Trial of the Heart
How the Heart Knows Before Events Unfold.
There was one belief Yibo had always held onto....something he felt was granted only to a few chosen souls.
He had long believed that the heart senses things before they happen.
Before any major turning point in a person's life....whether gain or loss...something stirs quietly within the heart. It knows before the mind understands. That awareness does not arrive in clear words or logic; it comes as subtle signs, quiet tremors beneath the surface.
That is why people often say, "I had a feeling," or "Something told me this would happen."
Science, in its own language, has also explored this phenomenon. The heart is not merely a muscle that pumps blood through the body. It carries signals. It processes impressions. Sometimes it reacts before the brain can interpret what is happening.
Often, you may find yourself restless, anxious, or uneasy without knowing why.
Then when something finally happens, you realize that your heart had already prepared you for it.
The day A-Bo died, Yibo's heart knew before his mind caught up with reality. He woke that morning feeling unwell, though there was no visible illness. His eyes were open, yet nothing around him felt real. He could not eat. He could not focus. His heart seemed suspended in another realm, already aware of what the day would bring.
From that day forward, he understood that the heart carries truths the mind cannot immediately grasp. It holds signals and impressions long before clarity arrives.
Every gain and every loss first takes shape in the heart before it manifests in time.
And so, ever since Tao's words shattered him...burning through his chest and melting him from the inside...Yibo had asked himself one relentless question:
What happened to me?
Did something break inside my heart?
Did it stop working the way it should?
There was silence within him now. Yet beneath that silence lived fear, tension, and a deep, simmering grief lodged in his chest.
But among all those emotions, there had been no warning.
No signal.
No premonition.
His chest tightened painfully, to the point that breathing became difficult.
If what Tao-ge had said was true, why hadn't his heart warned him? Why had there been no sign he could now look back on and recognize? Why had he felt nothing?
Why had he woken that morning happy to be with Zhan....on the very day the foundation of his world would collapse?
How could joy and devastating sorrow coexist in the same moment?
How could his heart beat steadily on the day his entire world was about to fall apart?
Was it truly possible for distance...or years of separation...to weaken the bond between a mother and her child?
He closed his eyes briefly, then opened them to the road stretching ahead. If he had not been driving, if he had not been on the highway, he was certain that closing his eyes would have meant never opening them again.
That was how they entered Nanjing.
After so many years away, he had once believed that when he left this city, he would not stay gone for this long before returning.
Zhan sat quietly in the passenger seat. At some point, he drew himself inward, tense...perhaps frightened by the speed at which Yibo was driving, unable to find the words to stop him. Since Yibo had told him what Tao-ge said over the phone, he had not spoken another word.
Yibo knew Zhan had stared at him for a long time, both hands covering his mouth, his eyes filled with worry and shock.
He barely remembered how they had left. He only remembered waiting in the car for Zhan without saying he was waiting. When Zhan finally came out, the only thing Yibo asked was, "Did you lock the house?"
After Zhan answered, silence fell between them for the entire journey. He knew Zhan had made two phone calls to his family, explaining the situation. When they reached the city, despite all the changes that had taken place over the years, his body remembered the way home. Instinctively, he drove toward the street where he had grown up.
From a distance, he saw a crowd of people and a line of cars gathered outside the house that had once defined his life.
His eyes fixed on the building.
His heart grew heavier in his chest, filling with something that felt unreal....like time itself had folded in on him. At the same time, he felt something pulling him toward the house. A powerful force he had not realized he had missed all these years.
He felt Zhan's hand touch his gently, as if trying to bring him back to the present. But he could not respond. The storm inside him was too strong. He sensed Zhan's anxiety clearly now, even without looking at him.
Finally, he gathered the courage to open the car door and step out.
His gaze swept across the crowd.
His chest burned as though something molten were spreading through it.
Then he saw Tao-ge among the people.
His heart lurched.
After all these years, it was Tao's physical presence...not his familiar voice...that struck him first. He saw the weight of time in Tao's face. The years had marked him. There was a heaviness in his eyes that had not been there before.
Perhaps it was the burden of the moment.
Perhaps it was everything they had lost.
Was what his mind had been running from truly real?
Had they really lost her?
Had he truly made the mistake of not returning sooner?
Had he truly lost his mother forever simply because he had been too stubborn to follow what his heart had urged him to do all along?
Why had he never considered that time could impoverish a person for the mistakes they keep postponing?
Why had he believed he had authority over time....that everything would wait for him until he decided it was convenient?
And beyond that… why, through all those years, had he planned for every possible loss except the loss of her?
His knees nearly buckled beneath him. How was he supposed to build a good life now?
How could he continue living knowing he had caused his mother sorrow...knowing she had parted from this world carrying the bitterness of his absence?
His body began to tremble as Zhan stepped out of the car.
Tao, whom he had been staring at from afar, rose as if to approach him. But before any of them could take another step, the front door of the house suddenly burst open. A car sped out violently, rushing past them and disappearing down the road.
Several members of the household ran after it in alarm.
Among them, Yibo's eyes locked onto a familiar face....his mother's younger brother. His mind had not forgotten his name.
Uncle King.
He saw the shock in Uncle King's eyes as he looked toward Tao, who was already moving closer.
"What is it? What happened now?"
Tao asked, his voice unrecognizable from the steady tone Yibo was used to hearing over the phone. Now it trembled, thick with panic.
Even though Yibo thought he had prepared himself for the worst, the words that left Uncle King's mouth shattered everything he thought he knew.
"Qiaoxi Jie is not dead… Danue said she's still breathing… They just took her to the hospital…"
He pointed in the direction the speeding car had gone.
Yibo turned his gaze toward the empty road. It felt like he did so with his final breath.
:
:
Regret.
It was something foreign. Unfamiliar. Different.
Wang Haozhi had never truly known it.
There had been moments in his life when something resembling regret brushed against him. He would feel it in his chest or mind...but quickly, he would justify himself. He would convince himself that things had simply unfolded that way, that he was not at fault.
And so, he had never really met regret. He had never counted it as part of his life. Whatever he did was right...because he had done it. His conscience rarely questioned him long enough to disturb his sleep.
Now, standing alone in the bathroom of his room, he closed his eyes and opened them again, feeling his heart pound violently in his chest.
Outside, he could hear the rising noise of relatives...his siblings and Qiaoxi's family filling the house.
They had gathered because of a death in the extended family, and nearly everyone from that side had come after hearing the news.
It was during that chaos that Qiaoxi had come to inform him of the loss. She had walked in while he was on the phone, saying things he should not have been saying.
A wave of dizziness nearly knocked him over. He gripped the edges of the sink with both hands.
How was he supposed to bear two things at once?
How could he confront regret...now that it was too late...and at the same time face the possibility of losing Qiaoxi?
He knew the kind of woman she was.
A devoted wife...rare beyond measure. Perhaps in a hundred women, he would not find another like her.
Qiaoxi had loved him with her entire heart...from her youth, through the early days of their marriage, into adulthood.
He knew it.
He had always known that her love was the pillar that sustained their home through the years. It was that love that kept her enduring every hurt he caused her.
He remembered clearly...his first wife, less than a year into their marriage, he had divorced her once. It was only through the firm intervention of her father that they reconciled, remaining together long enough to have their sons, Danue and Tao.
But when her father passed away, she must have known the path ahead. Soon after, she demand to separate and he divorced her for the final time. Deep down, he had always known she had stayed mainly out of respect...and fear...of her father's authority.
He looked at his reflection in the mirror above the sink.
At the same time, his heart hurled questions at him like weapons.
Why had he never truly acknowledged Qiaoxi patience, even though he was aware of it?
Why had he never shown her the smallest kindness in return for the countless ones she showed him?
Why had he never once suppressed his own ego to make her happy...or at least to ease her burdens?
Why had he always believed he could make her understand him, instead of trying to understand her?
His heart darkened further as his body continued to tremble, until even his legs began to shake.
What kind of bitterness had he forced her to live with all these years....punishing her by separating her from her son?
Why had he allowed his judgment of Yibo to blind him completely, without ever letting her pain soften his heart?
He remembered the day he saw Yibo in Beijing.
He remembered how he had returned home afterward… how he had looked at her again, seeing only Yibo's "fault" reflected in her eyes, not the wound she carried within herself. He had even found the audacity to tell her words that deepened her despair...that Yibo was dead.
He had told himself he was easing her suffering.
He had not once considered what such a lie might do to her heart.
And now...was this not the result? The moment she discovered that what he said was not true?
He tightened his grip on the sink.
So this was regret?
This was its bitterness?
And it chose to come to him only when it was useless?
If Qiaoxi had no life left in this world, who would he look at and tell, I am sorry?
Who would he attempt to mend his mistakes with?
He whispered those thoughts just as a knock landed on the bathroom door.
He exhaled deeply...five slow breaths before steadying himself enough to unlock it.
Danue stood there.
His eyes carried a new kind of panic....worse than the one he had left him with earlier.
And when he spoke, he pulled him into that panic as well.
"Aunty Rui said Mom isn't dead… they just took her to the hospital…"
***
"Zhan…"
In Zhan's ear, Aunty Shui's voice called his name when he fell silent on the phone.
"What happened? Why did you go quiet?"
Zhan swallowed carefully before finding his voice.
"After we arrived...before we even entered the house...they rushed the woman to the hospital. They said she might not have passed away."
He deliberately used the word woman. To Aunty Shui and Nainai, though they knew about their sudden trip, Zhan had only told them that one of Yibo's relatives had died. He had not known how to explain his parents' complicated story over the phone.
So in their understanding, the matter was distant. Not this close.
"Thank God… Thanks Heavens… May God make it certain… may He protect her…"
Aunty Shui sighed in relief, her voice easing the tension that had gripped them since morning.
Until today, Zhan had believed panic only looked one way...loud cries, tears, screaming, collapsing. That was what he imagined whenever the word panic was mentioned.
What he did not know was that panic had many faces.
And today had taught him one he would never forget.
There was a kind of panic wrapped in silence.
A heavy silence.
The kind that sits on your chest as though a building might collapse over you at any moment.
On the road from Beijing to Nanjing, he was certain it wasn't just the two of them inside that car.
Panic had been sitting with them.
Invisible...but unbearably heavy.
He had felt it pressing against their hearts. Even the way Yibo held the steering wheel....his fingers tight, knuckles pale....had made his own heart drop.
The road stretched endlessly before his eyes.
Sometimes he turned to look at Yibo and saw him biting the inside of his cheek, fighting to contain everything raging within him.
When they entered the city, Yibo drove through familiar streets...places from his past slipping past his window. He wondered how many times Yibo had walked those same roads years ago.
They reached the house only to be met with the chaos of uncertainty surrounding his Mother.
Soon after, along with many others, they arrived at the hospital.
"Just wait for me here… I'll come back."
That was what Yibo told him before stepping out.
His voice sounded distant...as though it took seconds to reach his ears.
He left with the others.
Zhan did not know how long he remained in the car. Minutes blurred together. He only realized he was hungry....remembering they had eaten nothing since morning.
After ending the call with Aunty Shui, he called Nainai as well, though he knew Aunty Shui was at home and would explain everything again. Still, he could tell from the morning that Nainai's heart had not been at ease.
He even exchange greeting with Bai before ending the call.
When he glanced at the time, it was already past four in the evening.
He shifted in his seat, considering stepping out for air.
That was when she saw Yibo walking out of the hospital.
Beside him was a man who resembled him...not merely in face, but in bearing. Taller than Yibo, though Yibo himself was tall.
If not for seeing the two of them, he would have opened the car door already.
They stopped suddenly.
Both of them stared toward the same direction.
Slowly, Zhan followed their line of sight.
Two elderly men had just stepped out of a black Jeep.
At that instant, Zhan's mind recognized one of them without needing confirmation.
He would swear on anything...nothing could separate the Yibo he knew from becoming that man in the future. Time would only deepen the resemblance.
Zhan's eyes widened as he stared at him...the man described to him with the harshest words he had ever heard.
He turned back to Yibo.
Yibo stood frozen, staring at his father.
Their eyes met.
The man beside his father looked at Yibo in shock, then turned, asking something in a questioning tone.
If Wang Haozhi intended to answer, he never got the chance.
Because something none of them expected happened.
Zhan's breath caught in his chest as he watched Yibo walk forward.
His eyes followed him until he stood directly before his father.
Then...
He dropped to his knees.
He knelt fully before his father.
Not casually. Not reluctantly.
But like a man who had reached the end of himself.
Like someone stripped of pride, stripped of defense...where love and pain had burned away everything else.
Tears filled Zhan's eyes until the image blurred.
And in that moment, Zhan understood something:
Seeking forgiveness is not always words.
It is not always begging.
Sometimes, it is brokenness.
Sometimes, forgiveness arrives in the form of a shattered person choosing to accept a mistake...even if it was never entirely theirs.
Yibo was not at fault for what had happened between him and his father.
Zhan knew that.
But because Yibo loved him…
Because he still wanted him…
He chose to kneel and surrender anyway.
✴✴✴
"Why have you never once thought of coming back?"
These words came from Haozhi as he watched Yibo sitting before him. Even before their eyes met, news of Yibo's return had already reached his ears, causing his heart to pound with immense surprise...a shock even greater than when Qiaoxi had awakened from her long coma, which they had all mistakenly believed to be death.
Yibo closed his eyes and opened them, finding himself once again, for the umpteenth time, in his father's sitting room. This room had always seemed so vast to him... the kind of vastness that, as a child, when he crouched down, made him feel utterly alone in the world because of the distance each wall kept from him... but today, as he crouched there now, that perception had shifted. He felt confined, as if every wall threatened to close in, pressing against him in his crouched position.
Yesterday, so much had happened...events that, perhaps without divine intervention, could never have occurred in a single day.
And among all that happened, there was the hope they had all clung to: the confirmation that Qiaoxi had not died, but had fallen into a long coma, her spirit deliberately distant from her body, only returning with the help of the hospital equipment she was connected to... After long minutes of waiting, they were assured of her survival, though due to the cardiac arrest she suffered, she had entered a state of "coma."
After the doctors left, Yibo asked to see her chart, confirming everything for himself and holding onto the hope that she wouldn't remain in this state for long. And yesterday, despite the turmoil most of his maternal relatives at the hospital were in, it didn't prevent the shock and uproar that arose from his own family's arrival.
For many of his maternal relatives had to be restrained as they fought, their shouts mingling with demands for the reason behind his return...
Most of them asked him: "What brought him here?" "What brought him at this time?" "Why would he return after choosing the world over his parents?"
One of his maternal uncles had to be escorted out of the visitors' area entirely because of how fiercely he erupted, listing the hardships Qiaoxi had endured throughout these years and how they had all tried to help her search for him.
Only the women showed him any leniency. Two of his maternal aunts simply embraced him and wept... Then one of his cousins, a woman called Suma's mother, was the first to slap him, before her own voice broke as she asked him why he hadn't returned all this time.
God knows he had witnessed every kind of turmoil from yesterday until this morning's dawn...a dawn that arrived with the heaviest thing of all: his father's call. Because yesterday, after their encounter, after he had kneeled before him without knowing what to say, his father had simply raised him to his feet with one hand, without uttering a single word.
Without saying anything to him at all, until everything at the hospital was concluded, he got back into his car and left with the friend who had accompanied him.
That made Yibo assure his brothers that he would not return home, that he would not set foot in that house he still wasn't permitted to enter... And as they had always understood him throughout these years, yesterday they understood him too, understood him and then cooperated, allowing him to leave the hospital in such a way that no one noticed.
He headed to a five-story hotel with Zhan, whom no one knew about at the time except Tao-ge. He chose to booked them a room up there, not because it was the most expensive, but because it was the farthest from the ground floor. Given how he felt about himself and his heart at that moment, if he didn't separate his body from the ground, then his heart would either be on the verge of bursting or shatter completely.
The experiences he had endured were too many to untangle, too heavy to sort through one by one. What bound them together in his heart was the weight of his father's concern....an invisible thread pulling at him through the night.
Sleep never came.
Not even once.
He only knew that somewhere between nightfall and dawn, his eyes had remained open, his mind drifting but never resting.
Just as he pushed himself up from the mattress, his phone rang.
It was Danue-ge.
The call carried the gravest command he had ever received in his life....the order to come to his father, from wherever he was, yet it reached him at precisely that moment, as though fate itself had timed it.
Without waking Zhan, who lay curled in deep, exhausted sleep on the bed, Yibo picked up his car keys and stepped outside.
For the second time in a long while, he found himself standing before the gate of his family home.
That house.
The place that had shaped him, molded him, raised him into the man he became.
And the same house that had used all its strength to cast him out...into the world like a stripped skeleton, sent away with nothing but pride and pain.
He closed his eyes, then opened them slowly.
He felt again the weight of his father's words. The weight of disappointment. The weight of exile.
Before stepping inside, before even approaching the study, he had imagined countless conversations....more than numbers could measure. He had rehearsed every possible rebuke, every harsh sentence, every cold dismissal.
But among all those imagined words, he had never once foreseen this question.
"Why have you never once thought of coming back?"
Now he stood before his father, hearing it in reality.
Now he stood before the man who had once driven him away with some of the harshest words he had ever known...only to ask him why he had stayed away.
"I did come back…" Yibo said quietly, refusing to let his thoughts wander elsewhere.
"I returned to this house countless times...just not in person. From the day you told me to leave, I never physically turned back… but wherever I went, my heart never truly left this place."
His voice wavered, though his head remained bowed.
"I tried to come back. I don't even know how many times. But whenever I remembered your words… whenever I recalled everything you said… I felt I couldn't."
Because his gaze was fixed on the floor, he did not see Haozhi reach forward and gently wipe the tear gathering at the corner of his eye.
"Why did you take my words so deeply to heart?" Haozhi asked softly. "Why did you let them wound you to the point that they crushed your spirit? Am I not your father? Do I not have the right to scowled you, Yibo?"
Yibo shook his head.
"You kept saying you didn't want me, you hate me. You said I would never become the son you hoped for. So I believed that no matter what I did… you would never see it as right."
Silence fell between them.
Haozhi did not search for meaning in those words...he already understood them. Of all his children, of all his relatives, there was no one who resembled him more than Yibo. In temperament. In pride. In stubborn silence.
That had been his greatest blindness.
They were so alike that neither of them had possessed the courage to challenge the other's thinking. Each clung to his own truth. Each believed he was justified. Each carried his reasons without ever speaking them aloud. And so they had lived for years...side by side in blood, yet separated by pride.
Until now.
Until fate touched the one person who mattered most to both of them.
Qiaoxi.
Her suffering...something they had both witnessed for years without fully grasping how fragile she truly was...had become the blow that forced them to see.
Haozhi wiped away another tear and silently vowed it would be the last shed over this matter.
He cleared his throat.
"A parent's anger comes from love, Yibo. You are not the only one who has disappointed me in this house… but perhaps your actions wounded me the most because my heart has always been closest to you."
He paused, almost startled by his own honesty.
"I forgive you for everything you did wrong. And I hope you can forgive me as well...for the pain I caused you… and for separating you from your mother."
Yibo lifted his head.
Tears streamed freely down his face now. His entire body trembled as though the years of restraint were breaking apart inside him.
He shook his head again.
"Why would you ask for my forgiveness? Why would you apologize to me? I'm the one who should be begging you, Daddy. I'm the one who should be asking you to forgive me."
His voice cracked completely.
"I wronged you. I'm sorry… please forgive me."
Haozhi swallowed hard, trying to steady himself...until Yibo spoke again, saying something that even in all his imagining, he had never once anticipated.
"I wronged you deeply, Daddy… I even got married without telling you."
His breath hitched.
"Married to a man."
Zhanxianyibo💚❤💛