On the eve of her departure to study abroad, Ji Shiyin received a call: her father had hit someone in a car accident. She rushed to the hospital, where her father sat trembling outside the operating room. At three in the morning, the doctor declared that the resuscitation had failed. The victim was brain-dead.
The victim had only one child, a seventeen-year-old son in his second year of high school.
Ji Shiyin took all the money she had saved for studying abroad and spoke to him alone.
Bending before the tall, thin boy, she apologized and promised to do everything she could to meet his needs.
He refused coldly. "I don't need it. I should thank your dad for hitting him and killing him."
Ji Shiyin later learned that his father was a gambling drunk. When the boy was ten, his father accidentally pushed his mother from the eighteenth floor, killing her on the spot. The boy had spent his life fleeing from debt with his father, never knowing a single peaceful day. A few days before the accident, loan sharks had splashed dog blood outside his school. The school summoned him and tactfully suggested that he leave.
Ji Shiyin found a lawyer to resolve the matter and paid his tuition in full.
One night, she got a call and hurried to the entrance of a nightclub.
A group of boys who looked like thugs stood together, smoking. The tall, slender boy stood among them, clear-eyed and out of place, like a white lotus in the mud or a poplar in the wasteland.
Someone shoved him and laughed. "A Yang, your ATM's here."
Ji Shiyin paid the bill. Holding the receipt for over three thousand yuan, she went up to him. "Do you have anywhere to stay? Want to come to my place?"
He frowned. "Who called you here this time? I told you, don't meddle in my business."
She sneezed. "Who wants to meddle in your business? Achoo... It's all smoke in here."
"I wasn't smoking..." The boy took off his jacket and tossed it over her, then pulled her away from the smokers. A light rain began to fall. He opened his umbrella and tilted it toward her, one hand in his pocket. "Come on, I'll take you home... Don't come out this late again."
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Shao Yang's world was a bottomless whirlpool. He would keep sinking until the moment he perished.
But a pair of gentle hands pulled him back up.
One accident changed the course of his life forever.
#Seven-year age gap
-2024.7.8
Theme: Strive to live
