All she saw was Ou Chen.
Luo Xi’s fingers froze in the air, his entire being slowly scattering like wind-eroded stone with the passing breeze… Deep in the night.
Zhen En, unable to sleep for days out of worry, finally collapsed and went home to rest, leaving Yin Xia Mo standing alone outside the glass window of the Intensive Care Unit.
Through the glass, she could see Xiao Cheng and Ou Chen inside.
Both were riddled with various tubes, equally pale and equally frail, both slumbering in a coma, clear IV fluids dripping rhythmically into their bodies, while the electrocardiogram monitor pulsed with its steady beat.
The surgery had been successful.
The doctor had told her that as long as they passed the critical post-operative period, there wouldn't be any major issues.
Looking through the glass of the ICU.
Yin Xia Mo suddenly felt a vast, dreamlike sensation.
Although Xiao Cheng was gentle, he was also deeply stubborn in his core; she was certain he would never agree to the surgery.
How was it that when she awoke, the procedure had already been performed? She had anticipated there would be no turning point.
She thought that because of her selfishness, she had hurt Luo Xi and Ou Chen, and thus Heaven intended to take Xiao Cheng away to punish her.
She had already been consumed by despair, powerless to struggle or resist, so why did things look so different upon waking? Xiao Cheng’s surgery had concluded smoothly.
And Luo Xi… Luo Xi… As evening approached and she watched Ou Chen’s bed being wheeled into the ICU, then walked back to await the end of Xiao Cheng’s operation, Luo Xi’s figure in the wheelchair, against the faint glow of the setting sun, struck her like a bolt of lightning, causing her body to seize up instantly! His eyes, pitch-black, stared toward the evening sky.
His face was so pale and thin it resembled a cherry blossom petal washed ashore overnight, its faint pink having long faded, leaving the petals stark white, chilled by the cold water, so translucent there was a terrifying sense of ephemerality and fragility.
His hands rested quietly on his knees.
The gauze on his right hand had been removed, revealing a horrible, deep scar winding around his wrist.
She stood rooted to the spot, dumbstruck.
Her mind was a blank expanse, as if blood was boiling, ready to detonate, yet simultaneously enveloped in the vast, white silence of a dense fog.
Life and death, love and hate, intertwined—in that instant, it felt like lifetimes separated them, and now that they met again, nothing was as it had been.
Luo Xi sat silently in the wheelchair, gazing at the twilight spreading across the horizon.
He did not speak to her.
It seemed he no longer recognized her at all.
His arrival appeared solely for the sake of waiting for Xiao Cheng’s surgery.
Once Xiao Cheng was wheeled out of the operating room and the doctors confirmed the procedure was relatively smooth, his back, seated in the wheelchair, vanished into the lingering glow of the sunset.
At that moment.
She, steadying Xiao Cheng’s hospital bed, tightly closed her eyes… She had no right to look upon his departing figure again.
It was she who had deeply wounded him, and she had wounded Ou Chen too.
Even if she chased after his solitary silhouette, what could she possibly say? Ou Chen had lost a kidney.
She was already Ou Chen’s wife.
She no longer possessed the right to ache for another man.
The night deepened.
Yin Xia Mo took a deep, sharp breath, pulling herself free from the chaotic memories, and gazed through the ICU glass at the two men lying within.
One was her brother.
The other was her husband.
They were her kin, her life, her entire world.
If despair and guilt had once made her want to give up, then from this moment on, she would guard them with twice the strength she once possessed.
Summer's Bubble III