and holding chopsticks in the other, she was struggling to poke off the head of a grilled shrimp on her plate.

Jiang Qihuai watched her fumble for a long time. “What are you doing?”

“I’m helping him take off his clothes,” Tao Zhi said.

“……”

Jiang Qihuai sighed, moved her shrimp to his own plate, pulled out a wet wipe to clean his hands, then picked up the shrimp between his fingers and peeled off the shell.

He tossed the peeled shrimp back into her bowl, then pulled out another clean wet wipe to wipe the sauce off his fingers.

Tao Zhi silently glanced at the shrimp in her bowl, then lifted her head to stare straight at him.

Jiang Qihuai finished wiping his fingers and looked up. “What’s wrong?”

Tao Zhi frowned at him and said in dissatisfaction, “Why did you take off my clothes?”

Jiang Qihuai: “……”

Expressionless, he picked up her half-finished beer by the neck and set it aside, then poured her a small cup of tea from the pot. “Drink tea.”

The tea at barbecue stalls was usually very light, barely tasting of tea at all—almost no different from warm water. But when Tao Zhi heard the word tea, she still wrinkled her nose. “I don’t like drinking tea.”

“Mm, depends on who you drink it with,” Jiang Qihuai said knowingly, raising his hand to call a waiter.

Tao Zhi’s mind was a little sluggish now, and she didn’t remember what she had once said to annoy him. For a moment, she didn’t understand what he meant.

She glanced disdainfully at the cup of tea, then saw the waiter approach carrying a small dish of honey and hand it to Jiang Qihuai.

Jiang Qihuai scooped two small spoonfuls of honey into her teacup, then set it back in front of her. “Now it’s sweet.”

Tao Zhi froze for a moment.

She held the small cup in her hands, stared at it for a while, then said slowly, “My friend said sweet tea is wrong—that it ruins the taste of the tea.”

Jiang Qihuai lowered his gaze and said casually, “It doesn’t matter. Drink it however you want. You don’t have to care about what’s right.”

Tao Zhi blinked at him.

A faint flush had already risen on her face from the alcohol—not just on her eyelids, but also on her nose and cheeks. She crossed her legs and suddenly said, out of nowhere, “I haven’t gotten drunk in a long time. The last time I did was after the college entrance exam banquet.”

Jiang Qihuai looked up, replying patiently, “It really has been a long time.”

Tao Zhi lifted her chin slightly and looked at him. “I went to find you that day, but I couldn’t find you.”

Jiang Qihuai paused.

Tao Zhi pushed the plate and cup in front of her away, lay down on the table, and repeated softly, “I didn’t find you. You were gone.”

Resting her chin on her arm, she tilted her head and began to recall, her voice slow and distant. “It was really hot that day, and there were so many mosquitoes. I just sat there”—she pointed vaguely forward—“sat there looking at the photos. You left me so many photos.”

She had looked at them for a long time.

His childhood, all the times she hadn’t been a part of; his precious secrets; the things he had hidden deep inside and never told anyone—his most important things.

When he left, he hadn’t taken them with him, as if those things no longer mattered to him.

Because they were no longer important, he had discarded them like something useless.

Because they were no longer important, he hadn’t wanted them anymore.

Tao Zhi suddenly lifted her head to look at him, her eyes slightly red, her voice catching uncontrollably with a hint of aggrieved resentment. “You didn’t even want the photos anymore—did you plan to never want me again, too?”

Jiang Qihuai looked at her. His throat moved, but no words came out.

It was as if his body, numb from sitting too long, had every limb, every bone, and even his heart pricked by countless fine needle tips—dense and thin—bringing with them a faint, tingling ache.

Jiang Qihuai didn’t know what kind of mindset he had back then.

On the day they parted, he had so many things he wanted to tell her, but in the end, not a single word made it out of his mouth.

He didn’t want her to wait. He wanted her to move forward freely, stride boldly toward a broader sky.

But if, by any chance, there was still the slightest trace of attachment in her heart—

If, by some one-in-ten-thousand chance, she suddenly, on a whim one day, turned around and looked back at him—

He had taken down the photos one by one, then put them back up one by one again, neatly aligned on the wall, patiently waiting for the person they belonged to—the person he wanted to wait for.

That was the hope he could never tell anyone about; the hand he refused to let go of no matter what; the last bit of darkness and selfishness he still clung to.

He wanted her to know: I like you this much.

That long before, even before they were together, before she liked him—he had already liked her all along.

In their relationship, the young Jiang Qihuai had always thought that Tao Zhi was the one in control.

She had dated before; she approached him with practiced ease, grew close to him naturally, and made him surrender without any effort.

That was why he chose to leave back then.

He thought he wasn’t that important to her. Jiang Qihuai had never known what it felt like to be someone’s most important person. Even with Jiang Qinghe, he knew very clearly that for Jiang Qinghe, the most important person had always been Jiang Zhi.

He hadn’t expected that there would truly be someone who thought of him as someone so important.

It was he who had done wrong.

He had completely underestimated—and dismissed—her determination and her sincere, wholehearted affection at that time.

Tao Zhi’s eyes were red, stubborn and unyielding as she looked at him, as if there were a thorn lodged in her heart—planted there on the day she got drunk—and ever since, she had stopped drinking.

Until now, getting drunk again, she was determined to pull it out.

But Jiang Qihuai didn’t know how to explain it to her clearly.

He couldn’t say anything. After a long silence, he finally spoke in a hoarse voice: “I wanted to leave them for you.”

Tao Zhi sniffled as she looked at him, then after a moment, hiccupped from the alcohol.

“You wanted me… to wait for you to come back?” she stammered.

“Yes,” Jiang Qihuai said. “But I hoped you wouldn’t wait for me.”

Tao Zhi looked at him, confused, unable to understand what he meant.

She struggled to organize her thoughts but couldn’t make sense of them.

In the end, she gave up, pouting in frustration, her voice muffled and choked. “But it’s been so, so long. You never came back. You never even wanted to come back.”

Jiang Qihuai’s gaze fell softly on her. His voice was low. “Zhizhi, every single day, I’ve wanted to come back to you sooner.”

So he had compressed his sleep to the bare minimum, and spent all the remaining hours studying and working.

During the days after he left her—even if it could have been just a month earlier, even just a day—he had wanted to come back sooner.

But he couldn’t be impatient.

Since he had already chosen this path, he could only keep walking toward the exit, never turning back, forcing himself to run harder, faster, all the way to the end of the road.

In the period after Jiang Qinghe’s death—perhaps for weeks, or maybe even longer—Jiang Qihuai had fallen into a dead end of despair and obsession.

The colors in his life had vanished too suddenly, too brutally, before he even had the chance to react. The world had already gone dark again.

He suddenly felt that the past ten-plus years of his life had been nothing but a joke.

He let himself be swallowed bit by bit by the swamp, too exhausted even to lift a finger to struggle anymore.

Until he received Ji Fan’s call.

Ji Fan told him that Tao Zhi hadn’t listened to her family and had gone to C University to study some strange major.

That she had spent almost all her allowance on an outrageously expensive camera and lenses.

That she was always running around the world with friends from her university club, taking all sorts of messy photos.

He said she’d enthusiastically joined a photography auction exhibition, full of confidence that her photo would be fought over by famous artists—feeling delighted, convinced that she was truly a genius photography girl.

That day, Jiang Qihuai sat at the edge of his bed, waiting until dawn. Then he lifted his head and saw the faint morning light outside the window.

He went to the photography auction Ji Fan had mentioned.

By then, he no longer knew how many sleepless nights he had endured. His condition, in every sense, was poor. He couldn’t even remember how he had followed the map to get there, nor could he clearly tell whether her photo had captured dusk or dawn.

He only knew—she had photographed two suns.

One hung distantly over the horizon of the sea, wrapped in rolling red clouds.

The other stepped upon the water, treading on light—and once again, it shone clearly into the murky swamp, walking toward him.