Epilogue
Later, Chen Yinian told me he had heard every word between me and Jiang Wujie through the restaurant’s surveillance.
He told me he had seen the despair in my eyes when I looked at the window and the small shift of my weight as I started to move.
He said the pain had hit him so hard he could barely breathe.
That was why, in the car, he never mentioned the child that had been ours.
He pretended he didn’t know.
He admitted he had been terrified that if he’d been even a second later, he would have lost me forever.
Almost everyone believed he first met me in university.
He told me he hadn’t.
During middle and high school entrance exams, his school was the city exam center.
He had seen me twice before.
The first time, middle school exams.
He was biking to an internet cafe, took a corner too fast, and knocked me to the ground.
I wouldn’t let him treat the scrapes, just smiled and kept saying it was fine.
When he returned with medicine, I was gone.
The second time, high school exams.
In the stairwell, I rushed down and crashed into him.
He knew enough then to feel the softness of my body against his was wrong. He pushed me away gently.
Then he looked into my wide, panicked, tear-filled eyes.
He froze, mouth half-open like he wanted to speak, but I slipped away before he could.
Just those two brief encounters.
Yet in art class, he could draw me perfectly from memory.
He told me every dream after that had been about me.
So falling for me in university had felt inevitable to him.
He had entered my life step by step, drawn me into his, made me take the first move.
The dependence that followed—mental, physical—had turned into something only I could satisfy.
Irreversible.
Chen Yinian knew clearly: he was the one who could never leave.
We were two cowards.
Wishing us happiness.