Luo Yang's expression didn't so much as twitch. "I don't joke."
"Right. Of course not." Ding Jia shook her head, equal parts amused and bewildered. "The man who's spent multiple books building an entire world out of vengeful spirits doesn't joke, and also doesn't believe vengeful spirits exist. You understand how that sounds, don't you?"
"Contradictions sell more books than consistency does." He straightened, tugging gently on Arthur's leash as the dog tried, unsuccessfully, to investigate a discarded napkin near the bench. "Ready to head back?"
She wasn't, particularly. The shutter sound had finally gone quiet somewhere around the time their conversation turned argumentative, and for the first stretch of silence all morning, the park had felt like just a park — kids on swings, sun on gravel, nothing rattling around inside her skull that didn't belong there. She wanted to sit in that feeling a little longer.
But she nodded anyway, and fell into step beside him.
They didn't talk much on the walk home. Luo Yang seemed content with silence in a way most people weren't. No nervous filler, no need to perform ease the way industry people constantly did around her, performing comfort the same way they performed everything else. He simply walked, occasionally glancing down to make sure Arthur hadn't found something disgusting to eat off the pavement, and let the quiet sit between them like it wasn't something that needed fixing.
She found, a little uncomfortably, that she didn't mind it either.
At her door, he paused only long enough to say, "Don't skip meals because of the costume fitting," which was such a strange, specific thing to say that she laughed before she could stop herself. Did she somehow shout her food frustrations and they heard it next door?
"How do you know about the fitting?"
"Director Gu mentioned scheduling conflicts in an email. Copied me by mistake." He shrugged, entirely unbothered. "Eat something real today, Ding Jia."
He was gone before she could decide whether that counted as concern or simply an author cataloguing a character's habits for future use. Either way, the words followed her inside and sat there long after the door clicked shut.
That night, after her shower, after her skincare routine, after she'd done every small ritual she usually relied on to wind a day down properly, she still couldn't sleep. The exchange with Luo Yang kept looping — do you believe in ghosts, no — but underneath that, quieter and far less easy to laugh off, sat the other thing she hadn't let herself think about properly since the crowd had parted around a body at the lake's edge.
They pushed me. They pushed me.
She sat up, turned on her desk lamp, and opened her laptop before she'd consciously decided to. The cursor blinked in an empty search bar for a long moment before she finally typed it.
Body found, woman, drowned, this week.
It took four tries and four different keyword combinations before a small regional article finally surfaced, three days old already and buried under bigger headlines about a politician's scandal and a typhoon warning. No photo accompanied it. Just a name, an age, and a profession that made something in her stomach twist tight.
Su Yao, 23, model. Recovered from the ornamental lake at Heyuan Community Park after being reported missing for several days. Police have ruled out foul play; preliminary findings point to accidental drowning.
Accidental. She read the word three times, feeling it sit wrong each time, like a shoe on the wrong foot. She scrolled further, into a thinner follow-up piece from an entertainment gossip site that had clearly smelled a more interesting angle than the official report offered.
It mentioned, almost in passing, that Su Yao had been quietly dropped from her agency's roster six weeks before her death, after failing to land a single booking in over a year despite "extensive and costly training." The article's comment section was a brutal little ecosystem of its own, a handful of genuinely grieving voices buried under a pile of strangers debating, with chilling casualness, whether she'd simply "not had what it takes" and whether that made her death sad or merely inevitable.
They pushed me. They pushed me! Her voice echoed somewhere within her mind endlessly.
Ding Jia closed the laptop, took a deep breath, opened it again, and kept reading anyway.
Two names surfaced repeatedly in the comments and the article both. Fellow trainees from the same modeling cohort, now genuinely successful, tagged sympathetically by fans hoping they'd say something kind about their former colleague. Ding Jia recognized one of the names instantly from a magazine cover she'd flipped past in a waiting room just last week. The recognition landed like a small, cold stone dropping into her stomach. She thought about the practice room from the vision: two girls walking in with that effortless, magnetic aura. Something Su Yao had spent years trying and failing to develop and wondered, distantly, if either of them had any idea what their easy confidence had cost the girl mirrored beside them.
But reality was harsh. This industry was too heartless for the girl. She knew it wasn't the two girls' fault that Su Yao didn't have that kind of talent. Reality is, hardwork doesn't always equate to success in this line of work.
She thought about calling Yu Xia, who knew the modeling world better than almost anyone in Lin Lin's circle, and asking, casually, carefully, whether the name Su Yao meant anything to her. She got as far as opening the messaging app before she stopped herself. There was no version of that question that didn't eventually require an explanation for why she was asking, and she didn't have one that wouldn't end with someone calling a hospital on her behalf.
She closed the app instead and stared at the ceiling until the article's last line stopped replaying behind her eyes.
Survived by one younger brother. The family has requested privacy.
The brother ran a small flower shop in the Jiangnan district. Mentioned only once, only in passing, because Su Yao had apparently helped out there on weekends between casting calls that never amounted to anything. Ding Jia found the shop's name through nothing more advanced than a determined half hour of searching, and stared at the pin on the map for a long time before closing the laptop for good.
She didn't know what she thought she could actually do. She wasn't a detective. She definitely wasn't about to explain to a grieving stranger that she'd absorbed his sister's entire struggle through a flower that had appeared and dissolved in her own living room twice now, like the universe couldn't quite decide whether it wanted her to understand or simply suffer alongside the memory of it. That conversation ended in exactly one place, and it wasn't a flower shop. Hell, she wasn't even sure if it was her mind that was faulty too.
She'd been in comatose for too long that it didn't feel too wrong to doubt that maybe, there was some brain damage happening somewhere within the depths of her brain that was missed during the tests. Or it could just be simply ghosts.
But she could buy flowers. Anyone could buy flowers. There was nothing strange, nothing suspicious, nothing remotely supernatural about a customer walking into a shop and buying flowers.
She told herself that the entire cab ride there the next afternoon, mask pulled high and cap pulled low, sunglasses doing the rest of the work her disguise usually needed. She was still telling herself that when she pushed open the door, heard the small bell above it chime, and saw a young man, maybe nineteen, with the kind of red-rimmed, sleep-starved eyes that came from days, not hours, of crying, wrapping a bouquet of white chrysanthemums for someone else's funeral with hands that wouldn't quite stop trembling.
He looked up, startled by the bell, and visibly tried to arrange his face into something customer-appropriate. "Welcome — sorry, just give me one second, I'm almost done with this order."
"Take your time," she said, and meant it far more than the words let on.
She wandered the small shop while he finished, fingers trailing over buckets of tulips and carnations she had no real interest in, eyes drifting back to him more than the flowers. Up close, the resemblance to the woman from her hallway was unmistakable in the set of his jaw, even drowning in grief and exhaustion the way he currently was. He moved like someone running on autopilot, the way she herself had moved through her first week back from the hospital. Present in body, absent in everything that mattered.
When he finally turned to her, she pointed toward a small arrangement of white lilies near the register and didn't examine too closely why those, specifically, were the ones her hand had reached for.
"For someone special?" he asked, ringing her up without really looking at her face, his mind clearly somewhere else entirely. Somewhere with a lake in it, probably.
"For someone I think deserved better than what she got," Ding Jia said quietly.
He paused at that. Just for a second. Something flickered across his tired face that looked almost like recognition. Not of her, she realized with relief, but of the sentiment itself, like the words had landed somewhere private and exposed a nerve he hadn't braced for. He didn't ask what she meant. She didn't explain. She paid in cash, took the lilies, and left in silence.
She never told him who his sister had been to a stranger she'd never met in life. She never could. She wasn't even sure if she really knew.
But that evening, after dark, after working up the nerve three separate times before actually going through with it, she left a plain envelope tucked discreetly beneath the shop's front step, nothing inside it but cash and a single white card, three words in handwriting she'd deliberately made messier than her own.
She mattered too.
It wasn't enough. It wasn't close to enough. But it was the only thing she could give without unraveling every careful lie holding her entire life together, and Ding Jia had learned a long time ago — in this life or maybe not? — that sometimes the only real choice on offer was between doing one small, insufficient thing, and doing nothing at all.
She walked away from that doorstep feeling lighter and heavier in equal, contradictory measure, and didn't sleep well for the rest of that week.