Chapter 2

When Chen Wei came out of the shower, I pointed at the conversation on his phone and demanded an explanation.

“That’s just how Jiang Lu talks. Don’t take it to heart,” he said.

“Don’t take it to heart? She talks shit about me to my own boyfriend, and I’m not allowed to be angry?”

“She’s not talking shit.” He frowned. “She’s just easygoing. She says what she thinks.”

“Chen Wei! Being blunt and being nasty are two different things!”

“You’re calling Jiang Lu nasty? Lin Sui, how can you say that about someone who’s been my buddy for years? That’s way out of line!”

I looked at him. For a moment, he felt like a stranger.

It was still the same face, the face I’d carried in my heart for eight years. Yet I felt as if I didn’t know him at all.

That night, I lay with my back to him and didn’t say a word.

I rarely got angry with Chen Wei. He probably wasn’t used to it. He wrapped his arms around me from behind.

“Don’t be mad, Suisui,” he coaxed patiently. “I’ll tell her not to say things like that again.”

I ignored him, and he patted me gently now and then.

“Suisui, are you really not going to talk to me? You used to say you’d accept everything about me.”

Something in my chest trembled. Suddenly, I was back in the past.

His face blurred, as though I were seeing it through shifting water again.

When I said Chen Wei had pulled me out of the darkest despair, I meant it.

My hometown had a Lakeside Park. As the name suggested, there was a lake in it.

There hadn’t always been railings around that lake. Those only went up after some unlucky kid nearly drowned there one summer about eight years ago.

That unlucky kid was me.

I was in middle school then, playing by the water with a girl from my class. The bank was slippery, and I lost my footing and fell in.

I couldn’t swim. I struggled on instinct, my arms and legs growing heavier and heavier.

The lake was deep. I could feel myself slipping farther from shore. My friend couldn’t swim, either. She stood on the bank, screaming in panic.

But the park was almost empty that day, and there wasn’t another soul by the lake. By the time she ran to get help and came back, I would have been dead.

Water flooded my lungs. I was suffocating in agony.

It was the most hopeless moment of my twenty-odd years of life.

I’d met Death, and it was taking me away.

Then someone caught hold of me. He refused to let Death have its way and dragged me back to the living.

Through the shimmering water, his face was indistinct. Young. Male. I saw him for only a moment before I lost consciousness.

I woke up in the hospital.

My family asked everywhere about my “hero.” All anyone knew was that he’d rescued me and walked away without leaving anything behind.

After a long search, we finally learned his name from some elderly people who lived near the park.

Chen Wei. From Beijing. A tourist.

Those were the only three things we had.

In a city as crowded as Beijing, there was no way to find him with so little information. We could only keep our gratitude to ourselves.

After I left the hospital, my body recovered without much trouble. My mind was another story.

I was terrified of water. For a long time, I drowned again and again in my nightmares every night.

But whenever that face finally appeared through the water, all my fear vanished.

Chen Wei was my god.

For three years of high school, I studied as hard as I could. Whenever I was exhausted, I’d write his name in my scratch notebook. I learned to write “Chen Wei” more beautifully than my own name, “Lin Sui.”

Maybe heaven was looking out for me. After I got into an art college in Beijing, I was thrilled to discover there was a boy there named Chen Wei.

It could have been a coincidence. I’d considered that. But the moment I saw him, my heart nearly leaped out of my chest.

His face looked so much like the blurred one I’d seen through the water.

And he was a Beijing native.

To make sure, I asked him, “Have you ever been to Suzhou?”

“I have.”

“The summer eight years ago… did you save a girl who was drowning there?”

Chen Wei paused and looked at me.

Then, hesitantly, he said, “At Lakeside Park? There was someone in red in the water…”

I’d been wearing red that day.

I was almost shaking when I told him, “That was me. Chen Wei, I finally found you.”

Later, he told me he liked me and asked me to be his girlfriend.

I said yes without a second thought.

Because he was Chen Wei. The Chen Wei I’d searched for all those years.

There were still a few things about the rescue that puzzled me, though.

For instance, he was my age. In my memory, the boy had been so strong, and he’d looked like a grown man.

Chen Wei said I couldn’t have seen clearly while I was drowning. Besides, because I was grateful, I’d probably made him seem bigger in my mind.

That made sense to me.

His name, his hometown, even the clothes I’d worn that day: everything matched.

And I couldn’t possibly be mistaken about that face.

Once we were together, I devoted myself to him.

I almost never lost my temper with him. Every time I looked at his face and remembered I owed him my life, how could I justify getting angry?

Over time, Chen Wei became certain I could never leave him. He had me wrapped around his finger.

Before this, we’d never had any major problems.

But once Jiang Lu appeared, I discovered we’d had plenty all along.

I was tired. Even so, I forgave him.

Because he was Chen Wei.