Chapter 15: The Curtain Falls

 

Born with an innate sensitivity that had shaped her perception of the world since childhood, Hu Xiu had always believed there existed moments when people plunge headlong into destiny—not gradually, not with warning, but suddenly, completely, like stepping off a ledge into an abyss that had been waiting beneath her feet all along. She had experienced what might generously be called "terrifying" phases scattered throughout her life, but those were merely lows—the kind that occur when a smooth road dips into a depression. They felt arduous in the moment, certainly, but they had little genuine connection to fate. They were circumstantial, survivable, forgettable in time.

This was different.

Now, standing completely immobilized in the darkness behind Qin Xiaoyi, a voice in her heart kept repeating with quiet insistence: this is it. This is the moment. The sensation was unlike anything she could adequately name—like stepping onto a tightrope strung over nothing and feeling gravity abandon her entirely. Fear and wonder crept up her bones simultaneously, twin currents running through her nerves, yet she found herself too exhilarated, too breathlessly alive, to contain either one. It was a sensation not everyone could comprehend, and she understood with sudden clarity why people throughout history had written entire novels trying to capture it in words and failing.

Someone approached through the darkness with deliberate, unhurried footsteps. Qin Xiaoyi registered the threat before Hu Xiu did—she felt him move rather than saw it, his body shifting back precisely half a pace, positioning himself to shield her completely behind him with the practiced ease of someone who had performed this gesture many times before, though perhaps never with this particular weight behind it. Hu Xiu, still suspended in the middle of her fall, was protected by Qin Xiaoyi. It was as though they were walking the tightrope together, for love, or for something that hadn't yet found its proper name.

The one approaching carried a knife and turned out to be the cheerful boy who had arrived earlier with the Shanghai woman—the sunny, tanned young man whose easy demeanor had made him seem entirely unthreatening. His voice came through the darkness clear and rapid, carrying none of the menace his weapon implied. "Big brother, let her go this time, or I won't be polite next time."

After confirming the surrounding area was sufficiently safe, Qin Xiaoyi turned slightly toward Hu Xiu. His voice carried its characteristic composure, though something beneath the surface had softened almost imperceptibly. "You really should go now. You can't hide here for long."

Hu Xiu stepped out from behind him reluctantly, the separation from his warmth and presence registering as a small, physical loss. She scanned the area with cautious eyes before turning back to him, and the words that emerged carried both honesty and something close to teasing. "It's all because your voice is too magnetic—whether you speak softly or loudly, it's immediately recognizable. Anyone within earshot could find you. And besides that, you're too thin."

"Complimenting me?" The faintest edge of amusement colored his tone.

"Saying you lack a sense of security." Her heart overflowed with a warmth so intense it almost hurt, the joy pressing outward against her ribs like something alive. She straightened her spine and fixed him with a look of determination. "Watch me from here, Minister Qin. Even with a knife coming for me, I'll win this. Last time you said I was foolish—let me prove you wrong."

"Of course you're clever." Qin Xiaoyi's smile deepened somewhere in the darkness, audible more than visible—a shift in the quality of his voice that communicated what his expression couldn't in the absence of light.

The question left her lips before she could think better of it, carried on the momentum of everything she was feeling. "Next time I come back, will you still recognize me?"

A pause. Then, with a weight that suggested the answer cost him something to give: "Probably."

Probably. The single word settled into her chest like a held breath, neither promise nor rejection but something suspended between the two—and somehow, impossibly, more satisfying than either.

Hu Xiu dashed out from behind Qin Xiaoyi and into the main thoroughfare of Rong City, her momentum carrying her forward with the force of everything she'd been holding back. The adrenaline of the game and the residual warmth of the darkness merged into something electric and purposeful.

The final Battle Royale had narrowed the field to its ultimate conclusion. When the dust of elimination settled, only two players remained alive on the entire playing field: Hu Xiu and Zhao Xiaorou. The realization landed with the particular absurdity of fate's sense of humor—the final showdown requiring her to eliminate her closest friend.

Zhao Xiaorou, for her part, appeared genuinely surprised by the situation. She clearly hadn't anticipated that the game's brutal logic would force this particular confrontation. But surprise didn't translate to hesitation. Her expression shifted from disbelief to something harder, more determined—she had absolutely no intention of losing, not even to someone she loved like a sister.

The coatings on both their bodies lit up with quiet electronic persistence, marking them as the last two living combatants. Li Ai, who had spent the entire evening maintaining his characteristic restraint and composure, broke that pattern now. Something close to excitement—rare enough to be almost startling—flickered across his features as he called out. "Xiu, go for it. This might be the only place where you can actually beat her."

Hu Xiu looked at Zhao Xiaorou across the illuminated space between them, reading her friend's clear intentions with the fluency of nearly a decade's shared understanding. She felt the familiar conflict rise in her chest—the genuine discomfort of someone whose nature recoiled from betrayal, even when the stakes were fictional. She wasn't the type to sacrifice a friend for victory. Not in life, certainly, and not even in a game where the consequences evaporated at dawn.

But then she remembered. She remembered the words she had spoken to Qin Xiaoyi in the darkness, the bold declaration she'd made with all the confidence the moment had lent her. She remembered wanting to prove something—not to herself, but to him. Mustering her courage, she made her decision. Betraying a friend would only happen this once, within the safe boundaries of the game. Even if the victory meant nothing beyond this single night, it would mean she had kept her word to Qin Xiaoyi. That had to count for something.

Before she could act on this resolution, however, the scene erupted into chaos from an entirely unexpected direction.

Someone shouted from the gathered crowd with theatrical malice that carried the unmistakable flavor of genuine spite: "Hu Xiu, Zhao Xiaorou has something to ask you—who exactly is your boyfriend?" Wang Guangming's finger jabbed toward Qian Jinxin first, then swiveled deliberately toward Qin Xiaoyi, and he laughed with the particular satisfaction of someone detonating a bomb he'd been carrying all evening. "Now tell me—who should everyone here be cheering for? Minister Qin Xiaoyi, or your legitimate boyfriend?"

"Wang Guangming, shut up. He's not her boyfriend." Zhao Xiaorou's frown was immediate and sharp, the words blurting out before she could consider their implications or the audience watching.

Qian Jinxin stood nearby, visibly stunned by the sudden escalation. Hu Xiu felt a flush of flustered embarrassment coloring her own cheeks—the situation was spiraling into exactly the kind of public spectacle she spent her life carefully avoiding. She thought to herself that since Qin Xiaoyi had acknowledged remembering her, explanations could wait. They could wait until the next time she returned to Snowpiercer, until she had the privacy and the proper setting to address whatever was developing between them. For now, she simply let the moment pass without dignifying Wang Guangming's provocation with a response.

What she felt instead, stepping back from the immediate chaos to observe the scene with the detachment of someone watching a film, was something unexpected: a touch of protagonist's pride. If one truly stepped back from the current stalemate—from the noise and the manufactured crisis—and viewed the entire tableau from a distance, what was unfolding on Rong City's main street was practically a scene lifted from a Republican-era drama. A genuine life-and-death showdown of a female lead, staged with inadvertent perfection.

A crowd had gathered, pressing inward from all sides. In the center stood two women—one dressed in a red dancer's outfit, the other in a blue cheongsam—each holding a knife, facing each other across the lamplit cobblestones. The atmospheric lighting caught the fabric of their costumes and the metallic gleam of their weapons with cinematic precision, and the ambient music provided by the game's sound system swelled at exactly the right moment. It was a scene rarely achieved even in professionally produced television dramas, and here it existed, unplanned and unrepeatable, on an ordinary Tuesday night.

Seizing the precise moment when Zhao Xiaorou's attention was pulled toward Wang Guangming's provocation—when her focus fractured just enough—Hu Xiu moved. She crossed the distance between them with quiet, deliberate steps and lightly drew her knife across the edge of Zhao Xiaorou's costume, just enough contact to activate the electronic coating beneath the fabric. The gesture was almost gentle. Almost apologetic.

Then she looked up, over Zhao Xiaorou's shoulder, directly at Qin Xiaoyi. She found him watching from the edge of the crowd, and in that single exchanged glance, a complicated emotion passed through her—pride at having made it to the end of Snowpiercer for the very first time in all her sessions, shadowed immediately by a genuine, quiet worry. She didn't want Qin Xiaoyi to think she was someone who would betray a friend. Not even in a game. Not even for a victory.

Zhao Xiaorou looked down at her activated coating, then at Hu Xiu, and something in her expression shifted—not anger, not even disappointment, but a kind of resigned, darkly amused acceptance. She threw her knife to the ground with a sharp clatter that rang through the sudden quiet.

Then she turned, not toward Hu Xiu, but toward Wang Guangming. Her voice carried with perfect clarity across the gathered crowd, stripped of all pretense and performance. "Wang Guangming, I've really had enough of you. I want a divorce!"

The room fell absolutely silent. Every person present seemed to hold their breath simultaneously, the collective intake creating a vacuum that Wang Guangming's words fell into. He stared at his wife—at the woman he'd married, the woman whose income sustained their entire operation—and his expression shifted through several phases before settling on something that looked like weary, practiced familiarity. Even impatience. As though this were a scene he'd watched performed before and found tiresome in repetition. "Stop causing a scene. If you're upset, we can talk about it at home."

"We'll talk right here. I can't wait until we get home, and I won't." Zhao Xiaorou's voice didn't waver, didn't crack, didn't rise to hysteria. It simply held its ground with a firmness that suggested this decision had been made long before tonight. "And Hu Xiu's business has nothing to do with you anymore. What are you all staring at? The show's over!"

"Since when did you grow such a backbone?" Wang Guangming's tone carried genuine incredulity beneath its contempt. "Are you seriously divorcing me over Hu Xiu?"

"I'm doing this for myself!"

"She's been two-timing both on and off stage, playing with men, and you're hiding her by threatening divorce?" His lip curled with disgust that seemed almost rehearsed. "What exactly are you trying to achieve here?"

"Oh—what am I trying to achieve?" Zhao Xiaorou's voice shifted register, acquiring an edge that cut through the air like glass. "Even Dai Peni wouldn't know what I want! But you—how do you have the nerve to keep up this act with me? You're not exactly clean yourself, yet here you stand playing the righteous hero. Who gave you the courage—Liang Jingru?" She flung the dancer's shawl from her shoulders with a sharp, violent gesture, letting it pool on the ground between them like a discarded flag. "Wang Guangming, aren't you tired? Tired of pretending to be the loving couple with me? Is deceiving our fans really that much fun for you?"

The crowd had grown absolutely motionless, every eye fixed on the unfolding confrontation with the fascinated horror of witnesses to something that had crossed irrevocably from performance into reality. Qian Jinxin, who had been watching with mounting alarm, apparently felt compelled to intervene. He stepped forward with the earnest confidence of someone who genuinely believed his perspective carried moral authority. "You're husband and wife; how can you argue like this in public? Besides, a woman should be gentle and obedient to her husband, not make him lose face in front of others. Zhao Xiaorou, listen to me—keep quiet. This is just a role-playing game; those people are merely actors, not worth getting so worked up over."

"You shut your mouth too." Zhao Xiaorou's attention swiveled to him with the precision of a targeting system acquiring a new objective. "I've put up with you long enough. Just because Hu Xiu respects you doesn't mean I won't call you out. Which ancient rulebook or coffin-pressing scripture spat out someone like you? Which page of the Classic of Mountains and Seas, which episode of Journey to the West, which chapter of Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio are you from? Even if this is a Live Action Role Playing Game, it's set in the Republican era—1936, the 25th year of the Republic. Women have been liberated, do you understand? What, are your feet still bound? Say one more word, and I'll twist your head clean off the moment we step out that door. Believe me."

"How—how can you talk like that?" Qian Jinxin's mouth opened and closed several times, rendered genuinely speechless by the velocity and precision of the verbal assault. Picking a fight with Zhao Xiaorou was demonstrably a catastrophic strategic error—once she began, she simply would not stop until her opponent had been thoroughly, completely, and publicly demolished. He retreated from that particular battlefield with visible haste. "I'm talking about you. And you, Wang Guangming—this divorce isn't over. Don't you dare use Hu Xiu as a shield to annoy me. Hu Xiu has been my sister for almost ten years. Even if there are relationship issues between you two, it is absolutely not your place to bring them up in front of everyone like this."

The scene had devolved into something that resembled less a game's conclusion and more a deliberate disruption—a controlled detonation set off in the middle of a crowded venue. No one had left; if anything, more people had gathered, drawn by the noise and the unmistakable energy of genuine conflict. The central streets of Rong City were packed body to body, every face turned toward the drama unfolding at its heart.

Wang Guangming, unusually, had abandoned any pretense of playing the loyal husband. Something had broken open in him tonight—whether it was the setting, the anonymity of the immersive theater where phones were confiscated and no one could record, or simply the accumulated pressure of maintaining a performance that had become too exhausting to sustain. He pressed forward, his expression stripped of its usual calculated charm. "Don't think I don't know the schemes running through your mind. You befriended Hu Xiu because she's poor. Ordinary in looks and talent. Pitiable—nothing compared to you in any meaningful way. You enjoy keeping such a follower around, don't you? Someone to play the savior over. Someone who makes you look generous by comparison."

The words landed in the crowd like stones dropped into still water, ripples of uncomfortable recognition spreading outward. Hu Xiu felt them strike somewhere deep, in a place she kept carefully protected, but she didn't flinch. She'd heard versions of this particular accusation before—from other people, from her own darkest internal voice on her worst nights. She knew it was designed to wound, and she also knew, with the quiet certainty of someone who had tested this knowledge against reality many times, that it wasn't entirely true. But it wasn't entirely false either, and that ambiguity was what made it cut.

Li Ai didn't step forward. He didn't need to. His cane, however, moved with fluid, silent purpose—pressing itself horizontally against Wang Guangming's chest with precisely calibrated pressure. Not aggressive. Not threatening. Simply present, and immovable, like a boundary drawn in the air.

Someone emerged from the gathered crowd with the authority of someone who understood that this situation required a specific kind of intervention. It was Qin Xiaoyi, his voice carrying across the space with calm, measured force. "The game is over. No arguing. Let's exit orderly through Rong City's gate."

Before he could finish the sentence, Wang Guangming shoved him.

The violence was casual, almost reflexive—the kind of physical aggression that came from someone who had never faced real consequences for his hands. Qin Xiaoyi's cheek scraped against something hard, skin splitting. His waist struck the corner of a wooden table with a sharp, resonant crack that cut through the noise like a gunshot. The impact was loud enough to make several people in the crowd wince.

A surge of anger rose in Hu Xiu's chest—hot, sudden, and more intense than anything she'd felt all evening. She knew Wang Guangming's pattern intimately. She had watched it operate for years: the way he bullied anyone he perceived as weaker, avoided anyone he perceived as dangerous, and calculated the odds with the instincts of someone for whom power was the only currency that mattered. In this setting—an immersive theater environment, surrounded by cast and crew who were, in his estimation, merely service staff—he felt entirely protected. Even friends, in his worldview, shouldn't resort to violence. But the cast and crew, in his eyes, were powerless to retaliate. They were furniture. Props. Things that existed to facilitate his experience.

Li Ai moved to position himself beside Zhao Xiaorou, his presence alone sufficient to prevent Wang Guangming from approaching her. The other NPCs rushed in from multiple directions, their professional training activating instantly. "No assaulting the cast and crew. Please leave the premises immediately."

In the midst of all this chaos—the confrontation, the shouting, the physical altercation, the crowd's collective shock—only Hu Xiu stood completely alone. She hadn't expected this evening to end like this. She had come tonight expecting the quiet satisfaction of a game well played, perhaps the lingering sweetness of Qin Xiaoyi's acknowledgment. Not a moral crisis, not a marriage collapsing in public, not the sight of Qin Xiaoyi—her Qin Xiaoyi, the person who had fastened a watch around her wrist and told her he remembered her—getting hurt because of someone else's ugliness.

She no longer cared to parse Wang Guangming's motivations—whether his words had been calculated cruelty or genuine conviction. She no longer needed to determine whether Zhao Xiaorou's decade-long friendship with her was built on authentic affection or some more complicated dynamic of generosity and dependency. None of that mattered right now. What mattered was the bruise already blooming on Qin Xiaoyi's face by the time the curtain call arrived, visible even in the venue's dim lighting.

Timidly—a word that felt strange attached to someone who had just stabbed a man without hesitation—she approached him. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine." The words were flat, carefully neutral, stripped of the warmth and humor that had characterized every previous exchange between them.

Qin Xiaoyi's eyes never looked at Hu Xiu again.

The absence of his gaze was more painful than the bruise on his face could have been. She stood there for a moment, feeling the loss of it like a door closing, and then she turned and walked away.

After leaving Snowpiercer, the group fragmented with the particular awkwardness of people who have witnessed something private and don't know how to reassemble themselves afterward. Hu Xiu changed back into her own clothes in the dressing room—the borrowed dress hanging in its designated spot, the watch returned, the evening's costume reduced to fabric and stitching once more—and waited in the lobby for Zhao Xiaorou to emerge.

She saw Li Ai standing near the entrance with his teenage cousin, who had long since abandoned any pretense of engagement with the adult drama unfolding around her. The girl was slumped drowsily against the sofa, her body language communicating with eloquent simplicity that she had absolutely no interest in the collapse of adult marriages and wanted only to know when her cousin would take her home. It was, after all, past one in the morning.

Li Ai was still in motion, moving through the lobby with quiet efficiency, apologizing to the surrounding staff members with genuine sincerity. The mess Wang Guangming had created needed cleaning up—not just the physical aftermath, but the social and professional damage to the venue's reputation. Li Ai handled it without complaint, without drama, setting his cane aside when necessary to use both hands. He was too busy managing the aftermath to pay attention to anything else.

Hu Xiu stood amid all of this with unusual clarity of mind—the kind that arrives after emotional exhaustion has burned through all the softer layers and left only essential perception. Nothing was more headache-inducing than the simultaneous convergence of these particular griefs: seeing the person she liked injured, watching her best friend's marriage dissolve in real time, and witnessing the entire spectacle unfold in a public venue at an hour when reasonable people were sleeping. She scanned the lobby for any remaining NPCs from the game, feeling an uneasy, unsettled quality that she couldn't quite attribute to a single source. No one from the cast appeared. The absence felt like something.

Zhao Xiaorou emerged from the dressing room with the purposeful stride of someone who had made decisions and intended to execute them. Her leather boots weren't fully seated on her feet—the heels hadn't quite slipped into place, and she stomped around inside the lobby adjusting them with impatient energy. She tugged her jacket on with one arm while the other reached for her phone, and before either action was complete, she was already asking the question that mattered most to her operational mind. "Where's that bastard Wang Guangming? Did he just leave? Who did he go with?"

"Why bother tracking him down if you're divorcing him anyway?" Hu Xiu asked, genuinely puzzled.

"We haven't finished talking—of course I need to find him. Tomorrow I have to fly to Beijing for an event, and he's supposed to accompany me." Zhao Xiaorou released a sigh that carried the particular weight of someone calculating logistics even while her personal life was in flames. "How inconvenient it is when a couple's professional work is bound together so tightly. Luckily, I hired my own assistant independently—the itinerary and styling contacts for tomorrow's event are all with me. Wang Guangming used to believe that no matter how badly we argued, everything should be resolved by the same night. Look at him now." The bitterness was quiet, almost philosophical. "Probably gone straight to some little internet celebrity."

Zhao Xiaorou's gaze found Li Ai across the lobby, and she raised a hand in his direction with the casual authority of someone accustomed to issuing directives. "Come to my place tonight. I have something to discuss with you—and help me pack some parcels while you're at it."

Li Ai's Audi Q7 carried a subtle, persistent fragrance that had settled permanently into the vehicle's interior—gardenia, his late wife's favorite scent. A small blanket lay folded on the backseat, and he handed it to his teenage cousin in the passenger seat the moment they climbed in. Within the span of a few intersections, she had already surrendered to exhaustion and fallen completely sound asleep, the blanket pulled up to her chin.

Zhao Xiaorou kept her phone in hand throughout the drive, its vibrations arriving with the relentless persistence of a crying infant demanding attention. Her thoughtfulness, when it manifested, did so in subtle, almost invisible ways—she never hastily hung up work calls simply to end a conversation, always delivered copy and video materials to her minor internet celebrity clients even late at night when most people would have delegated or ignored the task, and above all, never allowed her personal assistant to handle private deliveries on her behalf. As Zhao Xiaorou would explain if asked, people joined minor internet celebrities' companies to learn skills and build experience, not to become personal nannies. Boundaries should remain clear, or everything eventually collapsed.

Perhaps Snowpiercer had been the only genuine respite in Zhao Xiaorou's perpetually demanding, 24-hour life—the one space where she didn't need to clutch her phone, didn't need to perform, didn't need to calculate. Three hours of genuine freedom, purchased with a ticket and surrendered willingly. Wang Guangming had shattered those precious hours tonight with the casual destructiveness of someone who didn't understand what he was breaking.

When the conversation turned to divorce somewhere between intersections, Zhao Xiaorou's voice remained low. Resolute. Stripped of the theatrical fury she'd displayed at Snowpiercer and replaced with something quieter, more considered—the voice of someone who had been thinking about this for longer than tonight. "I don't need to settle scores with him. It's an uncontested divorce—we split our earnings fifty-fifty, clean and simple. I became the internet celebrity. He masterminded things behind the scenes. No one's freeloading here. The math is straightforward."

"Aren't you going to try reconciling first?" Hu Xiu couldn't help asking, the question emerging from a place of genuine concern rather than judgment. "Divorce might be manageable on paper, but the emotional rupture is serious business. If you're still attached to him—if there's any part of you that still feels something—there's room for discussion. But once divorced, once the legal process is complete, there's no going back. Not easily."

"A man shops for new shoes, and discards the old pair once he finds a better fit." Zhao Xiaorou's voice carried no self-pity, only the flat clarity of someone stating observed facts. "Right now he's just avoiding going barefoot—understand? Throughout our entire marriage, he's been cheating. The affairs have been constant, not exceptional. The only reason he hasn't initiated the divorce himself is that among all his various interests, nobody earns more than I do. I'm still the most profitable shoe in his closet." She paused, and when she continued, something harder and more personal entered her tone. "But I won't allow anyone to shatter my ideals about love. Don't I deserve someone better than this? Hu Xiu, believe me—marriage is absolutely not a good thing. You might find contentment in it, but never true happiness. You may love your husband deeply, but you will never like him perpetually, because every single day becomes a test of human nature. And human nature, given enough time, always reveals itself."

The words hung in the car's interior like smoke, heavy and impossible to dispel. Li Ai drove with steady, unhurried hands, his eyes on the road ahead.

Then Zhao Xiaorou's phone rang, cutting through the silence with brutal timing. Li Ai kept driving without comment. Wang Guangming's voice filled the vehicle through the speaker—surprisingly calm, measured, deploying the particular tone of someone who had decided that conciliation was the more strategically useful posture. "Rourou, haven't you made enough of a scene tonight?"

"I'm not making a scene." Zhao Xiaorou's response was immediate, level. "I just want a divorce."

"You and I don't need to go this far. And I genuinely love you—all those online rumors about me cheating are completely false." His voice carried the practiced sincerity of someone who had delivered this particular reassurance many times before and had refined its delivery over years of repetition. "I revolve around you daily—when would I even have time for affairs? Think about it logically."

Zhao Xiaorou said nothing. She reached up with one hand and tugged stray threads from her knitwear, smoothing them down to rest against her shoulders with the absent, repetitive gesture of someone whose hands needed something to do while her mind worked.

"Rourou, I've never felt our relationship was in any real trouble. I know exactly how considerate you are, how kind, how hardworking. That live stream audio that got leaked online—many people are calling me scum because of it now. But splitting up won't benefit you either. Think about this clearly. Netizens can be ruthless these days—divorce could seriously damage your brand collaborations. Remember the Double Eleven shopping festival coming up? Think about the advertising revenue we'd lose. Both of us would suffer."

"Yes," Zhao Xiaorou said quietly. "We're both cash cows."

"None of your sarcasm. When I organized that Live Action Role Playing game, I only meant to give you and your friends some fresh air—you needed it, and I wanted to do something nice. Seeing Hu Xiu getting so cozy with that Non-Player Character rubbed me the wrong way—I was just helping out a buddy. That's all it was."

"Enough, Wang Guangming." Zhao Xiaorou's voice carried finality—not anger, not tears, simply the sound of a door closing with quiet, decisive force. "See you in Beijing tomorrow. Let's both rest well tonight. After all, we have to perform as the perfect couple tomorrow for the cameras."

The call ended. The car continued moving through the city, the streets empty now, the night pressing against the windows with its full weight.

Zhao Xiaorou watched the flowing city lights streak past the glass, each one a brief, bright interruption in the darkness. She exhaled softly—not dramatically, not with theatrical weight, but with the quiet release of someone who had been holding something for a very long time. Then she raised one finger to the fogged window and traced characters into the condensation, letter by letter, as though writing something she couldn't say aloud.

Sorry for being so pathetic. To end up like this—I've really failed.

In the deep of night, wrapped in a yellow cardigan that had somehow become the softest thing in the world, Zhao Xiaorou looked as fragile as a wilted rose—beautiful still, but drooping, the color fading at the edges. Hu Xiu reached across the space between them and took her hand. The fingers she found were damp. Zhao Xiaorou had been crying—silently, without performance, without anyone noticing until now.

The night was still young, and Li Ai's voice broke the silence with a quiet firmness that carried more weight than any elaborate speech could have. "Zhao Xiaorou, you still have us."

The word "us" was barely audible—spoken so softly it might have been swallowed by the road noise entirely. But Zhao Xiaorou heard it. She held her phone in her hand, its screen illuminating her face with pale light as she typed a reply to some message, and for a long moment she simply sat with Li Ai's words settling into her. Then she responded, and her voice carried something that sounded very much like a warning—or perhaps a confession. "Li Ai, if you keep being my support group like this, I'll have no bottom line left at all."

Li Ai neither affirmed nor denied the implication. He simply drove the car forward, deeper into the night, steady and unhurried, carrying them all toward whatever came next.

Thoughts:

Wang Guangming's eruption transforms the evening from a game into something genuinely dangerous—his public confrontation with Zhao Xiaorou strips away the carefully maintained facade of their celebrity marriage, exposing the financial calculations and serial infidelity that have sustained it. His casual violence toward Qin Xiaoyi reveals his fundamental character: someone who bullies those he perceives as powerless and calculates risk with the cold precision of someone for whom relationships are business transactions. 

The most significant emotional weight falls on the final sequence in Li Ai's car, where Zhao Xiaorou's composed exterior finally fractures. Her analysis of marriage—that contentment is possible but happiness is not, that human nature always reveals itself given sufficient time—carries the authority of someone speaking from lived experience rather than cynicism. Li Ai's quiet declaration that Zhao Xiaorou still has "us," and her warning that his continued support threatens her capacity for boundaries, establishes the emotional foundation for whatever develops between them.