The reason Lin Xun never connected Grandmother Jiang with Shen Yu was simple: the two of them had completely different temperaments. The old woman had lived a hard life, but she carried herself with an easy, unhurried calm — cheerful, talkative, the kind of person who filled a room.
Shen Yu was another matter entirely.
Before the accident or after, Lin Xun had never once thought of him as someone who could be described as cheerful or talkative.
Take right now: he was still standing inside the doorway, barely holding to the formality of it, but his face made no effort to hide his irritation at being made to receive a stranger. He didn’t even bother pretending otherwise.
Grandmother Jiang noticed the look and gave Lin Xun an apologetic smile. “This is my grandson. His eyesight is poor, so don’t take it personally — he’s not trying to be rude. No need to feel uncomfortable.”
Then she nudged him with her elbow and dropped her voice. “She’s a neighbor from the same building. Can you not look like a corpse…” She turned back to Lin Xun, as if the thought had only just occurred to her. “Oh, right — what’s your name, dear?”
Lin Xun wasn’t used to this kind of warmth. “…My last name is Lin.”
The words had barely left her mouth when the figure standing indifferently in the entryway suddenly lifted his head in her direction. Lin Xun found herself looking directly into those blank, unseeing eyes, and for a moment she went still.
Before she could react, Grandmother Jiang extended the invitation again. “Little Lin, what a coincidence — you’re right upstairs! Isn’t that fate? Stay for dinner. I’m making braised pork ribs today—” She stopped mid-sentence and smacked herself on the forehead. “—Oh no, I forgot to take the ribs out of the freezer. What is wrong with my memory. Xiao Yu, keep our guest company.”
With that, she bustled off toward the kitchen, leaving her blind grandson and this complete stranger to stare at each other across the entryway.
“…”
That old woman had nerves of steel.
Lin Xun looked down at the pair of pink cotton slippers on the floor, hesitated for two seconds, then quietly stepped into them and pulled the iron door shut behind her.
She had one truly crippling social weakness: she could not say no to elderly people. Especially women over seventy.
Back when she used to work the barbecue stall with her grandmother, she’d faced down drunk men looking for a fight and local thugs angling for a free meal. At sixteen, seventeen years old, Lin Xun could pick up a beer bottle and stare them down without flinching.
But a shrewd old woman who ate her fill and then picked at the bill — that, she could never handle. She always looked the other way.
Cheng Meng used to tease her about it: “Bad people get old too, you know.”
Lin Xun knew she was right. She still couldn’t harden herself against it.
Her grandmother had been one of the rare clear-headed women in Shanglin Village, Qi’nan. The whole village respected her; whenever neighbors had a dispute, they came to her to settle it.
But in the first years after they moved to Zhoushan, that same grandmother would stand in the street for hours arguing over a single green onion, two pieces of ginger, a few spare coins. She would plant herself outside a fabric shop for an entire day just to return a pilling bolt of cloth.
Every scrap of dignity she shed — it all added up. A bag of milk every day. A set of textbooks every semester. Two pairs of sneakers every year.
Lin Xun put her canvas shoes in the shoe cabinet and turned around.
There in the entryway stood Grandmother Jiang’s “blind grandson” — hands in his pockets, handsome face cold, waiting to “entertain” her.
“Uh…”
She had absolutely no idea how to break the ice with this particular statue.
Since he hadn’t been kicked out by the landlord, there didn’t seem to be any real need for an “old classmates reunite” moment.
With everyone she’d known at No. 1 High School — everyone except Cheng Meng — Lin Xun had long since filed them all under “strangers.” It kept the unnecessary social entanglements to a minimum.
After a beat, it was Shen Yu who spoke first. “Give me the bag. I’ll hang it up.”
He reached out as he said it.
Lin Xun assumed he was just going through the motions at his grandmother’s behest, and waved him off. “I’ve got it, thanks. Where do I—”
She didn’t finish the question. Her eyes had already found the row of wooden hooks mounted along the entryway wall, one of which currently held Grandmother Jiang’s reusable shopping bag.
The problem was that the hooks were at an absurd height.
Lin Xun rose onto her toes and stretched her arm up. Her fingertips flailed at a point three or four centimeters below the hook for a long, determined moment, then dropped back down in defeat.
“…”
After half a minute of quiet embarrassment, she cleared her throat as if nothing had happened — and only then noticed that Shen Yu’s outstretched hand had never moved.
Lin Xun raised an eyebrow.
He’d known she wouldn’t reach it. How else could he have been so certain before she even tried?
It wasn’t as though she was short. She was 166 centimeters, and the hook had been a mere three centimeters beyond her absolute tiptoe limit. If she’d worn heels today, she would have made it.
Was this the legendary art of echolocation?
Could he really gauge her height from sound alone, accurate down to the centimeter?
Lin Xun blinked. A genuine respect stirred in her chest. It seemed like something close to a superpower.
She calmly placed the canvas bag into his outstretched palm. “Thanks for the trouble.”
To his credit, Shen Yu made absolutely no comment on her optimistic attempt.
He took the bag, reached up with an easy, unhurried motion, found the upper edge of the iron door by touch, and hung the bag on the hook without a single fumble. Then he turned and walked inside on those long legs, expression unchanged.
“…”
She had just been thoroughly shown up by someone who made it look effortless.
When she followed him into the living room, Lin Xun found the apartment in considerably better shape than the last time she’d seen it.
The sofa was draped in a soft pink floral cover, the kind elderly people invariably favor. A walnut-toned dining table sat in the corner, flanked by a few elegant phalaenopsis orchids. Pothos vines hung from the ceiling in thick, trailing clusters, lush and full.
It was clear that since Grandmother Jiang’s return, the quality of life here had improved quite a bit. Set against nothing in particular, the place was genuinely warm and comfortable.
Shen Yu led her to the sofa with practiced ease, navigating the apartment with only a few light touches to the walls to orient himself. The fluency of it made obvious that he had lived here for many years.
They settled at opposite ends of the sofa with a generous stretch of cushion between them.
Lin Xun tended toward silence in situations like this, and now that she’d decided not to reveal that she knew him, she had even less to say. Her attention drifted instead to Shen Yu, studying him with quiet curiosity.
Nine years. It had been nine years since she’d last seen him.
Whatever else might be said, his face had not suffered any dramatic changes.
If anything, the years had only refined him. There was something arresting in his looks now, a quality that drew the eye and held it.
He sat with his long legs bent, both hands rummaging through the tea table drawer.
The electric fan swept back and forth beside him, occasionally catching the hem of his t-shirt and billowing it up.
After a moment, those slender fingers surfaced from the drawer with a packet of green tea.
Lin Xun realized he meant to brew some for her. “Don’t go to the trouble,” she said. “I’m fine with water.”
She actually liked tea quite a bit, but making a blind person wait on her sat uncomfortably on her conscience, thick-skinned as she could be.
Young Master Shen, however, didn’t so much as glance up. He felt along the tea table for a glass infuser jar, and tipped the leaves in.
His fingers traveled a short distance further, traced halfway around the body of the electric kettle, closed steadily around the handle, tilted it over the jar’s opening, and pressed the switch.
The whole sequence was smooth and unhurried, without a single wasted motion.
When the water was poured, he fitted the lid onto the jar, nudged it toward the center of the table, then leaned back against the sofa with a loose, careless ease, put in his earphones, and picked up his phone.
The message was clear: I’ll pour what I pour, it’s no trouble at all, drink it or don’t.
“…”
She wasn’t sure whether her words had stung his pride. Then again, he had always been exactly that type — tell him he can’t do something, and he’ll make a point of doing it in front of you.
Lin Xun was genuinely a little thirsty, so she didn’t overthink it and poured herself a cup.
The tea was bitter with a faint, clean fragrance underneath. Whether it was good or not, she couldn’t really tell. She enjoyed drinking tea; she had never learned to appreciate it.
By the time she’d worked her way through the cup in unhurried sips, she glanced idly in Shen Yu’s direction.
He was playing Snake. The plump little body wound through the maze with quick, nimble turns, swallowing up one piece of candy after another.
Lin Xun was quietly impressed.
She knew screen readers could make games playable for the visually impaired, but could you really play something like Snake by sound alone? The reaction time required for that would have to be extraordinary.
Then, in the next second, he released his right hand and switched to playing one-handed with his left.
She was almost ready to think he’d sensed someone watching and was showing off deliberately — until his right hand drifted unhurriedly to the fruit bowl on the table, and gave the plate of peaches a gentle push in her direction.
“Have a peach,” he said.
“…”
Lin Xun pressed a hand to her forehead. He really had taken Grandmother Jiang’s instructions to heart. For all the forced, indifferent air he’d been wearing since she arrived, not one thing had been neglected: tea brewed, fruit offered, not a beat missed.
“Mm,” she said.
That said, she made no move to take one.
The peaches around Zhoushan tended to be the soft, juice-heavy honey variety, which she had never been able to get used to. Something about the texture — the way the flesh and juice clung together — always put her off. She preferred the crisp kind, but those were rarely found in local supermarkets.
Back in high school, Cheng Meng had a relative who grew the crisp variety, and she would always bring some for the two of them. They’d squeeze into the same seat, split a peach between them, and eat it without a single drop of juice to show for it.
Lin Xun was still drifting through the memory when the person in the middle of an apparently intense game drawled, without looking up: “Don’t force yourself. My grandmother bought the wrong kind — got hard ones by mistake. Nobody here eats them. They’ll just go bad in a couple of days and end up in the trash.”
“…”
Lin Xun was beginning to seriously wonder whether, on top of echolocation, blind people also came with telepathy.
Crisp peaches. It would be a genuine waste to throw them out.
The supermarket near her apartment didn’t carry them, and she’d never bothered to look elsewhere. It had probably been a year or two since she’d last had one.
With that thought, she stopped being polite, picked one up, and bit into it.
It was exactly as crisp as promised, and sweet.
By the time she’d finished the peach and the tea, she was already more than half full. When Grandmother Jiang set the table and called them over, Lin Xun didn’t expect to have much of an appetite.
She was wrong. The old woman was a genuinely good cook, and her food didn’t have the light, restrained flavor typical of locals here. Unlike the elaborate bento boxes Shen Yu used to bring to school back then — beautiful to look at, nearly impossible to eat neatly — everything on this table was simple. The ribs and meat had all been cut to bite-sized pieces, easy to manage.
Lin Xun normally ate very little. Tonight she finished a full bowl of rice.
After dinner, Grandmother Jiang brought out a small dish of her homemade sweet fermented rice as dessert. She spooned some out for Lin Xun and settled in to chat.
Young Master Shen was ordered to sit with them — which, in practice, meant he went back to his game of Snake.
“Little Lin, your accent sounds northern. Are you working here in Zhoushan now?”
“Yes.” Lin Xun swallowed a spoonful of the fermented rice and nodded. “I’m originally from Qingyuan.”
Her accent had never smoothed itself out. She still sounded unmistakably northern.
“That explains it. It can’t be easy, making a life here. And your parents — are they back in Qingyuan?”
Lin Xun’s chopsticks paused. “No,” she said, evenly. “They’re both gone.”
She said it without any particular weight, but Grandmother Jiang went quiet for a moment. Then she ladled a generous scoop of fermented rice into Lin Xun’s bowl. “Eat more. Look at you, so thin. You can’t put on weight living on nothing — you need proper rice.”
Lin Xun murmured agreement and took a big mouthful.
The fermented rice really was excellent, she had to admit.
After that, the conversation drifted comfortably through the usual small talk. Lin Xun didn’t say much, but she answered nearly everything she was asked. When the old woman asked about her work, she explained that she ran an audio drama studio and even took a moment to explain what audio dramas were.
She had always had an easy, almost inexplicable rapport with older people — a natural fluency in that particular kind of company. It was certainly more relaxed than sitting on the sofa earlier, “drinking tea” next to her old classmate.
Toward the end of the conversation, Grandmother Jiang asked the question all elders eventually ask: “So you’re living alone right now? Are you married?”
Lin Xun hadn’t even drawn breath to answer when a soft “tch” came from somewhere nearby. She turned her head. Young Master Shen was frowning, his face flickering with a brief flash of irritation — because on his phone screen, the Snake he had so carefully fattened up had just curved around and bitten its own tail.
