At two in the morning, Jiang Huaixiao closed his laptop once again.
He leaned back on the bench and turned his head to look through the glass window at the top of the door.
Only a bedside lamp remained on in the ward, its circle of warm yellow light confined to the edges of the two beds pushed together.
Jiang Xun lay wrapped in a blanket, one hand sticking out over its edge, his fingers loosely curled.
Across the gap, Shen Wangjing's fingers lay less than a centimeter from his fingertips.
Jiang Huaixiao stared at those two nearly touching hands for a moment, then stood, pushed open the ward door, and walked in.
He bent down and gently tucked Jiang Xun's exposed hand back under the blanket, widened the gap between the attendant's bed and the hospital bed by half a palm's width, and turned the air conditioner up two degrees while he was at it.
The young nurses at the nurses' station had privately given him a nickname: the most hardcore night watchman on the seventh floor of Peking Union Medical College Hospital.
The domineering CEOs in romance novels kept vigil for the heroine; President Jiang kept vigil to pry his little brother's hand away from someone else's.
At 3:17 a.m., the seventh-floor corridor of the inpatient building at Peking Union Medical College Hospital had fallen completely silent.
Jiang Xun had that dream again.
It was still that familiar communal sleeping platform at the orphanage. In winter, the radiators were never more than lukewarm, and the wind pouring through the gaps in the windows could chill a person to the bone.
He huddled in the spot closest to the wall, his quilt so thin that light passed through it, the soles of his feet numb with cold.
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