Apology

The night after the temperature drop carried a hint of autumn, bearing a wildness and tranquility distinct from the city.

Zhou Suirong parked the car a little distance away. Halfway through the walk, Fang Qingzhou suddenly stopped and called his name: "Zhou Suirong."

Zhou Suirong: "Hmm?"

By the roadside was a ditch filled with stray weeds, emanating a faint, fishy stench. Fang Qingzhou pointed at a fluctuating patch of light and said, "The moon in the water is so big."

Zhou Suirong followed her gaze into the darkness for a long time, never guessing that her intense focus was fixed on this. He pointed his finger from the water's surface upward and said, with a laugh that was neither a smile nor a cry, "That's just a roadside lamp, isn't it?"

As he spoke, Zhou Suirong turned his gaze to meet Fang Qingzhou's face. She was also looking at him, her brows curved, and her eyes, flashing with fractured light, held a direct and innocent smile.

Fang Qingzhou pressed his finger down and said, "I told you, you lack romantic flair."

A pleasant breeze brushed away the loose strands of hair on Fang Qingzhou's forehead. With a look of humble instruction, Zhou Suirong leaned in close, rested his head against the crook of her neck, and hugged her softly as he said, "Oh no, I'm such a mood-killer."

Zhou Suirong excelled at using spoiled endearments to coax her into a good mood, taking endless delight in it with high-level finesse.

Fang Qingzhou ruffled his hair.

Half-hanging on her like a large, mobile heat source, Zhou Suirong nudged her toward the car and said with a cheeky grin, "President Fang seems rather listless today. Would you like Little Zhou to offer you some service?"

Before Little Zhou officially assumed his new role, the phone in his pocket rang out of season.

He closed the car door, took out his phone, and saw it was a college roommate.

"Old Zhou! Long time no see! How have things been lately?"

After exchanging a couple of polite pleasantries, the caller cut straight to the point: "I'm getting married early next year. I'll send you the digital invitation later—make sure you come. It'll be a great chance for the guys to catch up."

It was a rare piece of good news for Zhou Suirong lately, and he offered his heartfelt blessing: "Congratulations!"

He pulled up the navigation app and casually tapped the speakerphone button.

After finishing the invitation, the caller smoothly steered the conversation to Fang Qingzhou, asking with a cheeky grin, "You two haven't broken up yet, have you?"

"Get lost!" Zhou Suirong's intention to hang up was instantly replaced by anger, and he retorted unhappily, "Who asks if someone broke up right out of the gate? You're about to get married, can't you say something nice?"

Good thing the call came now; if it had been a week ago, Zhou Suirong would have gone over to drag him down with him in mutual destruction.

The caller had no idea the phone was on speaker, and the other protagonist of the topic was sitting right in the same car. Hearing this, the caller laughed heartily and said, "Hahaha, sorry! It's just that I can't imagine Senior sister in a relationship. Wait, she's actually younger than us. You're older than her by a month, right?"

Zhou Suirong laughed and scolded, "A month doesn't warrant the word 'old'! I'm going to hang up now, I need to drive."

"Don't hang up yet! Make sure you ask Senior sister if she wants to come too. If she comes, I'll specially arrange a table for introverts just for you guys—guaranteed not to disturb you." Fearing he would hang up, the caller excitedly threw out the next topic: "When are you planning to get married? Can Senior sister even accept marriage? Seriously, I completely fail to imagine Senior sister building a family with someone. Maybe it's because I've never seen the two of you interacting. In my mind, her image is still that of a deity. Please, bring her with you!"

Zhou Suirong glanced at Fang Qingzhou beside him. He looked slightly dazed by the question, his expression carrying a trace of foolishness.

The classmate asked in a booming voice: "When I heard others say you two were dating back then, I thought it was utter nonsense. I never expected it to be true. The rest of us used to ponder it endlessly in the group chat—you were sitting there every day staring at your phone and silly-smiling because you were texting Senior sister, right? Did you guys start dating way back and only made it public after graduation? That must have been many years! Do you have any plans for the future?"

Everyone seemed to disbelieve that Fang Qingzhou would ever fall in love.

Perhaps it was because every single trait of romance ran counter to Fang Qingzhou's rules—complex, unstable, prone to collapse, requiring an immense amount of emotional labor to sustain, lacking a standard answer when problems arose, and incapable of returning to its original state once a crack was mended. It was illusory in essence, yet demanded to be real.

Much like a cheap commodity bearing an exorbitant price tag. Fang Qingzhou possessed far too much to have any reason to make such a purchase.

The caller brought up past memories from their college days, chattering on endlessly without stopping. Disturbed by his uncalculated remarks, Zhou Suirong forgot to interrupt.

Whether or not she was listening, Fang Qingzhou had brought out her laptop and was busy handling work emails in the spare moments.

It wasn't until the conversation came full circle that the classmate, driven once again by curiosity, brought up their dating history.

"How on earth did you two get together? Can you really not tell me? Why is that?"

Listlessly, Zhou Suirong said, "Where do you get so many 'whys'? It's too late, I have things to do, I'm hanging up."

Fang Qingzhou had originally not intended to insert herself into their friends' conversation, but finally unable to hold back, she pressed down the laptop screen and said, "I pursued him."

Silence fell on the other end of the line.

A second later, the call disconnected. WeChat notification alerts chimed frantically, flashing twenty-odd messages in an instant, demonstrating the sender's typing speed.

By the time Zhou Suirong tapped into the chat, the messages vanished one by one, leaving only a neat row of "The other party recalled a message" right down the middle.

After a long pause, a trembling line popped up: *Senior sister isn't checking your chat history, is she? Why didn't you say anything?!*

Zhou Suirong: "..."

He had always considered himself a resilient hero who could bend and stretch as circumstances required, but it seemed his cultivation still had some way to go.

Putting the laptop down from her lap, Fang Qingzhou said slowly, "They all think I'm different from them. I don't know in what way I'm different. Am I overthinking, or underthinking?"

Zhou Suirong immediately said, "Don't listen to their nonsense. You aren't different in any way. People are inherently different from one another; difference is our only point of sameness."

"I can't seem to communicate clearly with them." Giving him a distrustful look, Fang Qingzhou probed, "Did anyone say things like that to you when you were a child?"

Zhou Suirong replied, "Me? Not many people spoke to me when I was little, so my verbal expression skills were a bit problematic, with plenty of grammatical errors. I only fixed that later on."

With modest introspection, Fang Qingzhou remarked, "Then my verbal expression skills are a bit problematic too. That's probably why I'm always misunderstood."

Zhou Suirong certainly didn't dare let her upgrade her language skills any further. With a steadfast gaze, he encouraged her: "You have no problems at all; your expression is vivid and graphic. While other people fail to convey their meaning, our President Fang is simply being candid and straightforward. If they can't accept that, it's their problem."

Assuming he was just blindly flattering her, Fang Qingzhou straightened her expression and said, "Zhou Suirong, don't affirm me so unconditionally. A person must acknowledge their flaws. I make mistakes too."

Zhou Suirong loved chatting idly and wildly with her like this, because Fang Qingzhou used the exact same expression whether she was joking or speaking seriously, often coming out with utterly unexpected remarks that drew his amazed exclamation.

Watching her with a smile, Zhou Suirong asked, "What mistake has President Fang made?"

He expected that, after some thought, Fang Qingzhou would confidently state this was merely a hypothesis. Yet as he watched her lips part, the words that drifted into his ears sounded like sleep-talk: "What if I committed a crime?"

"I had no malicious intent, but I still hurt someone. Legally speaking, I am guilty, and if prosecuted, I might face a lengthy prison sentence..." The grave tone with which Fang Qingzhou spoke made her words fall heavily, every syllable tearing a vast void in the atmosphere. After an agonizing pause at the very end, she persevered and continued, "If I have no way to face this guilt and punishment, what would you want me to do?"

Her confession of wrongdoing was hurried and perfunctory, yet its underlying meaning was real and clear.

Zhou Suirong's breathing abruptly froze, and a terrifying, dead silence enveloped them.

Zhou Suirong leaned back and retreated. The smile on his face faded bit by bit, leaving his expression somewhat blank. He stared into her eyes for a long time before his expression shifted slightly; his mouth opened and closed again, and his Adam's apple rolled heavily.

It was as though he were thinking, yet his emotions remained hopelessly trapped in a sticky quagmire. Stunned, he asked, "What did you say?"

"You understood." This time, Fang Qingzhou did not evade him. "Think about it again."

Zhou Suirong weighed the joke content within her words, but unfortunately, he couldn't convince himself. Because Fang Qingzhou was a profoundly rational person; no matter how devoid of tact she might be, she would never use such a topic to amuse herself.

"Before Shen Zhiyang committed murder, did you go see her again?" Zhou Suirong could only rely on fragmented evidence to make limited conjectures. "You guys talked about the project data leak before—did Shen Zhiyang have her perception restored by the other party and wanted revenge? Did you restart the project to help her, yet Shen Zhiyang still lost control and killed someone, causing the prosecution to believe you share joint liability? Have you asked a lawyer about this?"

Fang Qingzhou hadn't expected him to string the cause and effect together so accurately. Fearing her lies would crumble, she pressed her lips together and answered with silence.

Zhou Suirong scrutinized her, his piercing gaze missing not a single flicker of change, attempting to read the answer from her face: "Did we quarrel because of this matter? I disagreed with your decision, so we broke up. I went to gather evidence, the other party found out, we had a dispute, and I tumbled down the mountain..."

Pretending to be clueless, Fang Qingzhou said, "That's far more plausible than the wild fantasies you guessed earlier. What do you think?"

Zhou Suirong's joy, terror, and anxiety overturned and crushed each other in a fleeting moment. Unable to calm down for a moment, he pressed both hands against the steering wheel and repeated in a low voice, "I'm sorry, let me think."

Call it thinking, but Zhou Suirong was entirely incapable of rational thought. He merely traced her shadow under the lights, letting it soothe his terrified, pounding heart.

Before long, Zhou Suirong spoke again. The fluctuation in his voice had receded as he asked, "Would you like to lean on me for a while?"

Fang Qingzhou said, "No need."

"Alright." Zhou Suirong gripped her hand tightly, then added, "Have you seen the sunrise in City B? The museum here is quite famous too—would you like to go?"

Fang Qingzhou waited for him to push the conversation forward.

Zhou Suirong's fingertips were cold, curling tightly and practically binding Fang Qingzhou's hand.

Perhaps because he had mentally prepared himself beforehand, speaking the words wasn't as difficult as he had imagined: "If that's the case, let's head back to City A early. We still need to abide by the law and bear the responsibilities we ought to. That's better than hiding outside in constant terror and dread, right? This is something you have to face."

Fang Qingzhou said, "I'll have to go to prison."

"I don't think prison is that terrifying," Zhou Suirong persuaded her patiently. "Look, you excel at growing accustomed to any structured routine. The repetitive daily life in prison won't pose much difficulty for you. Or you could apply to conduct deep research and study while inside—I believe your qualifications would be accepted. Well... you don't care much for money anyway, so that's easily within your reach. Besides, given your talent, plenty of people would be willing to hold a high-paying job waiting for you to come out, so your career won't suffer too severely. Nor will you need to care about others' evaluations; you won't have to condemn yourself because of outside judgment. If you're afraid of loneliness, I'll go visit you."

Zhou Suirong kept his voice very, very soft, leaning forward until the tip of his nose was almost touching her lowered forehead. The breath he exhaled caused Fang Qingzhou to close her eyes.

He tried his best to banish the imagined cold and hardship, dressing up failure in a way that inspired anticipation: "I'll go visit you frequently, seizing every single second to talk to you until the prison guard comes over to drag me away. I'll draft notes in advance and tell you all sorts of interesting stories. However, the company's growth might not be guaranteed—I can only promise you I won't let it go bankrupt."

"Are you inviting me to eat prison food?" Fang Qingzhou found the scenario he painted rather amusing. "What if the prison guard isn't as strong as you? What then?"

Zhou Suirong laughed too: "I'll try my best to let them drag me away smoothly, otherwise what if they don't let me visit next time?"

Mentally inserting himself into the scene, he imagined it vividly, covered his eyes in embarrassment, and said, "Do I really have to act it out? I feel like I'd be mocked. I was just saying it casually—are you really going to watch?"

Gazing at him, Fang Qingzhou asked, "Do you think a life like that is acceptable?"

Zhou Suirong kissed her forehead, pressed a hand to the back of her neck, and pulled her into his embrace. The trembling of his vocal cords betrayed a hint of pleading: "I hope you can accept it. It's really not that difficult."

Fang Qingzhou said, "Then I hope you'll remember what you said today."

Her violently shaken mind and spirit interfered with Zhou Suirong's judgment, preventing him from perceiving the deeper meaning in Fang Qingzhou's words, mistaking her stance for mere anxiety.

Zhou Suirong smoothed her hair, then followed up by probing: "I've never understood the laws in this area. Did Captain Ji tell you how long you might be sentenced? Less than three years?"

Burying her head, Fang Qingzhou remained silent.

His scalp tingling with apprehension, Zhou Suirong weighed it and asked, "More than three years, less than five?"

Fang Qingzhou shook her head slightly.

Frowning, Zhou Suirong uttered an "Ah": "More than ten years? Surely not?"

"Do you think it's too long?" Fang Qingzhou raised her head and asked, "Will you take a new girlfriend?"

Zhou Suirong chuckled bitterly: "Probably not. Am I supposed to bring her along to visit you in prison? That would be too bizarre."

Fang Qingzhou said, "Then we'll always be together."

Cupping her face, Zhou Suirong felt an inexplicable sense of relief. He accepted her promise.

"I don't know why..." Feeling his cheeks grow wet and tears fall uncontrollably, Zhou Suirong choked out with a laugh, "It's so strange, I don't know why, but I feel extremely happy right now."

In her cool return kiss, he tasted the saltiness of tears, carrying the tender flavor of a desire to make time stand still right here.