Wei Zijin carefully folded the first love letter Wang Xiaoliang had written her and slipped it into her notebook's plastic cover. Holding it in one hand, she hugged it to her chest for a long while.
Her phone screen was still lit. The message she had sent sat quietly in the chat, unanswered.
It's fine. He might be asleep.
Unless there's something he has to do, Xiaoliang never stays up late.
She stood and returned to the bedroom with light steps, opening the wardrobe to change. The moment her hand touched a hanger, she froze.
The clothes had been sorted by color and hung neatly, with equal spaces between them.
She pulled open a drawer and looked down. Her underwear had been folded into squares and stacked piece upon piece, lined up like goods on supermarket shelves.
The day she left, she had rummaged through her clothes in anger, leaving them in a mess.
Wei Zijin ran barefoot into the bathroom. She lifted the toilet lid; the inside gleamed white. The bottles and jars on the sink had all been wiped clean and arranged in a row by height. There wasn't a single water stain on the shower's glass door.
On the balcony, the drying rack was full of clothes-the ones she had changed out of the day she left.
Wei Zijin leaned against the balcony doorframe, the corners of her mouth lifting into a smile she couldn't suppress.
He had cleaned the entire home before leaving.
How wonderful.
She fetched a broom and dustpan to gather the scattered roses, but just as she was about to sweep, she set them aside again. She moved them a little farther away, fetched her phone, and recorded a video following the trail of roses, only to realize she had put away the