Ninth Heaven Sunrise Apartment – 27th floor, Pudong, Shanghai
Late afternoon sank into a bruised purple dusk.
The elevator opened with a tired sigh. Yu Xiao stepped into a corridor that always smelled faintly of bleach and someone else's curry. She balanced a small brown parcel against her hip, keyed the door, and slipped inside.
The apartment greeted her the way it always did: cool, dim, and too quiet. Floor-to-ceiling windows framed the Huangpu River far below, now glittering like spilled diamonds as the sun bled out behind the skyline. Dust motes drifted through the slanted amber light like slow-motion snow.
"Thank you!" she called after the already-retreating delivery boy, her voice echoing off bare walls. The door clicked shut. For one heartbeat, she simply stood there—parcel clutched to her chest—letting the silence settle over her skin.
Then the doorbell shattered it: three bright, impatient chimes.
"Who is it?" she called, already tense.
"Open the door before your miracle expires!" Mei Zhu, of course.
Yu Xiao yanked the door open. Evening wind rushed in, carrying the distant roar of traffic twenty-seven floors below, the greasy perfume of street-side skewers, and Mei Zhu's trademark peach-blossom scent. She stood grinning, arms full of convenience-store bags, ponytail flicking like a cat's tail. Beside her hovered a young man Yu Xiao had never seen—tall, slightly stooped, silver-rimmed glasses catching the hallway's sickly fluorescent light. He smiled as if standing on her doorstep was the best thing that had happened to him all year.
Yu Xiao's first, traitorous instinct was to slam the door.
She didn't. She never could, not with Zhu.
They tumbled inside. Zhu kicked off her sneakers with practiced chaos; the boy lined his up neatly, as if afraid to offend the floor. Zhu dumped her haul on the low glass coffee table (shrimp chips, peach gummies, two bottles of iced barley tea already sweating in the heat) and immediately zeroed in on the open parcel.
Three pastel-covered romance novels spilled out like guilty secrets.
Zhu held one up between two fingers, eyes gleaming. "Explain."
Yu Xiao snatched it back, ears burning. "Research," she muttered, dropping her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "I can't write people falling in love without sounding like a coroner's report. I thought… maybe if I studied enough of these, I could fake it."
Zhu barked a laugh and slapped her shoulder hard enough to sting. "You're absolutely lunatic."
Yu Xiao's gaze slid to the boy. He had settled on the edge of the dove-gray sofa, knees together, hands rubbing slow circles on his thighs as if trying to warm something that had been frozen for years. The dying sunlight painted gold across the lenses of his glasses and turned the tips of his hair copper.
"Who is he?" she asked, voice flat.
Zhu's grin sharpened into something triumphant. "Your new disciple. Cheng Zhiyu. Fresh graduate. Last night, the producers came back to the studio and Ms. Wang practically threw a party over his manuscript. Then she told him, 'Go work with Yu Xiao. She'll teach you how to make people cry properly.'"
The name hit Yu Xiao like cold water down her spine.
Cheng Zhiyu stood so fast he nearly toppled the coffee table. He bowed—deep, formal, the kind of bow you give elders on New Year.
"Senior Yu. I've been following your work since high school. I… I snuck into the university library just to read the literary magazines that published you. I was in the audience the day you won the National Youth Screenwriting Prize. And I was also there—" His voice cracked, barely. "—the day they stripped it from you. I never believed their lies. Not for one second."
The room narrowed to a single point of pressure behind Yu Xiao's sternum.
She saw it all again in merciless flashes: the courtroom's fluorescent glare, cameras firing like machine guns; her own name twisted into something ugly across every headline. She remembered standing on the subway afterward, invisible in a sea of strangers, feeling her heartbeat in her teeth because the alternative was screaming.
She had built her life brick by brick out of the silence that followed. No interviews. No apologies. Just endless nights bleeding words onto pages because it was the only place she was still allowed to feel anything.
And now this boy (this child, really) stood in her living room telling her he had watched the execution and still chosen to kneel at the grave.
Something inside her chest tore open with a sound she refused to let escape her throat.
Zhu's teasing had gone quiet. The only noises were the distant hum of the refrigerator and the soft rasp of Zhiyu's nervous breathing.
Yu Xiao sat down hard, the sofa exhaling beneath her. The romance novels lay scattered like pastel corpses.
"Ms. Wang sent you to fix me," she said, voice raw.
"No one is beyond repair," Zhiyu answered, so softly she almost missed it. "Some of us just take longer to remember we're allowed to want the light."
The words struck deeper than any blade. Yu Xiao felt the tears threaten—hot, treacherous—and blinked them back furiously.
She looked at Zhu, who had known her since orphanage bunk beds and stolen mooncakes, who had held her hair when she vomited from crying and never once asked for anything back.
She thought of Ms. Wang, chain-smoking in glass offices, quietly rerouting money and credit to Yu Xiao's name long after Yu Xiao had stopped believing she deserved it.
She thought of Master Long on his mist-shrouded peak, speaking of blood that remembered things her mind had buried.
And now this boy, standing in her apartment that had never known another person's footprints for more than an hour, offering her the one thing no one ever had: faith without conditions.
Yu Xiao pressed her palms together until the tremors stopped.
She stood. The city outside had turned violet; a million windows glowed like paper lanterns floating on black water.
"Fine," she said, and her voice didn't shake anymore. "If Ms. Wang says you're mine, then you're mine. We start tomorrow."
Cheng Zhiyu's face broke open into a smile so radiant it felt like sunrise had decided to happen indoors.
Zhu whooped and flung her arms around both, knocking over a bottle of barley tea that fizzed across the table like champagne.
Yu Xiao let herself be crushed between them. She closed her eyes and breathed in peach perfume and boy-sweat and the faint, electric scent of new beginnings.
Later, when the apartment was quiet again and the city's lights smeared across the windows like wet paint, Yu Xiao stood alone on the balcony. Twenty-seven floors below, traffic crawled in red and white rivers. Above, the first stars pricked through the haze.
She wrapped her arms around herself, feeling the night wind slip cool fingers under her hoodie.
I have been an orphan of blood, of name, of trust. I learned to live inside the echo of doors closing. But tonight, three heartbeats walked in and refused to leave. If they stay—if they stay when the darkness in me rises again—maybe I can learn how to write a story where no one must lose in order to win. Maybe I can learn how to live inside that story.
Far across the river, a single neon sign flickered on—a crimson lotus blooming against the night.
Yu Xiao watched it for a long time.
Then she smiled—small, crooked, but undeniably alive—and whispered to the dark,
"Let's see what tomorrow tastes like."