The moment those words left her mouth, Shen Luning herself was stunned.
She thought she no longer liked him.
For five years, she had been telling herself that she didn’t like him anymore, that she had let go, that he had nothing to do with her.
She deleted his photos from her phone, threw away everything he had given her, and set his name as a blocked word.
She did everything she could to make herself believe that she “didn’t like him anymore.”
“Mommy.” Xiao Niangao’s voice trembled softly, rising from her chest. “You still like Daddy, don’t you?”
Shen Luning didn’t answer.
She didn’t know how to answer.
She didn’t even know whether what she had just said was true or false.
Maybe it was habit, maybe it was impulse, maybe it was some older, instinct carved into her body.
Someone you loved, someone you had a child with, someone you thought of countless late nights—could you just stop liking them?
That’s not emotion; that’s a switch. And the human heart is not a switch.
“Mommy,” Xiao Niangao lifted his head from her embrace, looking at her seriously. “Go talk to Daddy.”
“Talk about what?”
“Tell him you still like him.”
Shen Luning shook her head.
“I can’t say that.”
“Why?”
“Because Mommy isn’t a teenage girl anymore.”
Shen Luning’s voice was very soft. “Mommy is a thirty-year-old woman with a five-year-old child. Mommy can’t just say ‘I like you’ and ignore everything else. Mommy has too many things to consider.”
Xiao Niangao tilted his head, looking at her with partial understanding.
“Mommy,” he said, “I think you’re overthinking it.”
“Hmm?”
“Liking is just liking.”
Xiao Niangao said, his tone matter-of-fact. “Do you like Daddy or not?”
Shen Luning didn’t answer.
“You do.”
Xiao Niangao answered for her. “Then just tell him. If he likes you too, you can be together. If he doesn’t like you anymore, then you’ll know the answer, and you won’t have to think about it anymore.”
Shen Luning looked at Xiao Niangao and suddenly felt that this five-year-old child was far more perceptive than she, an adult, was.
Not because he was smarter, but because he hadn’t yet learned to be afraid. He didn’t know how many things followed “liking.”
Responsibility, commitment, finances, family, the past, the future, other people’s opinions, her own dignity.
He only knew that “liking is just liking.”
The simplest, yet hardest truth.
“Xiao Niangao,” Shen Luning said, “you’re right, but Mommy still needs a little more time.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know. Maybe soon, maybe a long time.”
Xiao Niangao thought for a moment, then nodded, as if approving her request for an extension.
“Then think slowly. I won’t rush you. But, Mommy,” he looked at her seriously, “can you not make him wait anymore? He’s been standing downstairs for a long time. The sun is so strong, and he doesn’t even have an umbrella.”
Shen Luning’s nose stung.
She stood up, walked to the window, and lifted the curtain with her finger.
Lu Sihan was still downstairs.
Leaning against the car door, the back of his white shirt was soaked through, the Winnie the Pooh bandage on his neck peeling at the edges. He was sunburned red, and the collar of his shirt revealed skin flushed from the sun.
But he hadn’t retreated into the car or moved into the shade. He just stood there, straight and still, looking up at the sixth-floor window.
In his hand, he still held that rabbit.
Shen Luning looked at him, her hand resting on the curtain, her knuckles turning white.
Her phone vibrated once.
She lowered her head.
A message from Lu Sihan:
I see you.
Followed immediately by another:
Just one glance, let me see you just once. I won’t come up, I’ll stay right here below.
Shen Luning stared at the screen, her eyes growing hot again.
Xiao Niangao stood beside her, tiptoeing, unable to reach the phone but managing to grasp her hand.
“Mom,” he said, “send it.”
Shen Luning glanced down at him.
Xiao Niangao smiled at her—a smile identical to Lu Sihan’s, the corners of his mouth lifting slightly first, then his entire face unfolding like light slowly rising from beneath the ice.
Shen Luning pressed send.
Go stand under the tree. If you get heatstroke, I won’t care.
The moment the message was sent, a dull thud came from downstairs.
She looked down and saw Lu Sihan leaning against the car door, his entire body seeming to have been emptied out as he slid down the door and sat on the ground.
Not fainting.
He had finally received that message.
Tears streamed down his face.
He crouched on the ground, burying his face in the rabbit, his shoulders trembling.
The driver stepped out of the car, standing helplessly beside him, unsure what to do.
Lu Sihan crouched there, crying for a long time.
So long that a passing delivery rider in the alley stopped to glance at him, and the woman on the third floor opened her window again, peeked down, and silently closed it.
Grandma Wang from the fourth floor, returning from grocery shopping, passed by him for the second time. She stood beside him for a moment, placed her vegetable basket on the ground, took out a bottle of water, and set it next to him.
“Young man,” Grandma Wang said, “stop crying. Didn’t she respond to you?”
Lu Sihan looked up, his face covered in tears, his nose and eyes red, a Winnie the Pooh band-aid still stuck to his neck.
He stared at Grandma Wang, his lips trembling for a long time before he finally said, “Grandma Wang, she said if I get heatstroke, she won’t care.”
“Then why are you happy?”
“She’s concerned about me.”
Lu Sihan said, his voice so hoarse it didn’t sound like his own, “She’s concerned about me.”
Grandma Wang looked at him, shook her head, picked up her vegetable basket, and walked away.
After a few steps, she glanced back, sighed, and muttered softly, “Young people these days, falling in love as if it’s a crime.”
Upstairs, Shen Luning threw her phone onto the sofa and covered her face with her hands.
She trembled—not from cold, but from nervousness.
What was she nervous about? She had only sent a message—five words, a comma, and a period.
An ordinary message one normal person would send to another.
But she wasn’t normal, and neither was he.
Their relationship had never been “normal.”
Its beginning wasn’t normal—an orphan abandoned three times and an orphan raised in an orphanage, two people who didn’t know how to love, clumsily, mistakenly, stumblingly trying to find the missing piece of themselves in each other.
Its process wasn’t normal—obsession, control, suspicion, hurt, kidnapping in the name of love, imprisonment in the name of protection.
Its end wasn’t normal either—a heavy rain, a suitcase, a woman seven months pregnant, and a man standing at a second-floor window who didn’t chase after her.
Now, its restart is even more abnormal—a live stream, a kneeling, a knife, a child.
She is not normal, but he is, and their relationship has never been “normal.”