Chapter 85

Chapter 85 - 85 084 The Reason Changling Went Deaf Deceiving Him to Chapter 85: 084: The Reason Changling Went Deaf, Deceiving Him to Take Medicine (First Update) Chapter 85: 084: The Reason Changling Went Deaf, Deceiving Him to Take Medicine (First Update) Xie Shang looked at her for a few seconds, lifted her chin, and turned her face toward him, “I bit it and broke the skin.” He gently touched the wound on her lips with the pad of his finger, “Does it hurt?”

“A little.”

He stroked the area softly, “I’m sorry.”

Jiahui took his hand away and bit into a slice of watermelon, her cheeks puffing out as she said, “I forgive you.”

Xie Shang smiled.

She was quite magnanimous.

His phone rang, Xie Shang glanced at the caller ID and answered.

“Fourth brother.”

“Hmm.”

Gu Yihuan hesitated, “That... didn’t cause any big trouble, did it?”

“What trouble?”

By the sound of it, his mood seemed quite normal. Gu Yihuan asked directly, “Are you okay?”

Xie Shang said, “I’m fine.”

Gu Yihuan wasn’t reassured.

Last time during a thunderstorm, Xie Shang went racing at Half Moon Mountain, in such heavy rain, it was simply reckless.

Xie Shang did get injured that time, but what Gu Yihuan didn’t know was that the injury had been bandaged up by Wen Changling, who was helping out in the emergency.

The photos of the injuries from that time were still being circulated in the nurses’ group chat at Dihong Hospital.

But that’s beside the point.

Gu Yihuan got to the point, “I’m outside your pawnshop, open the door for me.” He wouldn’t feel at ease without seeing him.

“I’m not home.”

“Where are you then?”

Xie Shang said, “At my girlfriend’s place.”

Gu Yihuan fell silent for perhaps half a minute, “Then your girlfriend is okay, right?” She didn’t cause any fatal incidents, did she?

Xie Shang hung up the call.

Wen Changling was holding the watermelon, looking up at the sky.

“What are you looking at?”

Wen Changling, with her head tilted back, peered intently, “Looking at the stars.”

The night sky was a vast expanse of darkness after the downpour.

“There are no stars.” Xie Shang wondered if Miss Wen, when looking up at the stars, would remember him as she said she would before.

“There are.” She was serious, “They’re just hidden behind the clouds.”

There was also one beside her.

Xie Shang gazed at her absentmindedly for a long while, then uncontrollably reached out his hand. As she turned her head, his finger just brushed against her hearing aid. He tried not to make a sound as he gently touched the contours of her outer ear.

Wen Changling volunteered, “I wasn’t born with hearing loss.”

Her right ear was completely deaf, but with the help of a hearing aid, her left ear could hear sounds normally.

“It was caused by a high fever.”

She didn’t go into further details.

*****

At Dihong Hospital, the ENT department.

Yan Cong had booked an appointment with a specialist and asked him, “Can ears be donated?”

The specialist was taken aback, “Ears?”

“My friend has a hearing problem, I want to give her my hearing.” Yan Cong did not understand these medical things, “Corneas can be donated, right? What about eardrums, can eardrums be donated?”

The specialist gave professional advice, “You can have your friend come to the hospital for an examination, see what the specific cause of the hearing impairment is, and then consider whether reconstruction or repair is possible.”

Yan Cong thought it was too complicated, he had a simple idea, “Can’t I just give her whatever she needs?”

The specialist shook his head, “There’s been no precedent for heterologous transplantation of eardrums or cochleae in China.”

“What about abroad?”

“To my knowledge, no.”

Yan Cong was very disappointed, what a letdown medical science was if it couldn’t figure out this much.

He stood up and left.

Yan Boyong was frantically searching for Yan Cong, and the stress had added a few more white hairs to his head. Seeing him come out of the elevator, Grandpa Yan immediately approached, “Where did you go?”

He sounded drained, “Nowhere.”

Yan Boyong, with his hands behind his back, hesitated before speaking, “Your father called me, said your mother is here and wants to see you.”

“I won’t see her.”

Yan Cong’s refusal was definitive.

Yan Boyong wanted to persuade him, “Xiao Cong.”

“I don’t want to see her, and I have nothing to say to her.”

*****

It was past nine in the evening when Wen Changling was on a night shift and received a call from Yan Boyong.

“Changling, I’m sorry to bother you so late,” Yan Boyong asked her with a pleading tone, “could you come to my house?”

Wen Changling stopped what she was doing, “Is something wrong with Yan Cong?”

“His mother came by this afternoon, and he has been refusing to take his medication since then, suffering the whole time and also refusing to go to the hospital.”

Wen Changling immediately said, “I’ll come right now.”

“There’s no rush, first let your colleague know, I’ll send someone to pick you up.”

“Okay.”

After hanging up the phone, Wen Changling called Jiahui and asked her to take over her shift.

Jiahui agreed readily; living close by, she arrived at the hospital in just over ten minutes.

“Is there some kind of emergency?”

Wen Changling had already changed her clothes: “I need to check on Yan Cong.”

Jiahui was aware of Yan Cong’s situation, but—

“Your concern for Yan Cong,” Jiahui didn’t know how to ask. From the phone call just then, she had clearly sensed Wen Changling’s anxiety. Wen Changling was usually a person of calm emotions and rarely so flustered.

“Yan Cong, he reminds me of my brother,” said Wen Changling, “they look very similar.”

She and Ah Na weren’t real twins, and they didn’t look alike; Ah Na was even better-looking than her.

“Your brother, he...”

Wen Changling softly said, “He’s no longer with us.”

Ah Na had passed away at barely eighteen, even younger than Yan Cong now.

The driver took Wen Changling to the Yan family’s residence in Dihong.

Yan Boyong was waiting in the courtyard and hurried over with his walking stick when he saw Wen Changling enter.

“Grandpa Yan.”

Yan Boyong’s eyes were red, and even the robust frame of an elderly person buckled under stress, his back was bent: “I have to trouble you again, help me coax him.”

This wasn’t Wen Changling’s first visit to Yan Cong’s home; she was very familiar with the place.

On the living room sofa sat a lady, dressed elegantly, with her hair and makeup immaculate, sharing some resemblance with Yan Cong. She must be Yan Cong’s mother.

Wen Changling nodded to her, then went upstairs. She heard Yan Boyong talking to the lady.

“You should go back.”

“But Xiao Cong, he—”

“Go back.”

Go back, Yan Cong doesn’t need her, not when he was a child, and even less so now that he’s grown.

Wen Changling knocked on the door.

A single word came from inside the room: “Leave.”

Wen Changling pushed the door open and walked in. The room was dark, with the bed curtains drawn, and the lights off. She turned on the light, and on the left wall of the room were trophies lining the wall, the honors collected by a once high-spirited young man.

Yan Cong was buried under the covers.

Wen Changling approached the bed: “Yan Cong.”

The body under the covers moved slightly, slowly revealing a face that was gaunt and pale. His head was covered in sweat; he was enduring the pain, not crying out before Wen Changling’s arrival.

He said petulantly, “Every time it’s you they call, isn’t he tired of it?”

On the bedside table were a water cup and medication; Wen Changling touched the edge of the cup, it was still warm. She picked up the cup and sat on the edge of the bed: “Take your medicine first.”

Yan Cong sat up, turning his head away in a very capricious manner.

“I don’t want to take it.”

“It will hurt a lot without the medication.”

Yan Cong hung his head, his self-loathing peaking at that moment: “Good, it should hurt.”

“Yan Cong.”

Wen Changling called him.

Finally, he turned his head, “Changling,” he had been holding back for a long time, but seeing Wen Changling, his eyes reddened, “She brought her second son too, and I saw her pampering that kid, calling him Xiao Bao.”

When Yan Cong was born, his parents were in the midst of a divorce.

His mother had postpartum depression then and blamed all the problems in her crumbling marriage on the newly born Yan Cong.

It wasn’t until Yan Cong turned two that Yan Boyong realized something was wrong with his grandson, he wouldn’t speak, and he always had bruises. That’s when Yan Boyong took Yan Cong away.

Sometimes Yan Cong suspected that it really might have been his fault, as after he was taken away, his parents did get back together.

Two years earlier, he received a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, and the first thing his parents did upon learning about it was to go to the hospital for a check-up. A year later, his brother, who was eighteen years his junior, was born.

Isn’t that laughable?

Yan Cong swallowed the pills: “Changling,” his eyes reddened, and he was very upset, “the medicine is so bitter.”