Zheng Ranran calmly took a sip of milk tea.

Things were more or less as she imagined. The last time, that farcical blind date involving Fang Yongnian had become the fuse that ignited Lu Yixin’s emotional shift. She had finally realized that her feelings for Fang Yongnian might not be merely admiration and fondness.

What surprised her was Lu Yixin’s sense of shame.

Lu Yixin was not a delicate or sensitive child. Her way of dealing with emotions had always been a bit reckless—when she liked someone, she would stick to them; when she stopped liking them, she couldn’t even be bothered to roll her eyes at them. Simple, direct, and rarely taking detours.

But she actually felt ashamed because she had developed a different kind of feeling toward Fang Yongnian.

Her admiration had changed in nature, so now she felt that her current self was defiling that once open and beautiful emotion she had held.

“You like Fang Yongnian.” Zheng Ranran revealed the answer for her, unwilling to keep watching her hang her head.

At the sound of that name, Lu Yixin trembled and buried her head even lower.

“Is it that shameful?” Zheng Ranran couldn’t hold it in anymore and reached out, wanting to lift her friend’s head back to a normal angle.

“Very shameful.” Lu Yixin stubbornly kept her head down, not moving at all.

“I’ve always said I wanted to marry him, but we both know that was just a fangirl joke. No one would ever take it seriously.”

“I know he’ll definitely get married. I’ll have to call some strange woman ‘Auntie.’ After he gets married, he might not be my Uncle Fang anymore.”

“I thought I would bless him. Even if I felt sad, I’d still give him my blessings. After all, I’ve always hoped he wouldn’t be so lonely, wouldn’t be so thin. I’ve always hoped he’d be happy.”

Lu Yixin finally lifted her head, looking at Zheng Ranran. Her eyes were full of struggle and confusion, but her words were firm and resolute: “Right now, I want to curse him to stay single. Single until I’m old enough to chase him.”

Zheng Ranran: “……”

Her best friend was still her best friend, reckless like a bandit from the greenwood.

She had already made up her mind. Even if it was shameful, she wanted to follow her heart.

“Do you like him that much?” The eighteen-year-old Zheng Ranran couldn’t empathize.

“Fang Yongnian is different to me.” Lu Yixin voiced the dark thought she had been holding in for more than a week. She didn’t know why, but saying it out loud made her feel much lighter—and she suddenly wanted to keep talking.

“When my grandma got sick, my parents didn’t want to tell me what kind of illness it was. I overheard the caretaker my dad hired making a phone call, telling someone that my grandma had dementia.”

“So even though that caretaker was expensive and someone my dad had specially found, I still hated her.”

“The word Alzheimer’s disease, it was Fang Yongnian who told me about it. He was also the one who told me that one day, the world would definitely develop a medicine to cure it.”

Lu Yixin also began poking at the pearls in her milk tea with her straw.

The two girls had spent so much time together that even their small habits had become more and more alike.

“Then I started clinging to him,” Lu Yixin said with a smile, her big eyes blinking brightly. “Back then, I naïvely thought he would definitely develop a medicine that could cure Grandma. Whenever Grandma’s condition changed, I would go to him. I thought the more I told him about Grandma, the sooner he could create that medicine.”

“Fang Yongnian was strange. Even though he thought I was annoying, and even explained to me that the project he was working on wasn’t about Alzheimer’s, after realizing a few times that I wasn’t listening at all, he just let me be.”

“He explained a lot of things to me, so I learned what symptoms my grandma’s illness might cause. When they actually appeared, I could tell myself—it’s because Grandma is sick.”

Her grandma didn’t forget her because she hated her. Her grandma didn’t grow cold and irritable toward everything because she was in a bad mood.

It was just illness.

An illness that would get better after taking medicine.

Fang Yongnian would probably never know. Those words he had spoken back then, half impatiently, half out of courtesy because she was his senior’s daughter—had been such a vital lifeline for her.

At that time, her whole family had become busy and silent because of her grandmother’s illness. No one treated her as someone they could talk to. Only Fang Yongnian, who wasn’t even good at dealing with children, always treated her as a kid who could understand adult words.

In truth, she didn’t understand most of what he said. But those words she couldn’t understand quietly turned into courage inside her—courage that allowed her not to cry whenever her grandmother’s illness flared up, and to still call her “Grandma” sweetly even when the old woman looked at her with unfamiliar eyes.

Fang Yongnian’s words made that period, when she looked back after truly growing up, not filled entirely with tears.

She would help her grandma comb her hair; her grandma would call her by her mother’s childhood nickname; she would curl up in her grandma’s arms, listening to her talk about her mother’s embarrassing childhood stories.

Those were warm memories filled with smiles.

“When Grandma passed away, I bit him.” Lu Yixin had never spoken of this memory in such detail before. Zheng Ranran listened intently. Lu Yixin spoke slowly, and on her face, there appeared the shadow of her mother—that kind of gentle, quiet look.

She had bitten him very hard.

Because her grandmother never got to wait for the medicine that could cure her, she carried the anger of being deceived and bit down hard on Fang Yongnian’s wrist.

A child who had just entered junior high, going through the most painful days of her life—Fang Yongnian didn’t hold it against her. While her parents were busy with the funeral, and her mother fainted during the ceremony, he took her out to eat a bowl of wood-fired wontons.

His wrist was still wrapped in white gauze. He had even been thinking whether he should get a tetanus shot after being bitten by a child, but still, he ordered her a bowl of wood-fired wontons with an extra portion of egg skin.

That year, the winter in Hecheng was bitterly cold.

The place where he took her for those wontons was in a deep, old alley. An old lady about the same age as her grandma had built a shabby, color-faded shed. The wonton wrappers were thin as paper; in the clear broth floated bits of seaweed, scallion, pickled mustard, and bright orange strips of egg skin.

“I’ll take you to sleep in the lab’s break room tonight.” Fang Yongnian shook his faintly aching wrist and poured a spoonful of rice vinegar into Lu Yixin’s bowl.

Lu Yixin didn’t move. The steaming, fragrant wontons couldn’t pull her out of her grief. She wiped her tears, refusing to show weakness in front of this lying adult.

Fang Yongnian said nothing more. He tore off two sheets of cheap napkin from the stall and handed them to her, then quietly ate up the wontons in his own bowl, spoonful by spoonful.

He ate neatly, with focus. When eating, he was always so serious. Lu Boyuan used to joke that he was a robot only interested in two things—his lab and food.

Lu Yixin clutched those two pieces of rough napkin; when she wiped her tears, the paper fibers stuck to her face, and she angrily rubbed them off.

Her stomach finally growled under the thick, rising aroma. The little girl, who had eaten nothing all day except tears and anger, gripped her spoon hard, scooped up a big spoonful of wontons along with egg skin, and swallowed it in one bite.

The steam reddened her eyes. Head lowered, she ate bite after bite, forcing down all the grief and fury that had nowhere else to go along with that bowl of fragrant wontons.

She was eating so earnestly that she didn’t see Fang Yongnian, sitting across from her, wipe his mouth and show a faint smile.

He had always believed that a child who could be soothed with food was a good child.

“Another bowl?” He ordered himself a pancake and turned back to ask Lu Yixin.

The little girl’s eyes were full of tears as she looked at him and nodded fiercely.

It was the most complicated-tasting bowl of wood-fired wontons she had ever eaten. That taste, in her memory, became the taste of her grandmother’s passing. Sour, salty, bitter, steaming hot, stinging her eyes until the tears wouldn’t stop.

“I really resented him.” Lu Yixin’s milk tea was already finished. She toyed with the straw. “For a time, I even thought he was the reason Grandma suffered so much. Why, when she passed, she couldn’t even speak, couldn’t even sit up.”

So she did a lot of bad things.

She secretly threw away Fang Yongnian’s wallet, cut off the power cord of his computer, and even doodled all over his report.

Fang Yongnian hit her.

He used a ruler, and in front of Liu Miqing, struck her calves twice.

“He was probably driven to the edge by me,” Lu Yixin said as she recalled this memory. The way she spoke was nothing like her usual brash self, so gentle that it made Zheng Ranran’s nose sting. “Later on, when he really couldn’t take it anymore, he started explaining the process of making medicine to me.”

Seriously and solemnly explaining pharmaceutical development to a twelve-year-old girl. Genius Fang Yongnian must have faced the greatest challenge of his life.

He explained drug targets to her. He showed her chemical synthesis. He explained what an active chemical compound was, and how to screen for one.

He even went into detail about the pharmacological effects of drugs, their safety and toxicity, and the processes of absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion.

After being force-fed so much information, Lu Yixin eventually became conditioned to feel sleepy whenever she saw him.

But the grief faded.

She came to understand that the medicine she had once thought could cure her grandmother had too many uncertain, incomprehensible steps in its making.

Under Fang Yongnian’s relentless science lessons, she somehow began, at the age of twelve, to grasp what it meant to be powerless.

“Fang Yongnian looks really handsome when he’s doing experiments.” Lu Yixin smiled, her eyes shining.

During that time when she thought she couldn’t stand the sight of him, she saw him at work in the lab.

Wearing a white lab coat, tying his hair into a short ponytail because it got in the way, with protective goggles on—he became the center of the entire universe.

When he was doing experiments, his eyes saw nothing but the experiment.

That kind of focus made twelve-year-old Lu Yixin’s heart inexplicably tremble.

“Maybe it’s because I’m a person with no goal,” she said, “that I’ve always liked watching people who are focused.”

It was true for Zheng Ranran, and it was true for Fang Yongnian.

Her girlish admiration—her pure and burning affection—quietly sprouted in those days when she both disliked him and couldn’t stop paying attention to him.

Zheng Ranran finished the last sip of her milk tea.

She had never experienced such fierce emotion herself, but she was moved by Lu Yixin.

Liking someone shouldn’t make you feel ashamed.

Just as Lu Yixin said—Fang Yongnian wasn’t her actual uncle, and there was only a fourteen-year age gap between them, not forty.

They were only eighteen, the odds were in their favor.

“Lift your head.” Zheng Ranran said with pride and composure. “You’ve already made up your mind. What’s left is to figure out how.”

“I’m best at figuring things out.” Zheng Ranran narrowed her eyes and smiled. Her not-so-exceptional features suddenly came alive.

“I’ll help you.” Her best friend patted her chest confidently.

“…But if you dare to wipe your snot on my clothes, I’ll beat you up.” Lu Yixin had already buried her head in her friend’s arms, making her panic—she had just changed into that shirt today.

“…Too late,” Lu Yixin said shamelessly, rubbing against her once more. “You feel bigger.”

She rubbed against her again with a mischievous grin, and Zheng Ranran, face expressionless, shoved her away.

In the midst of their laughter and teasing, the troubles of girlhood turned into a problem that could be solved.

Lu Yixin lifted her head and grinned, showing a mouthful of bright white teeth.