Chapter 60

Chapter Sixty

"I think Lawyer Chi is amazing," Lan Yifang sighed.

"Like a hero riding on rainbow-colored clouds to save me, right?" An Ye sat beside her, chuckling softly.

Lan Yifang looked a little embarrassed and let out a soft "Mm."

An Ye smiled without saying anything.

She was becoming more and more curious about what this hero had gone through on his way to her.

The filming had gone smoothly; she had initially failed to get into character, but top student Chi Tuo helped her figure out a prompt she hadn’t expected. He said that last time, when Yang Zhengyi was explaining the scene to her, he said that A-Lin had chosen dissociative identity disorder not as a form of escape, but as a means of redemption.

It wasn’t about severing ties.

It was about deepening them.

Because she wanted to survive. Because she was lonely. So she imagined a child who always saw the world in color.

A-Lin didn’t want to go to another world—she was just too lonely. So she imagined many people to help her take root in this one.

Her hostility toward normal people came from a longing for acceptance.

Chi Tuo said, "Struggling is a way to survive."

Yang Zhengyi had said that to her too, but at the time, she couldn’t really understand it. Yet tonight, when Chi Tuo—his face pale—said that to her, her heart was pulled sharply and heavily.

It hurt.

So when she reentered that cold, pitch-black room, she acted out the struggle.

The remaining five shots all passed in one go.

Yang Zhengyi smoked through half a pack while reviewing the footage, and screenwriter Zhu Sa’s eyes were slightly red.

The director and screenwriter didn’t know much about the actors’ private lives. They had no idea what the actors had experienced during filming. They could only judge from what they saw on the screen.

An Ye would work with Yang Zhengyi three times—not just because of her acting skills, but also because of her matching aura. An Ye had a self-destructive quality, dangerous, but once magnified on the big screen, her brokenness was deeply moving.

But this time, in the director and screenwriter’s own transition project, An Ye—like them—underwent a kind of inexplicable transformation.

Yang Zhengyi and Zhu Sa were transitioning because age had softened their sharp edges. They had lost their inspiration for depicting sharp and painful themes and were contemplating a shift. That’s why they had agonized over whether to go with an open ending, even changing the title to Facing the Sun.

As for An Ye, they had seen through the lens how she transformed over the past two months—from self-destructive and fragmented to who she was today. Today, she finally understood struggle.

The first child personality that A-Lin created, when it opened its eyes in innocence, looked like a fledgling bird that had already tasted the harshness of the world but still welcomed it with warmth.

She had started learning to sprout at the edge of a shattered cliff.

She finally fully grasped A-Lin’s character—from the outside to the inside. From that point on, every expression, every action of A-Lin’s had a meaningful explanation behind it.

This New Year’s Eve shoot was finally wrapped up with a dramatic wave of Director Yang’s hand.

An Ye, with an unlit cigarette dangling from her lips and a frown on her face, was searching for the medication Chi Tuo had just taken.

His complexion had already looked bad when he was helping her with the prompt. She asked what was wrong, but he wouldn’t say. After she went off to film, Lan Yifang said he’d hesitated for a moment before asking her to grab his medicine from his car.Mainly, he was too dizzy to walk properly, and the ground was covered in snow—Chi Tuo was afraid that if he fell, it would only make things worse.

Lan Yifang said that after Chi Tuo took the medicine, he went to sleep. The guesthouse was fully booked, so he was sleeping in An Ye’s room. The lights inside were off now; An Ye and Lan Yifang were sitting outside. An Ye's craving for a cigarette kicked in—she pulled one out but hadn't lit it yet when Lan Yifang brought over the medicine from the car.

Lan Yifang didn’t know exactly what medicine Chi Tuo needed, so she just grabbed everything from the glove compartment that looked remotely like medicine.

There were quite a few kinds.

Some were basic cold and stomach meds, some were sleeping pills that An Ye kept at home, and one was a type that An Ye didn’t recognize. She looked it up—it was anti-anxiety medication.

It causes drowsiness.

An Ye sighed.

She often silently complained that Chi Tuo was even more mentally unwell than she was—three-word-count OCD, promise-keeping OCD, all that. But she hadn’t expected to end up being right. She always thought she was already pretty neurotic herself, yet she hadn’t reached the point of needing medication, while Chi Tuo had already reached the stage where he needed meds just to manage his anxiety.

To be fair, Chi Tuo wasn’t exactly hiding it from her. He had mentioned his insomnia and anxiety before—he just never said how bad it was.

Two people who practically came out of the womb fighting, two people bound together by family circumstances since childhood and relying on each other to survive—they actually knew each other very well.

A slight shift of the eyes, familiar little movements, even the tone of voice—sometimes these things gave everything away.

Lately, An Ye had realized that Chi Tuo wasn’t as laid-back as he appeared to be. The excuse that he hadn’t given Zhang Rou’s things to Wang Shanshan because he was busy didn’t really hold up—he’d been back for a year, after all.

Since the highway was built between Wangcheng and Baigang City, the drive only took about four hours.

Not far, and definitely not in line with his usually efficient way of doing things.

They rarely talked about their families. Even though their breakup back then was caused by family issues, after reuniting, both of them brushed off any mention of their parents.

Adults. The less you say, the more it means you’re afraid.

“You go to sleep,” An Ye nudged the dozing Lan Yifang beside her. “I’ll sleep after I finish this cigarette.”

“What about Lawyer Chi…” Lan Yifang rubbed her eyes. “Are you sleeping in my room tonight?”

An Ye’s room, although the biggest suite in the guesthouse, still only had one bed.

“No.” An Ye said, “I’ll wait until he wakes up, then I’ll talk to him.”

Lan Yifang nodded groggily—who knows if she even heard properly—yawned her way down the stairs, then halfway down came running back to stuff two hand-warmed heat packs into An Ye’s coat pocket.

An Ye smiled and gave her a pat on the head.

She had held the cigarette in her mouth for so long that the filter tip had gone damp. An Ye pulled out a lighter, lit it, took a drag, and tilted her head back.

Her acting today had gone unexpectedly well—Zhu Sa even cried. It felt like that first time during the audition, when Zhu had clapped and said, “Beautiful.”

Funny how things worked out.

Back then, too, the audition that changed her fate had come after Chi Tuo helped her find a prompt.

It was almost midnight. This small village, far from the city, had become lively with hundreds of crew members packed in. Fireworks lit up half the sky. The air was thick with the smell of gunpowder, smoke, and alcohol.

An Ye looked up at the fireworks—too many to even make out a shape anymore—and her mind swirled with thoughts: acting, contract termination, Chi Tuo… and An Jiujiu.

Ten years of acting. From a blank slate to now being a byword for acting talent among the new generation of actresses, this seemed to be the full extent of her life’s accomplishments.Her own life was a mess. Back then, the divorce case between Wang Shanshan and An Huaimin hadn’t gone smoothly. The dispute over the ownership of the house had dragged on endlessly. An Huaimin’s supposedly honest old mistress showed up at her filming location, pregnant, and got into a brawl with Wang Shanshan that ended with both of them at the police station.

Later, she forced Wang Shanshan to just cut it clean and end it. She told her, If you don’t want the house, then don’t want it. I’ll buy you the best one in the future. I just want the two of us to live a good life.

For once, Wang Shanshan listened to her. The lawsuit ended. They didn’t ask for anything—just the divorce certificate.

In that moment, An Ye thought her world had finally returned to peace.

But after losing her marriage, Wang Shanshan began to treat An Ye’s acting career as if it were her own. The reason they signed with the first company was because the introducer kept praising Wang Shanshan for raising such a capable daughter. That ragtag team kept pushing her to take those web dramas with two-week shooting schedules, saying the money earned in a month would be more than from films. The script was so terrible, An Ye seriously wondered if the creative team had intestines growing in their heads instead of brains.

The arguments never stopped after that.

Wang Shanshan obsessively believed that being an actress was just eating off one’s youth, that An Ye’s commitment to acting and character work was pointless indulgence. How many people even go to the movies anymore? So what if you’ve won some awards? Even your variety show appearance fees aren’t as high as some newcomer from this year.

Work is for making money. If you’re working harder than everyone else but not making more money, are you stupid or what…

By the end of all that arguing, An Ye discovered the only way to deal with Wang Shanshan—was to go insane.

As long as she screamed loud enough, Wang Shanshan would back off in fear.

With this nearly self-destructive approach, she shattered what was already a distorted relationship with her mother. The look in Wang Shanshan’s eyes changed from disappointment to suspicion and fear.

She no longer had a mother.

If she could successfully terminate her contract with Huan Zhou and break free from Yan Wan, then even the last little bit of Wang Shanshan’s access to her life would be completely cut off.

As long as she didn’t want it, Wang Shanshan would have no way to control her anymore.

That should have been something worth celebrating. But tonight, when she couldn’t get into character, she still chose to call Wang Shanshan.

Deep down, she knew—the bond between her and Wang Shanshan wasn’t something that could be severed so easily.

If Wang Shanshan had really followed through on her threats—tied her up and sent her to the psych ward for electroshock therapy—maybe she’d feel a little better. If she were bad enough, there’d be no need to remember the tenderness, the struggling years they’d stumbled through together, just the two of them.

She had no sense of security.

This industry had too many stories of overnight fame—and too many of people disappearing without a trace. Acting itself was a precarious job. So every time Wang Shanshan asked her why don’t you just earn more and retire earlier, she couldn’t refute it.

She didn’t want to treat this as just a youth-limited career. Immersive acting was something she truly enjoyed. Only when she was acting did she feel affirmed, feel needed.

She was twenty-eight now. After this New Year, she’d be twenty-nine. Yet she still hadn’t made peace with herself.

An Ye took another drag from her cigarette.

Above her head, a massive gold-and-red firework burst open.

That person in her room—who knows what kind of meds he’d taken—was somehow able to sleep through all the noise. Who knew how many nights he’d stayed up just to reach this state.

Chi Tuo was another named presence in her life. Because of the ten-year gap, when they reunited, she had her guard up too. She tested him, tried to find the kind of emotional balance in him that could make her trust again, like she did with others.

At first, she found it annoying—how well he seemed to be doing, that faint whiff of elitism he carried when he came back. But later, when she saw the broken mess behind that polished front, she didn’t plan to interfere.

They were adults. Everyone knew how much broken emotion they had to stuff inside their adult exteriors. As long as it looked okay on the outside, that was enough.

She couldn’t really help him with anything either. Comfort—that word was awkward as hell. There’s no such thing as true empathy. All comfort is just scratching an itch through a boot.

But lately, over the past month or two, something had changed.

Maybe it was because she’d cried in his arms twice—she started to notice the emotions Chi Tuo deliberately tried to hide, his lost sleep from managing work with fake calm, the reason why he was so at ease in Baigang City but needed excuses to come back to Wangcheng, and how, even when he looked carefree playing games, his back was hunched with tension.She realized that she kept seeking out those hidden things—and when she found them, it made her agitated, made her... ache.

It was a very unfamiliar emotion to her. At least for An Ye, she had never felt heartache for anyone before.

To put it a bit unfilially—even when Wang Shanshan stayed up all night to accompany her through shoots, she’d never once felt heartache. Because she knew Wang Shanshan was only doing it so others would praise her for being a good mother. Wang Shanshan needed that kind of validation.

But Chi Tuo hid these things simply because he wanted to hide them.

Because no one could comfort him—so he could only process it on his own.

The two of them had lost so, so many things—including the courage to ask for help. She needed contracts and money to give herself a sense of security, while Chi Tuo could only try his best to reconcile with himself.

When An Ye exhaled her third smoke ring, the cigarette in her mouth was taken away.

Chi Tuo stood behind her, wrapped in the down blanket from the couch, looking down at her with a blank expression.

“…Want one?” An Ye asked him.

“Don’t want to drop dead,” Chi Tuo said, extinguishing her cigarette and tossing it into the ashtray on the table.

He sat down where Lan Yifang had been sitting. Because the down blanket was big and he was tall, the two folding chairs squeezed together tightly.

The fireworks overhead were still exploding in full bloom. Both of them tilted their heads back to look at the sky, silent for a long time.

“Chi Tuo,” An Ye said, still looking upward.

“Mm?” Chi Tuo squinted at the brightest, biggest firework.

“Hold my hand,” An Ye said, pulling her hand out of her down jacket pocket and waving it a little in the air.

Chi Tuo chuckled softly and reached his hand out from under the down blanket.

They didn’t interlock fingers—just held hands simply and childishly.

His hand was cold; hers was warm from clutching a hand warmer.

An Ye thought, she would remember this New Year’s Eve.

It was a brand new beginning—two adults who grew up battered and bruised, holding hands. A brand new beginning, no longer alone.