When Yang Zhi returned home, she saw Qiqi lying in the snow-covered courtyard as soon as she entered.
She smiled brightly. "Sister Yang Zhi, you're back!"
Yang Zhi froze for a moment, then forced a smile. "Mm."
Qiqi asked, "Huh? Sister Yang Zhi, are you in a bad mood?"
"No." Yang Zhi shook her head, then walked toward her bedroom.
Grandma sat in a chair beneath the veranda and watched everything unfold. She said nothing, merely exchanging a glance with Qiqi.
"Sister Yang Zhi seems to have something on her mind."
"Ah... It does seem that way."
They looked at each other in silence.
Inside the bedroom.
Yang Zhi listlessly opened the packages she had bought. Her scissors snipped away at the tape before she tore the package open and took out the new clothes.
"They looked pretty nice when I saw them before, but now that I'm looking at them again, they're not that nice."
She opened the snacks she had bought and took a bite. They didn't taste as good as they had before, either.
After feeling melancholy for a while, she opened the test papers Ding Yebai had completed and began grading them.
She hadn't had time to look over the ones he had done before.
She started grading them one by one. Her red pen moved rapidly across the pages, but her mind was filled with the scene of Ding Yebai and that girl.
At last, she reached the fill-in-the-blank questions.
When Yang Zhi saw that Ding Yebai had gotten a question wrong again, even though he had done it before, a tiny flame of anger flared in her heart.
She frowned slightly, tightened her grip on the red pen, and blurted out, "This brat is really driving me crazy."
Knock, knock, knock—