It was rare for Lu Boyuan to have a full month of rest at home, and during this time, he truly experienced what it meant to have a “budding young girl” in the house.

His precious daughter, who had been like a wilted cabbage for days, suddenly woke up lively and full of spirit.

That Sunday morning, when he got up and opened his door, he saw Lu Yixin squatting by the bathroom door in her pajamas, a toothbrush stuffed in her mouth.

When she saw him, she grinned brightly and called out with vigor, “Good morning, Dad!”

Lu Boyuan was so startled he almost took a step back but managed to hold it in—barely preserving his dignity as a father.

Even at breakfast, she couldn’t stay still. After wolfing down a bowl of porridge, she stood up to get another.

While Liu Miqing had her head lowered, Lu Yixin darted over and planted a smacking kiss on her, splattering porridge all over Liu Miqing’s face.

“…In a good mood again?” Liu Miqing wiped her face, both crying and laughing.

“Mm!” Lu Yixin squinted her eyes and laughed heartily. “I want to eat purple sweet potato buns!”

Liu Miqing gave her a sidelong glance.

Lu Yixin swallowed the bite of side dish in her mouth and smiled even more fawningly.

“You’re just short of growing a tail.” Liu Miqing, both exasperated and amused, curled her finger and flicked Lu Yixin’s forehead.

Purple sweet potato buns were Fang Yongnian’s favorite snack.

Lu Boyuan, who didn’t want to expose his daughter’s intentions, pressed his finger down a bit harder when flicking her, leaving a red mark to make himself feel more balanced inside.

“Not planning to reflect on your monthly exam results?”

Since Lu Yixin had mysteriously recovered, it was time to settle accounts.

Lu Yixin: “…”

She lifted her porridge bowl to cover her face, pretending nothing was wrong.

“You even dared to hand in your college entrance exam intention form without writing a single word on it?” Liu Miqing pressed on relentlessly.

Lu Boyuan helped himself to another bun, watching with great interest.

Lu Yixin raised the bowl even higher.

“After breakfast, take out your monthly exam papers. Mark every mistake with the knowledge point and write down why you got it wrong. I’ll check this afternoon.”

Liu Miqing snorted. “Don’t slack off. Your grades dropped so much, consider yourself lucky I didn’t beat you.”

Lu Yixin pouted pitifully. “…Okay.”

She had miscalculated. After sorting things out in her mind, she’d gotten too pleased with herself and forgotten that her mother hadn’t yet settled the score.

If she had known, she would’ve mentioned the purple sweet potato buns later.

“If you do well, I’ll make purple sweet potato buns this afternoon. Make extra so you can bring some to your Uncle Fang after dinner,” Liu Miqing said with a smile, watching as Lu Boyuan frowned while chewing on a bun.

Her daughter and husband, both just like children.

“Okay!” Lu Yixin waved her hands excitedly, quickly finishing the rest of her breakfast. “I’m going to do my homework!”

She announced it loudly, full of energy and enthusiasm.

“What did she eat last night?” Lu Boyuan truly couldn’t adapt to his daughter’s emotional shifts. Just as he hadn’t understood why she’d suddenly become deflated before, he now didn’t understand why she’d suddenly recovered.

“She probably thought things through.” Liu Miqing smiled as she served her husband another bowl of porridge. “Kids in their teens are all like this. The more you ask, the worse it gets.”

Besides, even if they asked, Lu Yixin would never tell her parents.

She simply hoped her daughter could enjoy being eighteen. To experience joy and sorrow, hope and disappointment.

All emotions at that age are magnified, and she wanted her daughter to slowly feel them all.

After all, youth never comes back once it’s gone.

୨୧ ⏔⏔⏔⏔♡⏔⏔⏔⏔ ୨୧

Lu Yixin endured an entire afternoon of scolding.

The knowledge points on her test papers were all things she had reviewed before. It was just that during the exam, her mind had been wandering.

So when writing down the reasons for her mistakes, she honestly wrote that she hadn’t read the questions carefully.

Out of ten questions, nine were because she hadn’t read them properly.

The result, of course, was that she was bombarded for an entire afternoon by both Lu Boyuan and Liu Miqing.

When she finally received the steaming hot purple sweet potato buns, she was almost moved to tears.

It hadn’t been easy. To get some rations for Fang Yongnian, she had practically spent the afternoon licking blood off a knife’s edge.

It had already been a week since she’d last poked a chive pocket under Fang Yongnian’s nose.

This was the first time she had decided to see him again after much internal struggle.

Before leaving the house, she spent half an hour on a video call with Zheng Ranran just to decide what to wear.

“Don’t dress so fancy. You’re not going to confess. Who are you trying to scare?” Zheng Ranran scolded in disappointment.

“It’s still spring. Are you trying to make your parents kill you by showing your legs like that?”

Zheng Ranran rolled her eyes so hard they nearly turned over completely.

“Lu Yixin, classmate, you have no chest. It’s flat. So don’t wear those mature-looking clothes, my eyes hurt.”

Her words grew more and more vicious.

Beaten down to dust, Lu Yixin finally changed into her school uniform with a jacket and went out, fuming.

“Mom!”

While putting on her shoes in the entryway, she still couldn’t swallow her anger.

“From now on, I want to drink papaya milk in the morning.”

Liu Miqing was cutting fruit in the kitchen. Upon hearing this, she came out holding the fruit knife.

“Mom, I didn’t say anything!”

Lu Yixin covered her head and bolted, the sound of her running down the stairs going da-da-da.

“Come home early!”

Liu Miqing waved the fruit knife in farewell, giving her husband—who was grinning foolishly while sipping tea—a side-eye.

Family truly was the greatest treasure of Lu Boyuan’s life.

He took a sip of Tieguanyin tea and sighed in satisfaction.

That Fang Yongnian really was a strange one. Already in his thirties, living alone, with a disability, and yet completely uninterested in blind dates.

He truly didn’t understand how good marriage could be.

That feeling—no matter how tired you are outside, coming home to see your wife’s smiling face and your daughter’s ridiculous antics, so happy you could laugh even in your dreams. Someone who’s never been married could never understand it.

Still so ungrateful…

Lu Boyuan shook his head, crossed one leg over the other, and poured himself another cup of Tieguanyin.

୨୧ ⏔⏔⏔⏔♡⏔⏔⏔⏔ ୨୧

According to the schedule, Fang Yongnian wasn’t on duty at the pharmacy today.

Lu Yixin carried a lunch box on her back and rode her bike straight to his apartment complex.

In the two years since Fang Yongnian opened the pharmacy in Hecheng, Lu Yixin had visited this complex countless times but never once had she felt this way: a sort of nervous homesickness.

She rode her bicycle in circles at the foot of Fang Yongnian’s building, her eyes fixed on the window of his floor.

The apartment Fang Yongnian rented had two bedrooms and one living room, simply decorated. It was actually her mother, Liu Miqing, who had helped him find it.

Now, the warm orange light spilling from the window—that lamp was one she had bought herself. She had searched for it on Taobao for a long time, then purchased it using Fang Yongnian’s Taobao account.

Many of the small decorations in his home were also ones she picked out on his phone at the pharmacy and ordered using his account.

Fang Yongnian was very transparent with her. His schedule, his social and shopping account passwords, even the password to the pharmacy’s cash register.

Their relationship was close, like that of a real uncle and niece.

Lu Yixin pressed the brake, leaned her head against the handlebars, and sighed.

Her heart was still racing.

Just seeing that window and thinking of Fang Yongnian made her heartbeat quicken. As if it were about to leap right out of her throat.

After confirming her feelings, Lu Yixin became even more hopeless.

“Just one more round,” she muttered to herself, tightening the backpack straps on her shoulders as she pressed her feet against the pedals and began circling again.

It was purely by chance that she saw Fang Yongnian standing behind that big tree. Her attention had been fixed on the window of his apartment. When her bicycle wheel hit a small stone and jolted, she lowered her head; then, as she lifted it again, she caught a glimpse of a familiar shade of smoke gray behind the trees.

Fang Yongnian’s sweater, and his perpetually messy hair.

Beside him stood another familiar figure: Uncle Zheng Fei, the other co-partner of the pharmacy.

They’re not at work today? Lu Yixin murmured in confusion, her pedaling unconsciously slowing down.

It was the end of March, and Jiangnan was wrapped in its usual continuous drizzle. The air was damp and chilly, and the ground slick with moisture. Few people were walking around the residential compound at this hour, so even from four or five meters away, Lu Yixin could clearly see the two men leaning against a tree, exhaling smoke.

His body was already in such poor condition, yet his addiction to cigarettes remained so heavy.

Lu Yixin instinctively wanted to go over and tell him to stop, but her hand froze on the brake handle when she heard Zheng Fei’s words.

“Lu Boyuan didn’t leave any evidence.” Zheng Fei’s voice was louder than Fang Yongnian’s, and since Lu Yixin was standing downwind, she could hear every word distinctly.

“According to Lu Boyuan’s call records, he really did call Qi Yi only after finishing his call with Professor Wu. That matches the statement he gave to the police, so his claim that he suddenly decided not to go with you because Professor Wu had an emergency stands up.”

“Besides, Professor Wu also testified on his behalf back then.”

“This matter is troublesome. The other members of the project team all had questionable account records to some extent but his were perfectly clean.”

“His alibi is solid, too.”

“Even if we can prove that the driver involved in the accident knew Lu Boyuan, that still doesn’t prove the crash was ordered by him.”

“We’ve already dug through every account belonging to that driver and his family. In all these years since the accident, and even in the years before, there hasn’t been anything suspicious.”

“Now it’s awkward. Either we’ve been investigating in the wrong direction from the very start, or the way Lu Boyuan hid the evidence is something we can’t even begin to imagine.”

After finishing, Zheng Fei took a hard drag on his cigarette, frustration etched across his face.

Lu Yixin stood frozen where she was, not daring to move—nor wanting to.

“I don’t believe he’s innocent.”

The man who had been standing in the shadows, Fang Yongnian, finally spoke.

After a week apart, just that one brief sentence from him made Lu Yixin tremble slightly.

“Back then, I was the last one who knew the truth.”

“After the accident, he’s been investigating me.”

“That project document’s encryption key, only he and I had it. I’m certain I didn’t leak the document. Which means the only one in the team capable of doing so was Lu Boyuan.”

“If he had nothing to hide, there would’ve been no reason to investigate me.”

Fang Yongnian leaned half-against the tree, shifting the left leg he’d been using for support.

The house had felt too stuffy, so he and Zheng Fei had gone out for a walk—but judging by how he felt now, they’d stayed out too long.

He had been running a fever several times recently. The spot on his right leg where the prosthetic was attached ached faintly, and his stamina was far worse than before.

“No matter whether we’re on the right track or not,” Zheng Fei said, “since we’ve started investigating, we’ll dig to the bottom. If he’s really innocent, he has nothing to fear from us looking into it.”

There was one more hidden worry he hadn’t voiced aloud.

He couldn’t shake the feeling that Lu Boyuan’s eagerness to have him rejoin the project was too sudden. As if someone were afraid he might uncover something, so they wanted to keep him too busy to continue digging.

It had already been four years since the car accident.

He had spent over a year adapting to the prosthetic limb, undergoing rehabilitation, and getting his body back to normal.

Afterward, he moved to Hecheng, opened the pharmacy, built his own company, and applied for generic drug licenses.

In these four years, he had done many things and throughout it all, Lu Boyuan had shown no sign of wanting him back.

Yet just when he finally obtained a list of the project team’s accounts—accounts that clearly contained discrepancies, Lu Boyuan suddenly wanted him to return.

He took another drag of his cigarette and shifted his stance.

“Let’s head back.”

He was clearly at his limit. Fang Yongnian frowned and turned around—

And there she was.

The girl in a school uniform and wrapped in a red scarf stood beside her bicycle, staring at him in a daze.

“Uncle Fang…”

The girl’s lashes fluttered uneasily.

“I… came to bring you some purple sweet potato buns…”