Of course he couldn’t do that.
He couldn’t keep pouring his heavy expectations onto the other person, couldn’t keep telling her that she was his only emotional support, and definitely couldn’t double the pressure on her shoulders.
Xu Duyan was a person too—and more importantly, she was the woman he loved.
So he would keep those words buried deep in his heart. There was no need to say them out loud; doing so would only add unnecessary pressure to her.
The words he couldn’t speak stayed lodged in his throat, piling up inside his chest.
This despair-filled negative energy had to be borne and consumed by someone. Su Ziyan chose to digest it all by himself rather than dump it onto Xu Duyan and burden her further.
She was already trying so hard.
Su Ziyan abruptly cut off his own inner monologue and changed the subject.
“That’s why I don’t need to feel sad at all. Right now, I’m actually really happy.”
“I don’t need to be afraid either,” Su Ziyan said with a smile.
“I was just overthinking things. Once I got over it, it felt like I’d exhaled a breath of stale air, and suddenly I feel so much lighter.”
Su Ziyan moved his hand away and looked toward Xu Duyan’s face with his lifeless eyes, trying to see whether his elder sister had stopped crying.
Unfortunately, the weather outside had turned from sunny to overcast. The room grew dark, and without the lights on, he could no longer even make out her blurry outline.
The month of despair had made him forget what he used to look like. He could only desperately try to recall it, and finally forced out a smile that resembled the one from his memories. He said:
“So, to comfort your injured little brother, why don’t you hold him while we sleep tonight, Elder Sister?”
After he finished speaking, the air fell silent for a moment. Then he heard his sister’s soft laugh.
“Even at a time like this, you’re still thinking about taking advantage of me? Fine, I’ll allow it.”
Su Ziyan didn’t know whether his sister’s current smile was just a mask to comfort him, but at least no more tears were falling on his face. He figured his little act had succeeded this time.
What he didn’t know was that a person who had suffered such a massive upheaval could no longer smile the way they once did. And the current Su Ziyan had almost completely forgotten how to smile properly.
Xu Duyan watched Su Ziyan’s extremely awkward and forced smile. No matter how slow she might be, she understood exactly what he was doing.
So she lifted her head high, gave a light laugh in response, and let the tears slide down the corners of her eyes onto her fair neck. At least this time they wouldn’t land on Su Ziyan’s face.
If it had been the old Su Ziyan, he would have noticed even the smallest abnormality in her. But sadly, he was now blind. He couldn’t see light, and he couldn’t even make out blurry outlines anymore.
That was why he had no idea how fake his own smile looked, and he had no idea that Xu Duyan was currently tilting her head back to keep her tears from falling.
Their mutual deception had ultimately turned into a one-sided deception.
A well-meaning lie could apparently become an unbreakable knot between lovers.
For the next month, the two of them lived a happy and joyful life—just like the one Su Ziyan had once fantasized about.
At least, that was what he believed. Throughout that entire month, he played the role of his old self—the one who had never suffered any accident—all so that Xu Duyan could feel at ease.
And Xu Duyan seemed not to have noticed his performance. These days left him exhausted and in pain, but also happy.
Although the mixture of sweet, sour, bitter, and spicy feelings created an extremely complicated emotion—with mostly negative ones mixed in—Su Ziyan still felt satisfied.
At least he wasn’t as hopeless anymore, right?
Watching Xu Duyan gradually become happier because of his “improvement,” he felt happy too.
Even though he kept saying that his sense of taste and smell had gotten much better, in reality he had completely lost both senses.
But those were unimportant things anyway.
As long as his sister was happy, that was enough.
And so Su Ziyan kept emotionally moving himself, sinking deeper into the web of lies Xu Duyan had woven.
Because Xu Duyan could see everything clearly from a third-person perspective. She knew exactly how clumsy and forced Su Ziyan’s performance had been throughout the entire month.
She watched him act like a performer on stage, day after day, putting on an extremely strained show.
Every time she saw it, her heart ached so badly she could barely breathe.
It made her feel terrible. As Su Ziyan’s only family member, she had done everything in her power since they were children to ensure he never suffered even the slightest grievance.
She still remembered when Su Ziyan had just entered high school and encountered a girl who had been bullied by her classmates from junior high all the way into high school.
Even though he found her annoying, he didn’t want to cause trouble for his sister, so he never stepped in directly. Instead, he secretly helped the bullied girl a few times.
But the bullies eventually noticed his hidden concern and assistance. They tried to target him as well, forcing him to fight back.
In the end, both sides were punished equally and their parents were called in. That day, Su Ziyan had come to her with red eyes and apologized, saying he really hadn’t wanted to cause her any trouble.
At that moment, Xu Duyan had sworn in her heart that she would never let her little brother suffer any grievance.
She told the whole story to Mother Su, who had been secretly keeping an eye on Su Ziyan ever since their reunion. With Mother Su’s help, she dealt with the bullies’ parents. Then, right in front of the unreasonable homeroom teacher, she said to Su Ziyan:
“You didn’t cause me any trouble. On the contrary, both I and your mother are proud that you did the right thing. We’re very happy we raised you to be such a kind and upright person.”
The homeroom teacher had flown into a rage at first for losing face, but when he saw the principal bowing and scraping because of Mother Su, he quickly changed his attitude and declared that Su Ziyan was not only innocent but also a good student who had acted bravely for justice.
Later, when Su Ziyan entered university, Xu Duyan knew he wasn’t the type to chase vanity. He couldn’t even recognize most of the famous brand names that everyone else knew. A few cheap clothes bought online were enough to satisfy him.
Yet she still filled his suitcase with many very expensive clothes and pants. Even though she knew he wasn’t someone who liked to show off, she insisted on doing it anyway.
She didn’t want her boy to suffer even the tiniest bit of grievance. She wanted him to walk down the street and receive only envious looks from others—just like when she had given him that bouquet of flowers to hold as he walked out of the airport.
But even she herself had never imagined that, despite protecting him so carefully his entire life so that he had never really suffered any grievance…
In just this past month alone, the grievances Su Ziyan had endured while forcing himself to smile were far more than all the grievances he had suffered in the first half of his life combined.