After Saving My Possessive Best Friend, I Couldn't Escape (GL) - Chapter 17

The car was moving fast, passing Fang Zhile’s side in less than two seconds.

Ye Yu subconsciously turned her head to follow Fang Zhile’s figure. Before the car turned a corner, she saw Fang Zhile turn into an even more remote and narrow path.

So, she lives here.

She and I are separated by just one street.

“We’re home,” Butler Yang stopped the car. Ye Yu didn’t wait for him to open the door. As soon as the car stopped, she opened the door and jumped out, waving at Butler Yang. “Goodbye!”

Butler Yang smiled as he watched her enter the villa before restarting the car and driving away.

The moment she entered her own house, she felt a chill that was completely different from the Zhou family’s home.

The lights were off in the house; her mother and father had not yet returned. They had their own careers and were busy every day. Ye Yu disliked having others around at home.

When she was home, her parents would have meals prepared and delivered.

The hourly maid only came on weekends for cleaning. Other than that, the house held no warmth of human life.

Ye Yu opened the lights with a blank expression. The blinding light instantly made her eyes ache.

With a “snap,” Ye Yu turned off all the lights again.

Wash, tidy, sleep.

Ye Yu performed the actions she had done for over a decade, without emotion or expectation.

When she lay in bed, her sleep was unaffected. She fell deeply asleep according to her strict biological clock.

But she didn’t wake up according to her early rising biological clock.

Ye Yu was awakened by the sound of a quarrel.

To be precise, it wasn’t overly loud. The people arguing spoke very softly, as if they were deliberately suppressing their volume, yet the coldness and sarcasm in their words were impossible to conceal. Every word was clear, even through the thin door.

“That son of the Fang family is a fool. Set a trap for him to invest. When his cash flow is tight…”

“…If you don’t want to target the Fang family, who do you want to target?”

“The Zheng family is harder.”

“I don’t think we are discussing the problem while both in a calm state.”

“A serious suggestion: you need to see a psychiatrist.”

“Now you think I have mental problems? Why didn’t you get a divorce then?”

“Your speaking logic is truly confused.”

Arguing again.

Ye Yu lay on her pillow with her eyes open. Whether she closed her eyes or opened them, she could visualize her parents sitting opposite each other with blank expressions, inwardly furious and wanting to physically strike the other, yet restraining themselves for the sake of appearances, using the most callous and hurtful words to attack each other, personally tearing open layer after layer of the other’s wounds.

They were teaching Ye Yu, through their own actions, how to use words to kill.

Ye Yu suddenly felt so tired.

She got up and started getting ready, trying several times to shake off the profound weariness, but failing.

She pushed the door open to leave. As she passed the living room, her parents called out to her.

“Where are you going?” her father asked coldly.

“Why are you so ill-mannered? Your parents are here, and you don’t even say hello,” her mother chimed in.

Ye Yu felt like an empty shell. She turned around to greet them, predictably receiving more harsh critiques.

“How is the Ode to the Luo River Goddess coming along?”

“Still writing it.”

“I hope that what you spend so much time writing is something we can present proudly.”

“I will do my best.”

“How is the preparation for the final exam going?”

“The next exam is a monthly test. Preparation is acceptable.”

“You sound very confident. I will communicate with your teachers to confirm your study status.”

Ye Yu’s mouth opened and closed. Fatigue was like a wild vine, creeping out from the earth, wrapping around her feet, climbing up her limbs, tightening around her little by little, slowly pulling her down into suffocation.

“May I leave now?”

“Go.”

When Ye Yu pushed the door open, it wasn’t fully light outside yet.

Her parents didn’t wonder why their daughter, who was prone to low blood sugar if she got up early, was going for a run at five in the morning.

They didn’t ask her about her plans for the weekend after her run.

Nor did they ask why she was carrying a full backpack for a morning run.

The moment she walked out of the villa into the faint morning light, Ye Yu’s chest constricted, then slowly expanded. The sticky, pulling sensation of sinking finally stopped worsening.

Even on a humid and stuffy rainy day, the air outside was easier to breathe than the air inside her home.

In the transition from late summer to early autumn, moisture was everywhere, accompanied by the scent of decay—the smell of things that hadn’t had time to recover after the night’s downpour. Grass roots rotted in the polluted water. The bark of trees was swollen and blistered. A night of cold wind had left cicadas dead and moths rigid.

A muffled thunder rumbled in the distance. The sky, after raining all night, was gathering dark clouds again, brewing the next storm.

Ye Yu rummaged through her backpack and realized she hadn’t brought an umbrella.

Fang Zhile had brought all her clothes inside before going to bed, but the area where she lived was low-lying and prone to flooding in the yard. She had set her alarm for six in the morning, worried that her bed might be soaked when she woke up.

In the morning, she saw that, sure enough, it was still raining, and the accumulated water in the yard was almost covering her small vegetable patch.

Fortunately, most of the water had flowed through a small ditch into the tiny pond her grandmother had dug.

Fang Zhile put on her raincoat over her slippers, yawning as she filled a one-meter long plastic tube with water. Then, carrying a large basin, she put one end of the tube into the “pond” and the other end into the basin. The water level in the basin couldn’t be too high, or the siphoning wouldn’t work. After siphoning for a while, she had to carry the basin out to dump the water.

She dumped the water over a dozen times until the pond was finally emptied.

Fang Zhile poured the last basin of water into the ditch by the door. Holding the empty basin, she was about to close the door and go back to sleep when her peripheral vision caught a figure, startling her so much that she almost dropped the basin.

“Y-Y-Y-Ye Yu?”

Ye Yu was soaked through, looking over from the other end of the narrow path, her eyes even more bewildered than Fang Zhile’s.

Fang Zhile had never seen Ye Yu look so distressed.

Ye Yu also failed for a moment to recognize the person in the oversized raincoat and plastic slippers, carrying a large basin.

The two stared at each other, frozen on opposite sides of the path.

“You,” Fang Zhile saw that Ye Yu wasn’t moving and instinctively took a step forward. However, as soon as she stepped down from the threshold, the bewildered person took a step back. Afraid she might fall, Fang Zhile quickly stopped. “Don’t you want to come over? It’s still raining outside.”

The sky at around six o’clock was fully bright, but the overcast clouds created a dull, gray quality, like frosted glass that couldn’t be cleaned. Small raindrops were still falling, lightly splattering on the face, creating a sense of irritation.

Ye Yu finally snapped back to reality. After confirming several times that the person in front of her was Fang Zhile, she hesitated and tentatively took a small step forward. “Don’t move. I’ll come to you.”

She had been wandering here for nearly an hour. She remembered that the small path Butler Yang had driven her through came in from a different intersection, but when she tried to find it herself, everything looked different, and she quickly got lost. Annoyingly, she didn’t even know what she was looking for, wandering aimlessly like a headless fly for a long time.

It wasn’t until she heard a loud “splash” that her attention was fully called back. A person holding a half-human-sized aluminum basin was briskly and efficiently dumping a large amount of murky rainwater. The sound of the sewage rushing into the ditch was like a firecracker exploding nearby.

Ye Yu stepped on the protruding stones on the ground, trying to avoid stepping into the mud pits, and walked toward Fang Zhile one step at a time.

Like a lost traveler who had finally found a destination.

Fang Zhile retrieved an umbrella from inside the house, held it over Ye Yu’s head, and led the person into her home.