When the neon lights of the Abyss bar mingled with the smell of liquor, Meng Anran stopped the man pestering Qin Zhiyi for the third time. It was the sixth time that month someone had touched the girl, leaving her trembling, her fingertips digging into her palm until it turned white. Meng Anran had her bodyguards haul the troublemaker away, then turned and draped her smoke-scented suit over Qin Zhiyi. The cool, woody fragrance wrapped around her, carrying the tension peculiar to bipolar disorder. "From now on, you're staying with me."
Qin Zhiyi was an orphan with no parents. The trauma of being touched left her accustomed to scrubbing her arms over and over with cold water. Meng Anran was a rich heiress whose gambler stepfather extorted money from her. Her father's monthly allowance of 500,000 yuan couldn't fill the emptiness inside her, so she could only suppress the agitation of her manic episodes by clenching her fists and smoking twenty packs of cigarettes. She paid for Qin Zhiyi's university tuition, but shoved an access card to her apartment into her hand. "Don't go anywhere I haven't given you permission to go." As a leather wristband fastened around her wrist, they both laughed and called the other crazy: one clung to control, the other was trapped in self-reproach. They were made for each other in the abyss.
Qin Zhiyi studied psychology to treat her illness and became a renowned doctor in the field, but she couldn't dispel the gloom in Meng Anran's eyes. At thirty-five, Meng Anran sent her to buy a specific brand of cigarettes. When she returned, all that remained was a smoke-blackened room and a bracelet, burned out of shape. Qin Zhiyi fell asleep clutching a black-and-white photo, murmuring at midnight, "You said you wouldn't leave me." She didn't know that thousands of miles away, Meng Anran was swallowing pills and staring at a photo she'd secretly taken of Qin Zhiyi as she endured her treatment.
Three years later, she returned under a new name, only to be met with Qin Zhiyi's coldness instead of an embrace. It wasn't until she was cornered in the apartment that the girl, eyes red, gripped her wrist: "Isn't freedom what you wanted, Ms. Shi? I'll give it back to you."
This time, she would belong to her alone.
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