Tuesday started with rain.
The steady kind again. The kind that made the world feel smaller, like the sky was pressing down and saying stay inside, stay quiet, stay still.
Jiang Yue walked to school with an umbrella his mother had shoved into his hands at the door. Wei walked beside him with his own umbrella, black, perfectly sized, because even Wei's rain gear was controlled.
They didn't share an umbrella.
That would've been too much.
But they walked close enough that the edges almost touched, two circles of dry space moving through the wet city like parallel orbits.
At school, the day was ordinary.
Teacher Gao lectured. Students suffered. Rankings loomed.
Jiang Yue sat behind Wei and studied the back of his head and thought about the notebook and tried very hard to focus on Chinese literature instead of the fact that Wei Nianzhan had called not touching him the bravest thing he'd ever done.
He failed at Chinese literature.
He passed at surviving.
At lunch, something unusual happened.
Wei's phone rang.
Not buzzed. Rang.
An actual phone call, loud enough that the students nearby glanced over.
Wei looked at the screen.
His expression didn't change.
But his body did.
A stillness settled over him—not the usual calm, but something deeper. Something frozen. Like his system had encountered an error and was deciding whether to process or shut down.
He stood, picked up his tray, and walked out of the cafeteria without a word.
Shen Yichen watched him go, frowning.
Jiang Yue watched him go, something cold settling in his stomach.
He'd never seen Wei react to a phone call like that.
Wei didn't react to anything like that.
Jiang Yue's instinct screamed follow him.
His brain screamed don't.
His body compromised: he stayed seated for exactly ninety seconds, then stood.
Xu Zhe looked up. "Where are you going."
Jiang Yue grabbed his bag. "Bathroom."
Xu Zhe's eyes narrowed. "That's not the bathroom direction."
Jiang Yue was already walking.
He found Wei in the stairwell.
Not their usual stairwell. A different one, on the east side of the building, the one nobody used because it smelled like old mops and broken dreams.
Wei was standing by the window, phone pressed to his ear, back to the door.
He was speaking.
Low. Controlled. But tight in a way Jiang Yue had never heard.
"I understand," Wei said.
Pause.
"Yes."
Pause.
"I said I understand."
Another pause. Longer this time.
Then Wei's voice changed. Dropped lower. The control thinned until Jiang Yue could hear the thread it was hanging by.
"Why are you calling now."
Jiang Yue stopped breathing.
He stood at the stairwell entrance, hidden by the angle of the wall, and listened even though he knew he shouldn't.
Wei's voice continued, quieter. "It's been three years."
Three years.
"No. I don't need anything."
A long silence.
Then, barely audible: "Don't call again."
Wei hung up.
The sound of the call ending was small and final—a soft click that echoed in the empty stairwell like a door closing.
Wei didn't move.
He stood by the window, phone in his hand, staring at nothing.
His shoulders were rigid. His jaw was locked. His breathing was controlled in the way it got when control was the only thing keeping him upright.
Jiang Yue's chest ached.
He should leave.
This wasn't his moment. This wasn't his pain. This was something private, something Wei had hidden in an empty stairwell because he didn't want anyone to see.
Jiang Yue turned to go.
His shoe scraped the floor.
Wei's head snapped toward the sound.
Their eyes met.
For one terrible second, Wei's face was completely exposed.
Not angry. Not cold. Not calm.
Devastated.
Like a building after the earthquake—still standing, but the inside was wreckage.
Then the mask came back, fast and hard, slamming into place.
Wei's expression went flat. "How long have you been here."
Jiang Yue swallowed. "Not long."
Wei stared at him. "You heard."
It wasn't a question.
Jiang Yue didn't lie. "Some of it."
Wei's jaw tightened so hard the muscle in his cheek jumped.
He looked away, toward the window, where rain streaked the glass in long, uneven lines.
Silence.
Jiang Yue didn't move.
He didn't approach. Didn't retreat. Just stood there, letting Wei decide.
Wei's voice came after a long moment, flat and controlled. "My mother."
Two words.
They fell into the stairwell like stones into water.
Jiang Yue's throat tightened.
Shen Yichen's words echoed: Not when his mother left.
Wei continued, staring at the rain. "She left when I was fifteen. Moved to another city. Didn't contact me for three years."
Each sentence was precise. Clinical. Like he was reading a report about someone else's life.
Jiang Yue's hands clenched at his sides.
Wei's voice didn't waver. "My father doesn't talk about her. I don't talk about her. It's simpler that way."
Simpler.
The word sounded hollow.
Wei turned his phone over in his hand slowly. "She called today to say she's in Yunbei."
Jiang Yue's stomach dropped. "She's here?"
Wei's gaze stayed on the window. "Visiting. She said she wanted to see me."
Silence.
The rain tapped against the glass, steady and indifferent.
Jiang Yue didn't know what to say.
He had a hundred instincts—joke, deflect, attack, comfort—and none of them were right.
So he did the only thing that felt honest.
He walked to the window and stood beside Wei.
Not close enough to touch. But close enough to be there.
Wei didn't look at him.
But he didn't move away either.
They stood side by side, watching the rain.
Jiang Yue spoke quietly. "What do you want to do."
Wei's jaw flexed. "Nothing."
Jiang Yue glanced at him. "Nothing as in you don't want to see her, or nothing as in you haven't decided."
Wei was silent for a long beat.
Then, honestly: "Both."
Jiang Yue nodded slowly. "Okay."
He didn't push.
He didn't offer advice.
He just stood there.
The minutes passed. The bell for the next period rang, distant and irrelevant.
Neither of them moved.
Finally, Wei spoke again. "She said she's sorry."
Jiang Yue looked at him.
Wei's expression was controlled, but his eyes were too bright. Not tears—Wei didn't cry, as far as Jiang Yue knew—but something close. Something pressing at the edges.
"Is she," Jiang Yue asked. Not challenging. Just asking.
Wei's mouth twisted—a bitter, ugly shape that didn't belong on his face. "I don't know."
Jiang Yue's chest ached.
He thought about his own father. The one who left before the wedding flowers died. The one his mother never talked about.
He thought about the word sorry and how small it sounded when the absence it tried to fill was three years wide.
Jiang Yue said, carefully, "You don't have to decide now."
Wei's gaze flicked to him. "I know."
Jiang Yue held his eyes. "And you don't have to decide alone."
Wei stared at him.
Something cracked in his expression—not the controlled kind, not the almost-slip Jiang Yue had seen before.
A real crack.
Small. Deep.
The kind that showed the person underneath the performance.
Wei looked away, jaw working.
Then he said, so quietly it was almost lost in the rain, "She asked about my life."
Jiang Yue waited.
Wei's voice was barely there. "I didn't know what to tell her."
Jiang Yue's throat burned.
Because he understood.
How do you summarize a life to someone who chose to miss it?
How do you explain rankings and stepbrothers and 2 a.m. hallway confessions to a woman who wasn't there for any of it?
How do you say I'm fine when fine was a word you learned to wear like armor because nobody was coming to check if it was true?
Jiang Yue didn't try to answer.
Instead, he did something small.
He shifted his weight so that his shoulder touched Wei's.
Lightly.
Barely.
A point of contact so small it could be denied.
Wei went still.
Then, slowly, he didn't move away.
They stood like that—shoulder to shoulder, watching rain, saying nothing—until the second bell rang and the hallway outside filled with distant footsteps.
Wei straightened first. His expression reassembled, calm sliding into place like pieces of a puzzle.
He adjusted his collar. Picked up his bag. Became, outwardly, Wei Nianzhan again.
But Jiang Yue had seen underneath.
And he knew that underneath would stay with him longer than any notebook entry.
Wei glanced at him. "We should go to class."
Jiang Yue nodded. "Yeah."
They walked out of the stairwell together.
In the hallway, students rushed past, oblivious.
Before they separated toward their classrooms, Jiang Yue spoke.
"Wei."
Wei paused.
Jiang Yue's voice was low. "If she calls again and you need somewhere to go that isn't your room... my door's open."
Wei stared at him.
The hallway moved around them, loud and careless.
Wei's throat moved.
He nodded once, small.
Then he turned and walked away.
And Jiang Yue watched him go and thought about mothers—the ones who stayed and the ones who didn't—and how both kinds could break you in ways that took years to understand.
He thought about his own mother, asleep in the next room every night, trying so hard to build something new.
He thought about Wei's mother, three years absent, calling from somewhere in Yunbei, saying sorry like it was a bandage for a wound that needed surgery.
And he thought about the shoulder touch in the stairwell—barely there, easily denied—and how sometimes the smallest contact was the most honest.
Because it said: I'm here.
Not I'll fix it.
Not I understand.
Just I'm here.
And for someone like Wei, who had spent three years not being chosen, maybe that was enough.