Chapter 71: N. Found Again

After two full days keeping vigil at the hospital, his grandmother was finally out of danger.

The attending physician walked Su Hui through her condition and told him that as long as she made it through this stage steadily, her immune system would gradually recover. Everything was moving in the right direction.

The weight that had been pressing on Su Hui’s chest eased, just slightly.

He had barely slept for two days. The caregiver urged him to go home and rest, but Su Hui refused — he wanted to stay by his grandmother’s side until she woke. Eventually the caregiver said, “She may not come around for a while yet. The weather’s getting a bit warmer, Eddy — why don’t you go home, swap out her blanket for a lighter one, and bring back some of the food she likes? She can have it when she wakes up.”

Only then did Su Hui agree to leave, catching a car back to the apartment.

He felt unsettled on the way home, his thoughts drifting to Ning Yixiao and the trouble at work. But it was a world he knew nothing about, and he had no connections there — nothing useful he could offer. He thought about calling, then worried about interrupting, and eventually let it go.

Back at the apartment, he opened the door. Xuegao came running to greet him immediately, and Su Hui crouched down to gather the cat into his arms, rubbing his head. “Good boy, Xuegao. I filled your bowl before I left — did you finish it all?”

He was still talking as he stood and changed his shoes — and then he noticed Ning Yixiao’s shoes by the door.

Ning Yixiao was home?

Su Hui assumed he’d come back to sleep or was working from home, but the living room was empty. Xuegao made a beeline for the stairs, as if pointing him toward his owner on the second floor.

Su Hui followed. He passed through the hallway and came to the large, otherwise empty study — and there was Ning Yixiao, sitting on the sofa.

He didn’t look well. He was hunched forward, elbows on his knees, forehead resting in one hand. Exhausted.

“Ning Yixiao?”

Su Hui called his name softly, walked over, and crouched in front of him. He touched his arm carefully and looked up at his face. “What’s wrong? Is it still the situation at work?”

Ning Yixiao didn’t answer right away.

He looked so distressed that Su Hui felt it too, like a current passing between them. He tried to offer comfort. “You must be worn out from these past two days. Is anything hurting? I can help you work out the tension — would that help?”

Before he finished the sentence, Ning Yixiao leaned forward and wrapped his arms around him.

Su Hui paused for just a moment, then reached around and rested his hands on Ning Yixiao’s back, stroking gently through the soft knit of his sweater. Wanting to help him come back to himself, Su Hui smiled a little and murmured, “I knew it — you’re exhausted. You’ve worked so hard. Come here.”

Su Hui leaned into him like a gentle, pliant cat — battered himself in ways he didn’t say, yet doing his quiet best to comfort.

It was in that moment that Ning Yixiao finally understood why, on the day they had reunited, Su Hui had so carefully, tentatively asked him about the letters.

He hadn’t been talking about the papers Ji Tailu had shown him at all. He’d been talking about the letters he wrote day after day, trapped in that lightless psychiatric facility — letters written for Ning Yixiao alone.

The question that had haunted Ning Yixiao for six years dissolved, all at once, the moment he had read those pages.

He had convinced himself that Su Hui had never really loved him — that it had only been a temporary emotional peak, something that looked like love but was really just the illness. And because Su Hui hadn’t truly loved him, he’d been able to leave so easily, to vanish so completely.

Ning Yixiao had been abandoned by his biological father from birth, and his mother had slipped away in silence. He had never cried or raged at those who left him the way a child might. He had learned long ago to accept abandonment quietly. Even when he found Su Hui again, he hadn’t been able to bring himself to ask, with any rawness, why he had been left.

Su Hui was the same. He had believed all along that Ning Yixiao received the letters and chose not to reply — that Ning Yixiao didn’t want to see him, didn’t want to help him. When they met again, he had only dared to ask in a small voice, and the moment the subject was changed, he’d never raised it again. He hadn’t even let himself show how much it hurt.

They had almost missed each other a second time.

Ning Yixiao felt the pain of it like a slow blade. Every word Su Hui had written carved itself somewhere tender.

“I’m sorry.”

Hearing those words from Ning Yixiao, Su Hui went still — and, somewhere beneath the stillness, afraid.

“Why are you saying that?” His voice was quiet and careful. “What happened?”

He tried to get up, drawing Ning Yixiao with him. “You haven’t been sleeping enough — that’s what this is. Come lie down with me for a while, okay?”

Ning Yixiao didn’t resist. He followed Su Hui into the bedroom and let himself be settled onto the bed, the covers pulled back around him.

Su Hui lay down too, facing him, very close. He removed Ning Yixiao’s glasses and touched the bridge of his nose, then let his fingertips brush lightly over his eyelids — an invitation to close them.

“Let me put you to sleep,” Su Hui said softly. “I’ve done it for Xuegao. He goes out very fast.”

Ning Yixiao laughed, a small, involuntary smile that rose and faded.

Su Hui patted his shoulder in a gentle, steady rhythm, whispering again and again: “Sleep now. Sleep. When you wake up, all your worries will be gone. Everything will be alright.”

Ning Yixiao opened his eyes and looked at him. “Su Hui.”

“Hmm?”

“Is this how you used to comfort yourself? These past six years?”

Su Hui’s hand stilled. He was quiet for a long moment.

Hearing Ning Yixiao say six years, his heart lurched. He didn’t know what to say.

Ning Yixiao took his hand and held it, brow furrowed. “Su Hui. I never stopped wanting to see you. I was hurt and angry — but I never stopped wanting you.”

Su Hui’s eyes filled with a soft, bewildered mist.

He didn’t understand, so he said nothing.

“I never received your letters. Not a single one.”

It was rare to see anything like grief on Ning Yixiao’s face — he was always composed, controlled, self-contained. But right now he looked like a child who had lost everything.

“I got them this morning. Danny had them packaged and sent.”

If he had received even one, he would have gone after Su Hui without hesitation — however far, however hard. He would never have left him to suffer in that place.

Su Hui’s mind caught up slowly, and when it did, his breath went short. Like a startled cat, he felt it physically — his eyes went red in an instant.

“You didn’t get them… but she said she sent them. I wrote the address so carefully on every single one. She promised me. She told me she would send them…”

He met Ning Yixiao’s eyes. After a few seconds, tears fell — and he laughed at the same time, a bitter sound. “So I was lied to, wasn’t I?”

“They all lied to me. I waited every day for a letter back from you.” The tears came faster now, and he cried the way he had cried four years ago at a bus stop in a foreign country, borrowing strangers’ phones. “Why did they lie to me? I didn’t do anything wrong…”

Ning Yixiao’s heart broke. He pulled Su Hui into his arms and held him tightly.

“Baby. It wasn’t your fault.”

Hearing him say that, Su Hui cried harder still. “I thought you never wanted to see me again. I thought you hated me. But I had no choice — none at all. I wanted you to have a better life. I didn’t want you to keep suffering…”

“They damaged my brain. I couldn’t remember your phone number. I wanted to find you and I couldn’t, no matter what I tried. I had no money. I had nothing…”

“I know.” Ning Yixiao ached with it, not knowing what to say, only stroking Su Hui’s hair. “I wanted to see you. I never hated you. I never stopped loving you.”

Su Hui couldn’t speak anymore.

His six years had been one long, vast nightmare. However well he’d buried it, the moment the person he loved came asking, every scar and every wound surfaced without shelter.

Everything he had believed, all this time, collapsed at once. It had been a misunderstanding from the very beginning. The person he’d thought was helping him had been lying to him for six years — lying so thoroughly that even the courage to imagine Ning Yixiao still loved him had eroded away to nothing.

He didn’t want to be this fragile. He wanted to face himself and face the person he loved the way other people seemed to do — with more courage, more directness. But what could he do? He had tried everything he could think of, done everything within reach. All of it had sunk without a trace.

Su Hui wanted to know why. He’d never done anything truly wrong in his life. Why did fate have to be this cruel?

“Ning Yixiao… it hurts so much…” He leaned against his chest and could no longer hold back anything.

Ning Yixiao held him, his voice impossibly gentle. “It won’t hurt anymore. Not after this.”

The years they had lost could never be returned. No one could give them back. But from now on — no one could take them apart either.

---

After a long while, Su Hui’s emotions began to settle. When he came back to himself, he found he had cried all over Ning Yixiao’s shirt and felt terrible about it. “Your clothes…”

“It doesn’t matter.” Ning Yixiao kissed his red, swollen eyelids. “It was my fault. I misunderstood you. When we first met again, I thought you meant different letters — I said things I shouldn’t have.”

Su Hui shook his head. “I misunderstood you too. I’ve been misunderstanding you this whole time. I’m not without fault either.”

“Then you forgive me, I forgive you. Agreed?”

Su Hui nodded, and asked how Ning Yixiao had found Danny. He listened to the whole story, and when it was done, he didn’t say much, didn’t dwell on the suffering. He was quiet for a moment, then said quietly, “Those letters… you read all of them?”

“Yes.”

“They were — I was very unwell when I wrote those. They’re a mess, badly written, you must have…”

Before Su Hui could finish, Ning Yixiao kissed him. He pulled back after a moment and pressed their foreheads together. “Not a mess at all. Just reading them, I could only imagine a fraction of what you went through. Su Hui — even if I’d received just one letter, I would never have left you there. However far, I would have come to find you and brought you home. Everything I’ve done in these six years — all of it was trying to build something I could call home, for you.”

Su Hui pressed his lips together and held back the next wave of tears. He nodded.

“Thank you.”

Ning Yixiao smiled. “For what?”

“For finding those letters. For finding me.”

Ning Yixiao couldn’t bear to think about it — if Carl hadn’t booked that hotel, if the hotel hadn’t mixed up the rooms, how much longer would it have taken to find Su Hui again?

Would it really have had to wait until forty?

“I found you too,” Su Hui said, looking up at him. “The world is this big — and we found each other again.”

Su Hui suddenly felt like the luckiest person in the universe. Not everyone got a second chance to find the person they loved most. He had. Nothing else mattered.

---

“I came for you the next morning, actually.”

Ning Yixiao looked at Su Hui and spoke quietly. “That night after we broke up, I thought about everything. I was ready to let it go — but then I saw the things you’d left behind, and I thought: when it gets light, I have to try one more time. What if there’s still a chance?”

Su Hui knew that after that snowy night, there had been no morning for either of them.

He had already been taken away.

“I went to your house. Your grandfather showed me things you’d written — pages of notes. He told me you didn’t really love me, that the illness had just made you send signals that resembled love.”

“You believed him?” Su Hui sounded quietly hurt.

Ning Yixiao touched his face. “I did, at the time. Because I genuinely didn’t feel like I was good enough for you back then. I’d never understood what you could possibly see in me. Reading those pages, it all seemed to make a terrible kind of sense.”

He looked down. “When I left your house, I got on my bicycle and started riding back to campus. A car hit me on the road. The driver fled. He left me alone in the snow. I thought I was going to die — and I remember feeling almost at peace about it. But someone saved me. I was unconscious in the hospital for ten days.”

He let out a slow breath. “Ten days. If it hadn’t been for the accident, I could have spent those ten days tracking down your mother, or your grandmother, in Shanghai. I would have found out where you were eventually.”

Life has a way of laughing at such calculations.

But Su Hui wasn’t interested in what-ifs. He reached out and touched Ning Yixiao’s leg. “The accident — that’s how you were hurt, isn’t it? Let me see. You’ve never let me see.”

Faced with that expression — quietly pitiable and earnest — Ning Yixiao hesitated, then gave in. He pulled off his damp-from-crying shirt.

Six years later, for the first time, he let Su Hui see him plainly.

The scars were on his ribs, the inner side of his left arm, and across his back — the sutured wounds were jagged and livid, each one a shadow that had followed Ning Yixiao for years.

Su Hui bit down on his lip. His whole body had begun to tremble, without his quite realizing it.

“May I… touch them?”

Ning Yixiao smiled. “Of course.”

Su Hui reached out and brushed them gently. His voice caught. “Does it hurt?”

“No.” Ning Yixiao kept his voice easy, not wanting to cause him more pain. “They healed long ago. They just look frightening.”

Su Hui leaned in and pressed his lips to each scar, very softly. Tears slid down.

“Your leg too. That was hurt as well.”

“The leg was the worst.” Ning Yixiao held him close. “Rehabilitation took the better part of a year. I gave up at first — I thought, what’s the point. Then I kept going. So I was a year late leaving for abroad, and at Stanford I just had to work harder and graduate early.”

The truth was, he’d been terrified lying in that hospital bed — afraid that one day Su Hui might regret things. That if Su Hui came back and looked for him, he couldn’t be found as a broken man.

“I’d actually been quietly saving money,” Ning Yixiao said. “I was going to use it for us — for when we studied abroad together. I kept a log. The category was called: Kitten Care Fund.“

The smile in his voice faded. “In the end, that money saved me. Not for keeping the kitten — but the fund I’d set aside for the kitten paid for most of my hospital bills.”

Su Hui could barely stand to hear it. He could picture it so clearly: Ning Yixiao with nothing — no family, no one to come sit beside him after something that serious, left to carry everything alone on his own two hands.

The guilt was overwhelming. If Su Hui hadn’t broken up with him that snowy night, none of it might have happened. Ning Yixiao wouldn’t have come to find him the next morning. He wouldn’t have been on that road.

But Ning Yixiao seemed to sense the guilt closing in and said: “All of that is in the past. I found out later that the accident wasn’t really a coincidence — the traffic police showed me footage when they were investigating. I recognized the driver. He had a history with my mother too. He got what was coming to him.”

He left out most of the details — there were names he didn’t want to speak tonight — and tightened his arms around Su Hui instead, steering toward lighter ground. “These scars. Pretty ugly, aren’t they?”

“No,” Su Hui said immediately.

“Really? I find them frightening. I’ve been afraid to take off my shirt in front of you.”

Su Hui cupped his face in both hands and kissed him gently. “They’re not frightening at all. Don’t think that way. It makes me sad.”

“Are you pitying me?” Ning Yixiao asked.

Su Hui shook his head quickly — being misunderstood by Ning Yixiao always made him flustered.

Ning Yixiao nudged his nose against Su Hui’s. “Don’t pity me, little cat. Just love me.”

Su Hui had no answer for that.

“I already love you very much.”

Ning Yixiao stroked his waist and kissed the tip of his nose. “Not enough. Love me more. Love me until you can’t be without me.”

“Alright.” Su Hui nodded, obedient, and rested his hand on the back of Ning Yixiao’s neck, fingers tracing through his hair.

Ning Yixiao leaned in and kissed him — long and unhurried, carrying no urgency, only tenderness and care.

They both understood that the years of emptiness between them couldn’t be filled in a single day. So, without needing to say it aloud, they made the same quiet decision: to reclaim, piece by piece, everything the two of them had lost.

Su Hui stroked Ning Yixiao’s scars softly, murmured his name, and hummed something low and soothing until the exhausted Ning Yixiao finally drifted off to sleep.

And Su Hui didn’t leave. He lay still in his arms while Ning Yixiao, even in sleep, held on tightly. With the tips of his fingers, Su Hui traced over each familiar feature — brow, nose bridge, lips, chin — greeting each one in a whisper, somewhere inside.

Hello.

It’s been so long.

You’re mine again.

Before he could speak to each new scar he didn’t yet know, Ning Yixiao seemed to catch the edge of a bad dream and pulled him close all at once, very tight.

Su Hui lifted his head quickly — and saw a single tear slide from Ning Yixiao’s closed eye.

Even his tears were stubborn. It stopped at the bridge of his nose, refusing to fall, pooling there in a small, crystalline lake.

“Don’t be afraid.” Su Hui kissed the tear away. “I’m right here.”

I won’t disappear again.

---

Two hours later, Ning Yixiao woke and found Su Hui had fallen asleep. He poked at the sleeping cat for a moment, quietly delighted, but work calls kept coming in one after another until there was no putting it off.

“Shaw — Edge needs an emergency meeting. Come if you can.”

There was nothing for it. He left a note on the bedside table, changed, and headed out.

Su Hui slept deeply — more peacefully than he had in a long time. When he finally woke, the room was dark. He reached over and realized, belatedly, that Ning Yixiao wasn’t beside him. He found the note.

[Came up in an emergency — will be back as soon as I can. Text me when you’re up. Ordered dinner; don’t forget to eat. — Ning Yixiao]

Su Hui did as he was told and sent a message.

[Little cat: I’m awake~]

He got up, washed his face, and gathered a few things his grandmother would need. He was about to head out to pick up some of her favorite foods when Ning Yixiao called.

“A file? Electronic?” Su Hui retreated from the entryway, listening to Ning Yixiao’s instructions over the phone as he went upstairs and opened the laptop.

“What’s the password?”

“Your birthday.”

Su Hui’s ears went faintly warm. He made a small sound, typed in his birthday, and the screen unlocked.

“Okay… D drive — hold on, slow down. The file path is so long.” He hadn’t anticipated how many folders Ning Yixiao had — layer inside layer, all named with similar date-and-English combinations that were hard to tell apart.

“Found it. Sending now.”

“Thank you. Eat your dinner.”

“I know, I know.”

The call ended. And then Su Hui noticed something — tucked among all those similarly named folders was one with a completely different name.

[Elephant.]

His heart jumped when he saw it.

Almost without meaning to, he clicked.

Inside was a single video, dated two years ago.

He knew it wasn’t right to open someone else’s files without asking. He opened it anyway.

The video began to play. He heard unfamiliar voices. The footage was first-person — somewhere extremely hot, sun blazing, the surroundings rougher and less clean, bins of hay and waste along the roadside. Not anywhere he could imagine Ning Yixiao going.

Then Ning Yixiao’s voice, in English.

“Is this the place?”

A dark-skinned man beside him nodded. “That’s right — the breeding center is just ahead.”

“Could I trouble you to hold the camera for me? I’d like to record a video.”

“Of course, no problem.”

The camera changed hands. The footage swayed, then steadied. Ning Yixiao stepped into frame — white athletic wear, black baseball cap. He walked forward through a gate, came face to face with a group of elephants, and leaned in close to read the tags hanging around each of their necks. He turned back toward the lens.

“These are them.”

Su Hui went very still.

On screen, Ning Yixiao reached into his backpack and pulled out a harmonica. He raised it to his lips and, facing the seven gentle animals before him, played a scale.

Do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si.

When he finished, he smiled and touched each small elephant’s trunk — without any hesitation, as though it didn’t occur to him that they might be dirty — and said something in Chinese, very quietly.

“You’re all so lovely. Just like him.”

Su Hui heard it clearly.

A moment later, Ning Yixiao turned back to the person holding the camera. “Thank you. That’s all I needed.”

The video cut to black.

---

Author’s Note:

They’re finally back together (more or less — their relationship isn’t officially reconfirmed yet, but it’s almost there!). There are still a few more things to settle. The two of them will take their time healing and falling in love all over again.