She had a high fever for a week. Her wound also got infected. At first, she didn’t care, and insisted on going to work. In the end, she had such a high fever that her whole person was in trance and her hands nearly couldn’t move so she finally went to the community hospital. When the doctor saw her swollen wood, he immediately advised her to go to a large general hospital. She was afraid, so she resisted the pain until she couldn’t anymore. Fortunately, it was not his hospital, and was one half a city away.
But she was still afraid, afraid to the extent that anytime she saw a doctor in a white coat, she would tremble; afraid to the extent that her tears could fall at any minute.
The pus needed to be squeezed from the wound and rotten flesh scraped off.
The nurse who handled the wound for her was very surprised and said, “Why did you delay coming to the hospital until now? Your hand would’ve become permanently useless if you hadn’t come!” Then she said, “Don’t move, it will hurt a little, just endure and it’ll be over.”
Endure. She tried desperately to endure. It hurt, hurt like so. The pain was such that she could clearly feel the knife was scraping at the wound, such that she could clearly feel the scissors cutting through the flesh, but she didn’t shed a single tear. She pinched her fingers deeply into her palms, thinking numbly, how long will it take? How long will it take to end? How long will it take to stop the pain?
Three or four bags of IV drips every day. Her fever gradually subsided, but her hands still couldn’t move. Changing the dressing every day was like torture, but she would rather this kind of cruel bone-cutting pain than the pain in her heart.
One day in the middle of the night, while asleep, her phone rang. Still half-asleep, she picked it up and heard a familiar voice, and the call of “Xiaosu”. She thought it was a dream, and it turned she was also dreaming. The phone hung up almost immediately. Hearing the repetitive beeps, she thought, so it was a dream after all.
She lay down and fell asleep again. The pain in her arm came in wages, so painful but to find Fenbid to take. After one tablet, it still hurt. After two, it still hurt. She took out all the tablets. They formed a small handful. If she swallowed it all, would it no longer hurt?
She put them close to her mouth. As long as she lifted her neck and swallowed it, she might never hurt again.
After hesitating for a long time, she finally threw the medicine down fiercely. The capsules fell onto the ground, like a handful of beans. Her hand still hurt, almost making her want to cry again. She called out in a very small voice: “Shao Zhenrong.”
In the dark, there wasn’t a response.
She was in such pain that she curled herself up and finally fell asleep slowly.
When he saw Du Xiaosu again, Lin Xiangyuan was surprised.
She seemed to have become a different person. The last time he saw her, she was shining, like a jewel that people’s gazes couldn’t help but attach to. But seeing her this time, her whole person seemed to have dimmed, no longer dazzling brilliant like that day. Although she was still attentive in the meeting, occasionally he could see her thick and long eyelashes covering her eyes, like the deep shadow of a secluded pool, reflecting the color of the sky, but with a dazed and bewildered look.
After the meeting, in the parking lot, Du Xiaosu discovered that she had forgotten her files in the meeting room. Although Ning Weicheng didn’t say anything, Du Xiaosu felt deeply guilty. She was absent-minded as of late and kept on forgetting things. She said quietly to Ning Weicheng: “Manager Ning, why don’t you all go first. I’ll just get the files and take a cab back home by myself.”
She took the elevator and went upstairs again. When she opened the door of the meeting room, she was startled.
No lights were turned on in the meeting room. Only a little red light could be seen in the darkness. In the shadows, you could see a person sitting there smoking a cigarette. She walked in from the outside corridor. She couldn’t see who it was for a while, so she hesitated, wondering if she should first leave.
“Xiaosu.” He called to her suddenly in the darkness.
She deliberately said in a relaxed tone: “So it was Mr. Lin . . . . I forgot my things here.”
“I know.” His voice was calm: “The switch is on the wall behind you.”
She stretched out her hand – it really was there – so she pressed down. Star-like lights filled the ceiling, all shimmering with brightness all of a sudden. She was a little uncomfortable with the sudden light, and couldn’t help but stretch out her hand to cover her eyes.
When she put down his hand, Lin Xiangyuan had already stood up from the table and handed her the documents. His figure was still tall, and his huge shadow obscured the light above his head. She said cautiously, “Thank you.”
“Xiaosu, there’s no need for such politeness between us.”
She was silent for a while, and finally said: “Okay, Mr. Lin.”
He suddenly smiled: “Xiaosu, let me treat you to dinner.”
She said, “Thank you Mr. Lin, but I have an appointment with a friend. When there’s an opportunity, we can discuss it.”
He finally sighed, as if trying to resist something, but still asked: “Xiaosu – has something happened to you? Can I help?”
She gently shook her head. No one could help her. She had committed unforgivable sins.
He laughed self-deprecatingly: “I really… I really can’t help myself. Please don’t get me wrong. I think you are a little unwell today, so just from the standpoint of a friend, I want to know if you are encountering any difficulties.”
Her face was pale. She didn’t want to talk any more.
After a long silence, he said, “Xiaosu, I’m sorry.”
Du Xiaosu’s face seemed very calm, and her voice as well: “There’s nowhere where you’ve been sorry to me.”
“Xiaosu, your family is well-off, so you never understand what striving is, because, since young, you have never needed to fight. I know you despise me and look down on me, but you don’t know what I’ve experienced.” He still carried that faint self-deprecating smile: “In the past, you asked me why I was studying for a Ph.D. Now I can tell you that it is because of low self-esteem. Yes, low self-esteem. Only a degree can win the respect of others, and only a degree can make me confident in myself. You hadn’t expected that right? It’s such a ridiculous reason.
You know that I was born in a mining area and my father died very early. But I never told you that my mother didn’t have a formal job, so I could only go to school because of a pitiful amount of pensions and the money from my mother’s part-time work. I will never forget tha because there was no money, I watched my mother’s disease advance from hepatitis B to cirrhosis. Recovery for her disease was delayed by poverty. I could no longer stand that kind of life, that kind of poverty. The No. 1 Middle School in the mining area is very famous, and many students go to Tsinghua and Peking University every year from there. Do you know why? Because of poverty, because there is no other way and no way out, they study furiously. Once they get admitted to a prestigious university, they come out reborn as a new person.
But do you know how difficult it is? I worked three to four times as hard as others to get the scholarship, but after graduation, I had nothing, no connections, no one I could rely on. Xiaosu, I will never forget my embarrassment when looking for a job. But you, you said you were going to Beijing to stay with me. You didn’t even need to bother to find a job, because your father’s friends soon arranged everything for you. If you look down on me because of this, I will feel better, but you are not like that. You have no such idea at all. Instead, you were helping to look for a job for me.
During that time, I could hardly raise my head in front of you. After all those years of hard work, what could I even do? I wasn’t even comparable to a phone call from your father, not comparable to this uncle and that uncle that my undergraduate classmates knew from home. I had nothing. I even had to rely on you. I still needed to feed my mother so that she could spend her last years in peace. I am her only hope and only pride in her life! When you were in school, you always felt puzzled and wronged for my refusal to take you home. It’s not that I don’t want to take you home, but that I can’t make you face my mother. I had continually been studying for a Ph.D. There was nothing but bare walls in the house. That house, that kind of family…
In front of you, I was always that outstanding and proud. You had always been proud of me, felt that I was the best in the world. You don’t know how much effort I have to put in to stand with you, yet you are relaxed and at ease, yet still have so much more than me. You are that beautiful, that great, that simple that I felt inferior. To be with you took too much effort. To preserve that beauty, it was too difficult. So in the end, I really couldn’t bear it any longer and couldn’t persist anymore…”
He paused for a while, as if he had smiled. His voice became faint, with indescribable sadness: “Xiaosu, nothing can make up for it now. But the fact that I can say these things to you makes me feel much better.”
His words were like a dense rain, making her feel a cold that seeped into her bones. The lights in the meeting room glittered, shining on him, his well-tailored handmade suits, making his eyebrows shart and distinct. He was clearly familiar and clearly unfamiliar. She had indeed tnot thought that he would have such pressure and such thoughts. She tried her best to forget those things in the past, but she did not expect them to ruin everything today. She kept her long silence, as if she wanted to purge everything from her past quietly and silently.
Finally, she said: “The past has passed and it is not important anymore.”
He said, “Xiaosu, please forgive me.”
She was still very silent: “You didn’t do anything wrong, let alone needing my forgiveness.” Then, she asked: “Can I go now?”
“I’ll send you.”
“No need.” She pushed back the door of the meeting room. There was wind in the corridor outside, blowing such that her body felt even colder.
On the way home, Du Xiaosu looked at the street view outside the car window. At dusk, the city was bustling with traffic, cars flowing like water. The city seemed to be so prosperous, as though nothing had ever happened. It was like a dream, that once she woke up, nothing had yet happened.
But she would never be able to wake up from this nightmare.
Only when she arrived at the door did she notice that her bag was missing. She didn’t know if it was on the subway or in a taxi.
She was very tired, and didn’t even want to try to think further.
So, when she reached the door, she slowly sat down, hugging her knees, just like a baby. This was the safest. This was the best. If she could no longer think, how great would that be.
Her keys, wallet and mobile phone were all in the bag.
She couldn’t get in, but it didn’t matter anymore. She didn’t want to go in anyway.
Something in her died forever, never to revive. She buried her head in her arms. If she could, she wanted to die just like that, without having to come back to life.
She once thought that she had really forgotten her unbearable past, the ignorance and selfishness of youth, and the impulsive indulgence because of her heartbreak. After that night, she panickedly discovered that she was in bed with a stranger. After the panic, she finally forced herself to forget. Successfully, eternally forget, never to remember again, like a pairt of scissors cutting at the middle of the mess, not leaving a trace. Even she herself thought that she had wiped those memories clean, but she had still committed a heinous crime that brought about the retribution today. She thought that was just a chanced mistake. With her 20 years of good upbringing she had never done such an audacious thing, losing herself in the midst of wine. So this was retribution. She was wrong, so terribly wrong. She couldn’t think about it, she couldn’t have imagined that man would reappear in her life, and was even Shao Zhenrong’s brother. This was retribution. Just thinking about it made her whole heart anguished, as though she was trapped in the nine hells, burned by fire and ice, never to turn over this stone, never to be at peace.
She remembered calling Zou Siqi very late that night because her spare key was with Zou Siqi. She waited for a long time, and finally the elevator finally stopped on this floor, and there were footsteps. Someone came to her, but it was not Zou Siqi who sent the key, nor a neighbor, but Shao Zhenrong.
She sat in front of the door exhausted to her bones. When she saw him, her body jumped slightly, as if she wanted to escape, but there was a locked door behind her, and there was no room to retreat to.
He looked at her quietly, carrying her bag in his hand. She looked at him in panic. He gave her the bag, his voice seemed a little low: “You forgot it in the taxi. The driver looked through the phone’s directory and then called me.”
She didn’t dare to speak or move, like a fish in a shallow pool. She was afraid that a swipe of her tail would startle people, and she would never be able to recover.
“Xiaosu,” he finally called her name, as if these two words carried some kind of pain. His voice was still very soft, as gentle as before. He said, “You have to take care of yourself, don’t always forget this and that.”
She didn’t move. He stretched out his hand and held the bag in front of her for a long time. She still didn’t move, let alone reach out to pick it up.
Finally, he gently put the bag on the ground in front of her, turned, and left.
Until the elevator door closed with a quiet “ding”, her body shook and she raised her head.
She didn’t care about anything else and just rushed to the elevator door. The number had already changed rapidly and decreased, like the heartbeat of a person who lost all hope. She desperately pressed the button, but it was useless. He was already. She continued to desperately press it, watching the numbers decrease one by one in despair. He had truly gone. She turned around and ran down the emergency stairway. There were floors and floors of stairs, pitch black without light, without people, like an endless passageway, spiraling downwards, with no end… She only heard her own footsteps, tap tap tap, tap tap tap…accompanied by her racing heart, that threatened to come out of her chest. Even her breathing became difficult, but it was too late and she knew it.
She ran downstairs in one breath and pushed open the heavy smoke-proof door with a “bang”. The rebounding door leaf hit her calf and caused her to stumble, but she found her ground. Because she couldn’t fall, she didn’t have the time to fall.
The hall in front of her was empty, the marble floor reflecting the cold of the ceiling lights, There were sounds outside. Maybe it was raining.
She didn’t have a hint of hesitation and rushed outside, charging down the steps and caught a glimpse of his car’s tail light, red, like a pair of eyes, dripping with blood and tears, moving further away in an instance, turning across the driveway and disappearing from her sight.
It really was raining. The rain drenched her hair. She didn’t cry. She clearly knew that he was already gone.
He was truly gone.
She stood there, like a fool, silent. She knew that was hell, but she personally plunged herself into it, personally watching until she succumbed to despair.
She had a high fever for a week. Her wound also got infected. At first, she didn’t care, and insisted on going to work. In the end, she had such a high fever that her whole person was in trance and her hands nearly couldn’t move so she finally went to the community hospital. When the doctor saw her swollen wood, he immediately advised her to go to a large general hospital. She was afraid, so she resisted the pain until she couldn’t anymore. Fortunately, it was not his hospital, and was one half a city away.
But she was still afraid, afraid to the extent that anytime she saw a doctor in a white coat, she would tremble; afraid to the extent that her tears could fall at any minute.
The pus needed to be squeezed from the wound and rotten flesh scraped off.
The nurse who handled the wound for her was very surprised and said, “Why did you delay coming to the hospital until now? Your hand would’ve become permanently useless if you hadn’t come!” Then she said, “Don’t move, it will hurt a little, just endure and it’ll be over.”
Endure. She tried desperately to endure. It hurt, hurt like so. The pain was such that she could clearly feel the knife was scraping at the wound, such that she could clearly feel the scissors cutting through the flesh, but she didn’t shed a single tear. She pinched her fingers deeply into her palms, thinking numbly, how long will it take? How long will it take to end? How long will it take to stop the pain?
Three or four bags of IV drips every day. Her fever gradually subsided, but her hands still couldn’t move. Changing the dressing every day was like torture, but she would rather this kind of cruel bone-cutting pain than the pain in her heart.
One day in the middle of the night, while asleep, her phone rang. Still half-asleep, she picked it up and heard a familiar voice, and the call of “Xiaosu”. She thought it was a dream, and it turned she was also dreaming. The phone hung up almost immediately. Hearing the repetitive beeps, she thought, so it was a dream after all.
She lay down and fell asleep again. The pain in her arm came in wages, so painful but to find Fenbid to take. After one tablet, it still hurt. After two, it still hurt. She took out all the tablets. They formed a small handful. If she swallowed it all, would it no longer hurt?
She put them close to her mouth. As long as she lifted her neck and swallowed it, she might never hurt again.
After hesitating for a long time, she finally threw the medicine down fiercely. The capsules fell onto the ground, like a handful of beans. Her hand still hurt, almost making her want to cry again. She called out in a very small voice: “Shao Zhenrong.”
In the dark, there wasn’t a response.
She was in such pain that she curled herself up and finally fell asleep slowly.
When he saw Du Xiaosu again, Lin Xiangyuan was surprised.
She seemed to have become a different person. The last time he saw her, she was shining, like a jewel that people’s gazes couldn’t help but attach to. But seeing her this time, her whole person seemed to have dimmed, no longer dazzling brilliant like that day. Although she was still attentive in the meeting, occasionally he could see her thick and long eyelashes covering her eyes, like the deep shadow of a secluded pool, reflecting the color of the sky, but with a dazed and bewildered look.
After the meeting, in the parking lot, Du Xiaosu discovered that she had forgotten her files in the meeting room. Although Ning Weicheng didn’t say anything, Du Xiaosu felt deeply guilty. She was absent-minded as of late and kept on forgetting things. She said quietly to Ning Weicheng: “Manager Ning, why don’t you all go first. I’ll just get the files and take a cab back home by myself.”
She took the elevator and went upstairs again. When she opened the door of the meeting room, she was startled.
No lights were turned on in the meeting room. Only a little red light could be seen in the darkness. In the shadows, you could see a person sitting there smoking a cigarette. She walked in from the outside corridor. She couldn’t see who it was for a while, so she hesitated, wondering if she should first leave.
“Xiaosu.” He called to her suddenly in the darkness.
She deliberately said in a relaxed tone: “So it was Mr. Lin . . . . I forgot my things here.”
“I know.” His voice was calm: “The switch is on the wall behind you.”
She stretched out her hand – it really was there – so she pressed down. Star-like lights filled the ceiling, all shimmering with brightness all of a sudden. She was a little uncomfortable with the sudden light, and couldn’t help but stretch out her hand to cover her eyes.
When she put down his hand, Lin Xiangyuan had already stood up from the table and handed her the documents. His figure was still tall, and his huge shadow obscured the light above his head. She said cautiously, “Thank you.”
“Xiaosu, there’s no need for such politeness between us.”
She was silent for a while, and finally said: “Okay, Mr. Lin.”
He suddenly smiled: “Xiaosu, let me treat you to dinner.”
She said, “Thank you Mr. Lin, but I have an appointment with a friend. When there’s an opportunity, we can discuss it.”
He finally sighed, as if trying to resist something, but still asked: “Xiaosu – has something happened to you? Can I help?”
She gently shook her head. No one could help her. She had committed unforgivable sins.
He laughed self-deprecatingly: “I really… I really can’t help myself. Please don’t get me wrong. I think you are a little unwell today, so just from the standpoint of a friend, I want to know if you are encountering any difficulties.”
Her face was pale. She didn’t want to talk any more.
After a long silence, he said, “Xiaosu, I’m sorry.”
Du Xiaosu’s face seemed very calm, and her voice as well: “There’s nowhere where you’ve been sorry to me.”
“Xiaosu, your family is well-off, so you never understand what striving is, because, since young, you have never needed to fight. I know you despise me and look down on me, but you don’t know what I’ve experienced.” He still carried that faint self-deprecating smile: “In the past, you asked me why I was studying for a Ph.D. Now I can tell you that it is because of low self-esteem. Yes, low self-esteem. Only a degree can win the respect of others, and only a degree can make me confident in myself. You hadn’t expected that right? It’s such a ridiculous reason.
You know that I was born in a mining area and my father died very early. But I never told you that my mother didn’t have a formal job, so I could only go to school because of a pitiful amount of pensions and the money from my mother’s part-time work. I will never forget tha because there was no money, I watched my mother’s disease advance from hepatitis B to cirrhosis. Recovery for her disease was delayed by poverty. I could no longer stand that kind of life, that kind of poverty. The No. 1 Middle School in the mining area is very famous, and many students go to Tsinghua and Peking University every year from there. Do you know why? Because of poverty, because there is no other way and no way out, they study furiously. Once they get admitted to a prestigious university, they come out reborn as a new person.
But do you know how difficult it is? I worked three to four times as hard as others to get the scholarship, but after graduation, I had nothing, no connections, no one I could rely on. Xiaosu, I will never forget my embarrassment when looking for a job. But you, you said you were going to Beijing to stay with me. You didn’t even need to bother to find a job, because your father’s friends soon arranged everything for you. If you look down on me because of this, I will feel better, but you are not like that. You have no such idea at all. Instead, you were helping to look for a job for me.
During that time, I could hardly raise my head in front of you. After all those years of hard work, what could I even do? I wasn’t even comparable to a phone call from your father, not comparable to this uncle and that uncle that my undergraduate classmates knew from home. I had nothing. I even had to rely on you. I still needed to feed my mother so that she could spend her last years in peace. I am her only hope and only pride in her life! When you were in school, you always felt puzzled and wronged for my refusal to take you home. It’s not that I don’t want to take you home, but that I can’t make you face my mother. I had continually been studying for a Ph.D. There was nothing but bare walls in the house. That house, that kind of family…
In front of you, I was always that outstanding and proud. You had always been proud of me, felt that I was the best in the world. You don’t know how much effort I have to put in to stand with you, yet you are relaxed and at ease, yet still have so much more than me. You are that beautiful, that great, that simple that I felt inferior. To be with you took too much effort. To preserve that beauty, it was too difficult. So in the end, I really couldn’t bear it any longer and couldn’t persist anymore…”
He paused for a while, as if he had smiled. His voice became faint, with indescribable sadness: “Xiaosu, nothing can make up for it now. But the fact that I can say these things to you makes me feel much better.”
His words were like a dense rain, making her feel a cold that seeped into her bones. The lights in the meeting room glittered, shining on him, his well-tailored handmade suits, making his eyebrows shart and distinct. He was clearly familiar and clearly unfamiliar. She had indeed tnot thought that he would have such pressure and such thoughts. She tried her best to forget those things in the past, but she did not expect them to ruin everything today. She kept her long silence, as if she wanted to purge everything from her past quietly and silently.
Finally, she said: “The past has passed and it is not important anymore.”
He said, “Xiaosu, please forgive me.”
She was still very silent: “You didn’t do anything wrong, let alone needing my forgiveness.” Then, she asked: “Can I go now?”
“I’ll send you.”
“No need.” She pushed back the door of the meeting room. There was wind in the corridor outside, blowing such that her body felt even colder.
On the way home, Du Xiaosu looked at the street view outside the car window. At dusk, the city was bustling with traffic, cars flowing like water. The city seemed to be so prosperous, as though nothing had ever happened. It was like a dream, that once she woke up, nothing had yet happened.
But she would never be able to wake up from this nightmare.
Only when she arrived at the door did she notice that her bag was missing. She didn’t know if it was on the subway or in a taxi.
She was very tired, and didn’t even want to try to think further.
So, when she reached the door, she slowly sat down, hugging her knees, just like a baby. This was the safest. This was the best. If she could no longer think, how great would that be.
Her keys, wallet and mobile phone were all in the bag.
She couldn’t get in, but it didn’t matter anymore. She didn’t want to go in anyway.
Something in her died forever, never to revive. She buried her head in her arms. If she could, she wanted to die just like that, without having to come back to life.
She once thought that she had really forgotten her unbearable past, the ignorance and selfishness of youth, and the impulsive indulgence because of her heartbreak. After that night, she panickedly discovered that she was in bed with a stranger. After the panic, she finally forced herself to forget. Successfully, eternally forget, never to remember again, like a pairt of scissors cutting at the middle of the mess, not leaving a trace. Even she herself thought that she had wiped those memories clean, but she had still committed a heinous crime that brought about the retribution today. She thought that was just a chanced mistake. With her 20 years of good upbringing she had never done such an audacious thing, losing herself in the midst of wine. So this was retribution. She was wrong, so terribly wrong. She couldn’t think about it, she couldn’t have imagined that man would reappear in her life, and was even Shao Zhenrong’s brother. This was retribution. Just thinking about it made her whole heart anguished, as though she was trapped in the nine hells, burned by fire and ice, never to turn over this stone, never to be at peace.
She remembered calling Zou Siqi very late that night because her spare key was with Zou Siqi. She waited for a long time, and finally the elevator finally stopped on this floor, and there were footsteps. Someone came to her, but it was not Zou Siqi who sent the key, nor a neighbor, but Shao Zhenrong.
She sat in front of the door exhausted to her bones. When she saw him, her body jumped slightly, as if she wanted to escape, but there was a locked door behind her, and there was no room to retreat to.
He looked at her quietly, carrying her bag in his hand. She looked at him in panic. He gave her the bag, his voice seemed a little low: “You forgot it in the taxi. The driver looked through the phone’s directory and then called me.”
She didn’t dare to speak or move, like a fish in a shallow pool. She was afraid that a swipe of her tail would startle people, and she would never be able to recover.
“Xiaosu,” he finally called her name, as if these two words carried some kind of pain. His voice was still very soft, as gentle as before. He said, “You have to take care of yourself, don’t always forget this and that.”
She didn’t move. He stretched out his hand and held the bag in front of her for a long time. She still didn’t move, let alone reach out to pick it up.
Finally, he gently put the bag on the ground in front of her, turned, and left.
Until the elevator door closed with a quiet “ding”, her body shook and she raised her head.
She didn’t care about anything else and just rushed to the elevator door. The number had already changed rapidly and decreased, like the heartbeat of a person who lost all hope. She desperately pressed the button, but it was useless. He was already. She continued to desperately press it, watching the numbers decrease one by one in despair. He had truly gone. She turned around and ran down the emergency stairway. There were floors and floors of stairs, pitch black without light, without people, like an endless passageway, spiraling downwards, with no end… She only heard her own footsteps, tap tap tap, tap tap tap…accompanied by her racing heart, that threatened to come out of her chest. Even her breathing became difficult, but it was too late and she knew it.
She ran downstairs in one breath and pushed open the heavy smoke-proof door with a “bang”. The rebounding door leaf hit her calf and caused her to stumble, but she found her ground. Because she couldn’t fall, she didn’t have the time to fall.
The hall in front of her was empty, the marble floor reflecting the cold of the ceiling lights, There were sounds outside. Maybe it was raining.
She didn’t have a hint of hesitation and rushed outside, charging down the steps and caught a glimpse of his car’s tail light, red, like a pair of eyes, dripping with blood and tears, moving further away in an instance, turning across the driveway and disappearing from her sight.
It really was raining. The rain drenched her hair. She didn’t cry. She clearly knew that he was already gone.
He was truly gone.
She stood there, like a fool, silent. She knew that was hell, but she personally plunged herself into it, personally watching until she succumbed to despair.
