The woman wore her hair in a low ponytail. Her features were delicate, and she carried herself with a gentle, refined grace.
She wore a beige trench coat that fell below her knees, paired with black straight-leg trousers and black pointed-toe shoes.
She was wheeling a brand-new Phoenix bicycle, a canvas bag hanging from the handlebars and stuffed to the brim.
Zhou Xiaowei glanced at her instinctively. Her brows and eyes seemed strangely familiar, but no matter how hard he racked his brains, he couldn’t remember where he had seen her before.
“Let’s go.” Chuntao was lost in thought and didn’t even glance at the woman beside them.
Zhou Xiaowei looked away and was just about to pedal off when the woman turned toward him.
“Comrade, could you tell me which way to Shen Dani’s house?”
Shen Dani?
Zhou Xiaowei froze. Wasn’t Chuntao’s grandmother’s surname Shen? He had no idea what her given name was, though.
When Chuntao heard the woman say “Shen Dani,” her heart clenched, and she hurriedly looked up.
The woman standing before her was stylishly dressed and carried herself with an elegant, gentle air. At a glance, it was obvious she wasn’t from a poor, remote village like theirs.
Her grandmother’s full name really was Shen Dani.
But her grandmother was already gone. At the thought of that, tears began to well up in her eyes again.
“Shen Dani is my grandma…” Chuntao’s voice was soft and trembling. Her lips quivered, and she could say no more.
The woman looked at her. Her expression stiffened for half a second, and her breath caught sharply, as though something had lodged in her throat.
She stared at Chuntao’s face for a long while. Then, seeming to realize that she had lost control of herself, she quickly looked away.
When she looked back, her expression had returned to normal, though she deliberately added a hint of surprise.
“Shen Dani is your grandmother? Is she… doing well?”
“She’s gone!” Chuntao raised a hand and wiped away the tears at the corner of her eye.
“Gone? When did it happen?”
“On New Year’s Eve!”
The two exchanged question and answer in a stiff, mechanical manner.
Zhou Xiaowei’s gaze shifted repeatedly between their faces, his heart filled with suspicion and shock.
A trace of sorrow passed over the woman’s face. Then she asked, “What’s your name? I can’t seem to remember.”
“I’m Chuntao.”
A sharp pain struck Chuntao in the chest. She suddenly remembered the two children at home. She had been away for so long and needed to hurry back.
There wasn’t enough breast milk for both children. Jianshe had started having rice cereal not long after he was born and was already used to it.
But Nuannuan had been weak since birth and had always nursed. She had never had rice cereal before. By now, she was surely crying from hunger.
Chuntao herself had been uncomfortable for a while, and she could feel that even the little undershirt beneath her clothes was damp.
She suddenly turned and pointed at the four earthen houses not far away.
“That’s my grandma’s house. My brother and sister-in-law are working in the fields by East Gully. I have something to take care of, so I’ll be going.”
Before the woman could say anything else, Chuntao climbed onto the back seat of the bicycle.
“Xiaowei, hurry up. Nuannuan must be hungry!”
Zhou Xiaowei glanced at the woman once more, then suddenly began pedaling. The bicycle rattled away along the uneven dirt road.
“Sister-in-law Chuntao, that woman… looks a lot like you!” Once they reached a somewhat smoother stretch of road, Zhou Xiaowei finally couldn’t hold back his observation.
But the moment the words left his mouth, he realized he had used the wrong form of address again.
Luckily, his second uncle wasn’t nearby. If he had heard him, Zhou Xiaowei would surely have received another scolding.
Chuntao’s mind was filled with thoughts of the children at home—and of Zhou Zhijun, who was working on the reservoir. She wondered whether he was tired and whether the wound from his surgery had healed.
Her heart was wound tight with worry, and she didn’t hear Zhou Xiaowei at all.
When she failed to respond, Zhou Xiaowei cautiously corrected himself.
“Second Aunt!”
“Oh!” Chuntao finally came back to herself.
“That woman just now looks a lot like you. Is she related to your family?”
“Does she?” Chuntao rarely looked in a mirror and had never paid much attention to her own appearance. At the time, she had only felt that the woman looked somewhat familiar.
Now that Zhou Xiaowei mentioned it, the woman’s fair, beautiful face rose in her mind.
Chuntao had no idea who she was.
In all her memories from childhood onward, her grandmother had never mentioned her, and Chuntao had never seen her before.
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen her.”
“She must be a close relative. Could she be your aunt? Otherwise, how could she look so much like you?”
Chuntao did remember her grandmother saying that she had an older sister, but the woman had died very young.
She had no mind to dwell on it. All she wanted was to get home as quickly as possible and feed Nuannuan.
Zhou Xiaowei carried Chuntao farther and farther away. The woman stood watching the figure on the bicycle’s back seat, staring blankly into the distance, her eyes unfocused.
She remembered that Grandma Shen’s house had once stood at the front of the village. She had ridden her bicycle straight there, but the three ramshackle earthen houses had long since collapsed into ruins. She had had no choice but to get off and ask for directions.
Never in her wildest dreams had she expected the young woman she had just met to be Grandma Shen’s granddaughter.
There were still so many things she wanted to ask, but the girl had already left.
Who was the young man with her? Was he her husband?
After a long while, the woman came back to herself. She took the bag from her bicycle’s handlebars and walked toward the nearby home of the Li family.
“Li Xiaolian! You have a visitor!” A half-grown boy ran ahead, shouting at the top of his lungs.
Li Xiaolian was standing beneath the Chinese toon tree in the courtyard, gnawing on half a piece of dry steamed bread.
Beside her was a small wooden seat, with her younger brother sitting inside. He, too, clutched a lump of bread in his little hands and stuffed it into his mouth with all his might.
When Li Xiaolian saw the stylish woman approaching with a bag, and heard the boy say that she was a guest from her family, she was both surprised and delighted, though a little timid as well.
“Sweetheart, where are your parents?”
Li Xiaolian blinked and answered softly, “They went to work in the fields to the east.”
As soon as she finished speaking, Li Dazhuang and Wang Lanhua returned, each carrying a hoe.
Apparently, one of the children had already run to the eastern fields to inform them.
A commotion had broken out in the fields earlier, and Wang Lanhua was still angry. She hadn’t wanted to come back, but in the end, she had returned, half believing and half doubting what she had heard.
Li Dazhuang was puzzled too. Carrying two hoes, he followed Wang Lanhua home.
From a distance, they saw a stylish woman standing in the courtyard, surrounded by a crowd of children.
“Here, go play.” The woman took a packet of White Rabbit milk candies from the bag and handed them out to the children gathered around her.
When she saw Li Dazhuang and Wang Lanhua return, she froze for a moment. Then a gentle smile spread across her face.
“You’re Dazhuang, aren’t you?” Her eyes settled on Li Dazhuang’s face.
Confronted by such a fashionable and beautiful woman, Li Dazhuang grew awkward.
“Yeah. And you are?”
“Your grandmother was my aunt.”
“Then I should call you Auntie!” Li Dazhuang scratched his head sheepishly.
“Yes. Where is your grandmother?”
The woman already knew the answer, but asked anyway.
At once, Li Dazhuang’s eyes reddened.
“Our grandma… she passed away. She died on New Year’s Eve last year.”
The woman let out a soft sigh, her voice thick with emotion.
“I came too late… Where is your grandmother’s grave? Could you take me to see it?”
Wang Lanhua stood to one side, listening to their conversation. The moment she learned that this stylish woman was Grandma Shen’s niece, her thoughts began racing. The anger she had been carrying only moments earlier vanished without a trace.
“Auntie, it’s already noon. Please come inside and sit down. I’ll make lunch right away! After we eat, Dazhuang can take you there.”
She reached out to take the bag from the woman.
As the woman handed it over, her gaze happened to fall on Wang Lanhua’s hand.
The silver ring on Wang Lanhua’s finger glimmered faintly.
The woman’s eyelashes lowered sharply. A turbulent shock flashed across her eyes, and her heart sank heavily.
How did this ring end up on her finger?
