Winter came early to Wangyue Town. By November, three heavy snowfalls had already blanketed the town.
Wrapped in a crimson cloak, she came down from the Drunken Moon Tower and dug a boy out of a snowdrift. His lips were blue with cold. When he opened his eyes, the first thing he said was, “Big sister.”
She kicked him over. “Call me that again and I’ll cut out your tongue.”
He didn’t listen. He called her that for three years.
She raised him like a dog and honed him into a blade. He poured her tea, ran eighty li in the middle of the night to fetch a doctor, and took a knife for her. She made him kneel on broken porcelain, and when he was done, he smiled at her. She pricked his palm with a needle, and he leaned closer and said, “That feels wonderful, big sister.”
She thought he was crazy.
Only later did she learn that he had hidden a jade pendant, a name, and a memory she had long since forgotten. Seven years ago, beneath the artificial hill in the back garden of the Wen residence, a little boy gave a little girl an osmanthus cake. The girl smiled at him.
Just once.
He remembered it for seven years. She forgot.
Some people are a sickness you catch the moment you meet. There is no cure, and you don’t want one.
That winter, the last snow fell on Wangyue Town. The pear tree was blanketed in white, its branches bending beneath the weight. When the wind blew, snow fell in a soft rustle.
From then on, every winter, someone stood beneath that pear tree, waiting for a person who would never come back.
