Chang Nian was worried, afraid. Even she could no longer tell whether the "wait a little longer" she kept repeating was prudence or escape.
She understood everything and knew everything. What that matter meant to Tong Guan was like what A Lian meant to Yu Guo.
That was why she was afraid, why she had considered running away. After all, Yu Guo had ultimately met a bad end because of those obsessions...
But after Old Yu Street, this woman whose heart belonged wholly to her husband could no longer say anything. Gu Xingjian had laid those things bare before Tong Guan.
Tong Guan could no longer run, and Chang Nian knew she could not run either.
Her heart ached for him, and she understood him. He had always been the only thing she pursued in life, yet she also knew that he pursued far more things in his own life.
She gripped her husband's icy hand, personally lit a cigarette for him, and sat with him in the first-floor hall, waiting there.
A past they could not avoid, an entanglement they could not break free from.
Fate was like an invisible net, covering every one of them and turning them into fish trapped within its tangled mesh.
When the doors of the Seventh Branch were pushed open, the visitor blended into the cold wind. Behind him was dazzling light, yet in the eyes of the couple, there was only that black figure.
Since the Old Yu Street mission, Ji Li and Tong Guan had avoided meeting each other, whether by coincidence or deliberately.
But at the end of the event, they could no longer avoid it.
Long, long ago, Ji Li had no memory at all of fifty years earlier, only scattered traces and fragments.
Tong Guan's hazy childhood memories