The Moon Festival Cousin Switch novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: Everything After the Card

They went into the flat and Anqi shut the door behind them.

Mengyao did not take off her shoes.

She stood in the narrow hall with the bent envelope in one hand and her breath still ragged from the run.

"I want to say mine first," she said. "Before you say yours."

"All right."

"At the wedding, you were at the cake table with a plate. You'd taken the corner piece with the most icing."

Anqi blinked. "I remember the icing."

"I remember you gave it to a little boy who was crying. You didn't say anything. You just put it in his hand."

Mengyao's dimples came and went.

"Then you asked me what I did. I said I looked after trees. Everybody else says 'Oh, how nice' and looks over my head. You asked which kind."

"Osmanthus," Anqi said softly. "You said it smells like someone being forgiven."

"I said that?"

"You did."

"I've never said anything that good since." Mengyao laughed, and it broke in the middle. "Anqi. I sent you the first Spring Festival message. You answered with a single short line. I read it for a week."

"I thought you were being polite."

"I was being a coward." She set the envelope on the shoe cabinet. "Nobody put that in me. A card didn't do it. I had two years of looking at your name on my phone before Haoran touched a pen."

Anqi's eyes stung.

"He just moved the chair," Mengyao said. "I was already walking toward you."

It was not a clever speech.

It was said by a woman with soil still under one thumbnail, in a hallway that smelled of old paper.

Anqi found that it went straight through the cold place.

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