Chapter 16

Most of Gi Changning's character was made of going first, so having said they should talk, she started with herself.

"My grandmother brought me up." She sent her mother a message saying she would be back, and walked beside Ji Ran through the city village. "Jinhua wasn't built then. We lived on an ordinary estate. She used to show me videos of my mother performing and ask whether I wanted to dance."

She laughed once. "I was tiny. What did I know about wanting things? And she couldn't tell one kind of dance from another. She saw a lot of little girls doing ballet, so she sent me to ballet."

"Ballet hurts." Gi Changning remembered herself small, crying through the stretches. "But as far as my grandmother was concerned, a dancer was the finest thing a person could be. Her eyes lit up when she watched me. She praised me with every word she could think of and bought me things to eat and things to play with. At the start I kept at it for her. After a while I loved it for myself."

Ji Ran listened without a word. She had heard a good deal of this from her aunt, and the same events sounded different coming from the person they happened to.

Her aunt was calm about it, and analysed it, and found it a pity. Gi Changning only missed it.

"Chairman Ji is a contradictory man. Honestly." A gust caught her and she coughed twice, pulled her hood up and tightened it over her nose and mouth. "He kept videos of me dancing where he thought I wouldn't find them, and did everything he could to stop me dancing. He wanted to look like a father and went a fortnight at a time without coming home. He wanted to be closer to me and then heard I was doing street dance and announced he'd break my legs. These last two years he's got older and his temper's much better, he's learned to soften his voice and make jokes and ask me things like an ordinary parent. But people don't feel each other's griefs. All I want to ask him is where he was."

Ji Ran turned her head. The fur on Gi Changning's hood covered half her face and there was no reading it. She pressed her lips together and asked into the quiet, "Have you ever thought that it isn't that he doesn't want to be close to you? That he just doesn't know how?"

"That's his job as a father. What has it got to do with me?" Gi Changning shrugged. "Why should I keep offering when there's nothing coming back? I grew up thinking I had no mother and no father, and only my grandmother and my brother to hold on to."

Ji Ran had no answer. People are made by how they are treated. Her father had given Gi Changning nothing to work with at the beginning, and had pushed the child further out with every year.

And the other way round? Gi Changning had given him nothing either, and the thing had sharpened between them.

"I was at primary school when my grandmother died." Gi Changning sketched a shape in the air. "She used to be round and soft and lovely. After she got ill there was nothing but skin on bone. She loved me so much and by the end she didn't know who I was. And the son she never stopped asking for wasn't there in the last hours of her life."

Ji Ran could not see her face. She heard the catch in her throat.

She said, "I hate him."

A pause, and she said it again. "I hate him."

Ji Ran had not had much luck with grandparents. She never met her mother's. Her father's mother died when she was small. The one she remembered clearly was her father's old master, who always had a pile of snacks ready whenever she appeared, and who died too before the move to Pingchuan, of old age, the kind of death people call a good one.

But to Gi Changning this was someone she had lived with for ten years. She could not take an ounce of pain off a woman whose life was going out of her. She would have swapped places. She wanted to grant her one last wish, and it went the other way.

Gi Changning remembered that flattened afternoon, the cold wall of the hospital, the engaged tone repeating in the phone. The sky came down and the world turned over, and she sobbed out loud and tried to stop them putting the white cloth over the old woman's face, and her brother held her back and would not let go.

Is a company that important?

More important than the life of your own family?

You knew your only mother was in that hospital. Why did you leave?

Under the silent sky, Ji Ran said, "You know he was in an operating theatre."

That year there had been an accident at a Ji factory in the south. A newly built workshop was half wrecked by a competitor, and it got bad enough that only Mr Ji himself could settle it. He meant to go and come back the same day. On the way to the airport his appendix went. He had the operation, and the moment the anaesthetic wore off he ignored every instruction he was given and rushed back to Pingchuan.

He was late.

Far too late.

What he came back to was his mother's cold body and the hatred in his daughter's eyes.

Gi Changning tilted her head and met Ji Ran's clear black and white eyes, and then pulled at the corner of her mouth and smiled. "Yes. I know."

She had seen how awkwardly he walked. She had seen his face when the pain took him. She had seen the blood on his shirt.

And what difference did it make?

None of it could be changed.

"Gi Changning. You were the one who told me we shouldn't live for other people." Ji Ran stopped walking and asked it seriously. "Have you managed it yourself?"

Had she?

Of course not.

Fighting her father had become her daily life. Whenever he moved her, her grandmother's last look came up in her head, and making peace with him felt like a betrayal of her grandmother and of the girl she had been.

Gi Changning was quiet a long time. "Ji Ran, do you know? She looked at me the whole of that last hour. She didn't want to go."

"She was probably thinking she wouldn't see you grow up, and wanted to look at you while she could." Ji Ran's eyes went wet. "She was that good a person. How could she have wanted you carrying hate around for the rest of your life?"

A snowflake came down and turned quietly to water on her coat.

Gi Changning could not hold it any more, and the tears came.

Ji Ran stepped forward, put both arms out and took hold of her, and her voice was muffled and perfectly clear against Gi Changning's ear. "I'm sorry."

Gi Changning's eyes went wide.

I took the home that belonged to you.

A warm mother, a gentle father, a house with love in it. All of it should have been Gi Changning's and not hers.

Gi Changning froze, then shoved her away. Her eyes were red and the tears had dried on her face, and she could not believe it. "You're saying sorry to me? What gives you the right to say sorry? Do you know how low I've been? I lived in a huge house, I spent money that never ran out, I used his guilt for everything it was worth, and nobody dared cross me because nobody dares cross Chairman Ji. I have been living the life that was yours, and at the end of it you say sorry to me?"

The absurdity of it.

"Ha. Ji Ran." Gi Changning pulled a crumpled scrap of paper out of her pocket, her fingers shaking with how worked up she was, and smoothed it out. "Are you a saint? Aren't you angry? Don't you resent me for taking your life off you?"

She had not pushed hard, and Ji Ran only went back a step. She could not read what was on the paper and did not know what was meant. She said quietly, "I told you when we met. What we're after isn't only having enough. It's having enough inside."

"Even when it costs you the thing you wanted?"

Gi Changning came after her, held the paper up in front of her and pointed at the broken writing. "Medicine. Fees, scholarships, grants, eight years straight through to a doctorate, then the training years. Computing. Fees, scholarships, grants, apply to the big firms on graduating, projected salary."

The comparison was there in black and white. Ji Ran had set the two roads side by side, gone carefully through what each university would cost and what she could expect to get, and worked her future out in cold numbers. And at the end she had put a large cross through the eight years and the training, and drawn a circle round computing.

Which left one road.

Upstairs, reconstructing the handwriting, Gi Changning had reached the end of it with a mouthful of anger and nowhere to put it, and guessed immediately what Ji Ran had been thinking. Medicine takes too long. Ji Ran could not afford to wait, so she picked computing, aiming at a big firm on graduating, so she could pay her family back.

Nobody understood giving up a dream under duress better than Gi Changning.

And Ji Ran had made her choice long ago, had quietly shouldered the family, and was walking on with the thing she had given up and no intention of stopping.

"It was only a rough plan." Ji Ran had not forgotten making that comparison. It was precisely because the gap was so brutal that she had let medicine go almost without friction, none of the agonising she had expected, only the sense of water finding its level, as though this was the road she had always been meant to take. "I thought I threw it away. Where did you find it?"

"Threw it away, did you. It was under the desk." Gi Changning shoved the paper back into her hands furiously, and it was like hitting a pillow.

She puffed out her cheeks, deflated, looked up at a sky with no sign of the snow stopping, and said gracelessly, "Come and eat before you go back. Mum and Dad miss you."

Ji Ran shook her head. "Not this time. There'll be another chance."

Gi Changning knew they both needed to be alone and settle, so she did not press.

They walked back together, and Gi Changning saw her to the entrance of the city village. The lights there were bright. Ji Ran waved with her back turned. "Go in. I know the way."

Something made Gi Changning call out. "Ranran!"

Ji Ran turned, and a figure came running at her with both arms open and caught her hard. Ji Ran was slight and had none of Gi Changning's muscle, and the impact took her back several steps. She was about to ask what was wrong when she heard her say, against her ear, "I'm sorry, Ranran. I took your life."

The money I had, the freedom to do as I liked, the freedom to choose, all of it should have been yours.

Neither of them said anything.

Ji Ran patted her back. "Some people won't say it, but I know Dad and my brother miss you. Why don't you come to Jinhua when you have time?"

The past is past. What is in front of you and what is coming cannot be wasted.

"No." Gi Changning turned her head away. "You can tell them that if they treat you badly, half my bed is yours. Always."

Ji Ran nearly laughed. "All right. I'll pass it on."

---

Back in the attic, dinner was already on the table. Her mother started the moment she came in. "You, sending a message and running straight out. Let me look at you, you'll have frozen."

"I'm fine. Ranran was downstairs. We talked for a bit."

"Ranran?" Her mother got up, and the chair shrieked on the floor. She hurried to the balcony and there was nobody there. "Why didn't she come up?"

Gi Changning washed her hands and sat down, waving her parents back into their seats. "She says next time. Next time she'll come up and scrounge a meal."

Her father pulled out a tissue and handed it to her. He could see perfectly well that she had been crying, pretended not to, and sighed. "Qing. The child's grown up. She's got secrets now."

---

At Jinhua Gardens, the villa had its lights on.

Ji Ran blinked and her feet went faster of their own accord. She opened the door with the snow still on her, and the two men in the kitchen looked up at the sound and stopped mid-sentence.

Both had their suit jackets off and aprons on over their shirts, their hands covered in flour and no idea what to do with their faces.

Her brother coughed and recovered first. "Ranran's home. Is it cold out? Come and get warm, we're having dumplings."

He did not ask where she had been. He said it the way a family that has lived together a long time says it.

Dumplings?

Ji Ran changed her shoes and went over to a board that could fairly be called a disaster. There were no dumplings. There was not even a ball of dough. "What sort of dumplings are these?" she said helplessly. "Where's the filling? There's not enough water in that, it'll never come together."

Her father produced a sealed bag packed with minced beef. "Beef filling from the hotel, ready seasoned," he said quietly. "There was too much water in the dough at the start, so we added flour, and then there was too much flour, so we added water."

He had known hard times. He had simply not made dumplings in years and had lost the knack.

Ji Ran had nothing to say.

Fine.

She rolled her sleeves up and accepted her fate. "I'll show you. You're stronger, you knead. Dad, put the filling in a bowl and beat it until it holds. I'll roll the wrappers and you two fill them with me. All right?"

They nodded away. "Yes. Yes."

Watching the pair of them flounder, Ji Ran asked, "Why dumplings, suddenly?"

"It's nearly New Year. Everyone eats dumplings." Her father did not look up. "Ones you make yourself taste better than ones you buy."

The Jis had got used to ordering in from the hotel. If it had not been for Ji Ran's pot of porridge, they would have forgotten the kitchen could produce anything but instant noodles.

Ji Ran's eyes curved. She taught her brother and her father to fold dumplings, and said, "I went to see Ningning today."

Her father's hands paused on a dumpling.

Ji Ran appeared not to notice. "She says she'll come and see you next time."

Outside, the snow got heavier and settled on the clipped box hedge like a layer of sweet cream.

A good sign.