Yan Zhen stared at the woman across from him, disbelief making his voice thin.
Four years had passed. As a mother now, she had shed the last traces of youthful awkwardness—something in her had grown into a deeper, more dangerous kind of beauty. Yet her face, the shape of her mouth and eyes, matched the image he had kept in his memory.
“What kind of joke is this?” he blurted. “This isn’t funny.”
Xu Zixi’s patience had a hard edge. “Hasn’t tonight been enough to make things clear?”
Yan Zhen faltered. Tonight’s events had already upended everything he’d believed about Yuan Xi.
“I’m not Yuan Xi,” Xu Zixi said. “My name is Xu Zixi. I was a lost soul from another world who ended up reborn in Yuan Xi’s body after she died.”
“That’s impossible. I won’t believe it.” He shook his head like a man warding off a nightmare. “You’re doing this to get back at me—you’re making up stories to torture me.”
“Do you know what day she died?” Xu Zixi asked. “It was the day you were supposed to get engaged to Yuan Ya’er.”
“Don’t say another word.”
He roared and clapped his hands over his ears, trying to block it out, but Xu Zixi’s voice cut through him from all directions, cold and relentless.
“Four years ago, the girl everyone doted on like a little princess was suddenly told she wasn’t related to the people who raised her. Imagine what that was like for her—it was like being struck by lightning out of a clear sky.”
“The Yuan family found their biological daughter, Xu Ya, who had been away for eighteen years, renamed her Yuan Ya’er, and transferred every ounce of affection they’d given Yuan Xi to the newly returned child. The woman who’d raised Yuan Xi felt guilty toward her own blood and wanted to make up for what she’d lost—so she lavished everything on Yuan Ya’er.”
“As for Yuan Xi, she had been raised for eighteen years; ties had formed. The family couldn’t quite cut her loose, so they let her stay. But things weren’t the same. The balance of their hearts had shifted. Little comments—‘Xiao Xi, you’re so sensible, can’t you give Ya-ya some space?’—became a curse she couldn’t escape. Her room, her clothes, the toys she loved, even her car were all handed over to Yuan Ya’er under the name of ‘compensation.’ She told herself it didn’t matter; she still had Yan Zhen. You’d said, ‘Even if the whole world abandons you, I won’t.’”
At that, tears started to course down his face. The memory of the promise struck him like a blow; his chest tightened with a pain that made him dizzy.
“On her eighteenth birthday you rented a place and threw her a party. You invited her classmates. She was delirious with happiness that night—your attention had soothed every insecurity inside her. She thought: as long as you were there, she could keep bearing it; after she married you, everything would get better.”
“But that night you didn’t show up. She called you again and again; no one answered. Her birthday went flat. So when she received a call she thought was from you, she didn’t hesitate—she ran out, elated.”
“That call led her, step by step, into hell. Her world collapsed that night. The one who shoved her into the abyss was you.”
“Yuan Xi was so miserable. Because of a casual ‘no harm meant’ from Yuan Ya’er, she was forced to marry Guan Baocheng—old, ugly, a man who had already killed two of his wives. She finally gathered the courage to flee Feng City, hoping to find real family somewhere who would take her in and give her a real home. But because of one photo, she was branded a harlot, expelled from the place she’d tried to call home.”
“She carried that undeserved shame like a brand, living like a shadow in Haicheng, scraping by. The pain ate at her—she developed postpartum depression, tortured by the cage of lost purity and betrayal. And then, on the day you and Yuan Ya’er were to be engaged, she swallowed a handful of sleeping pills and ended her short life.”
“Today, standing here, I’m the one telling the truth. I—Xu Zixi—helped prove that four years ago she did nothing wrong.”
“But Yuan Xi? Her life vanished in a corner where no one noticed. Until the end she believed she was guilty.”
Yan Zhen curled up on the cold ground, a human reflex born of unbearable pain. He clutched at his chest, mouth opening as if to let out the agony clawing at his insides, to let the sound of his soul break free.
Nothing came. His throat closed around the cry.
“Does it hurt?” Xu Zixi leaned down and looked at the man racked with grief. “She suffered more than you did these past four years. When she took the pills she was holding a photo of the two of you. Do you know what she must have been thinking? Why did this happen to her? Out of all the people in the world, why her?”
“Whether it was being given away at birth or the night of her eighteenth birthday—none of it was her fault. Why should she bear others’ sins? Was she not even allowed the right to be happy?”
He managed a single keening wail, then the weight of the truth crashed over him like a wave. He was drowning; breath abandoned him.
“So when you stand in front of me with that hypocritical face, those phony eyes, that lying mouth, calling her ‘Xiao Xi’—‘Xiao Xi will always be my little sister’—it makes me sick. It’s obscene and it’s cruel.”
“Yan Zhen, you are the greatest accomplice in her death, the cruelest executioner. You don’t deserve Yuan Xi. You don’t deserve to repent. You don’t deserve forgiveness.”
She flung something at him, then turned and strode to the car a short distance away. She slid into the passenger seat beside Yan Yincheng and folded into the warmth of his arms.
Under the dim streetlight, on the cold pavement, Yan Zhen lay broken.
Only now did he understand what Yan Yincheng had meant at the wedding when he said, “Your Yuan Xi is already dead.” He finally understood what the aside—“Look at how different she is from four years ago”—had been hinting at.
He had woken from the nightmare Yuan Ya’er had woven for him, only to fall into a darker, more suffocating one.
“Yuan Xi… Xiao Xi…” he murmured, those syllables slipping through his lips like a prayer, like an accusation.
“Xiao Xi… Xiao Xi… Xiao Xi…”
He called her again and again—first in longing, then in grief, then in despair, then in a love that could not be voiced. In the end he could not say it at all.
He had destroyed his Xiao Xi with his own hands.
He had closed every road of retreat for her.
He had buried their past.
There was no longer a Yuan Xi in this world.
He had lost her completely—utterly and forever.