Just as they sat in silence, the door to the hospital room opened.
It was the woman Lin Zhou had misunderstood, Shen Che's neighbor's sister, Zhang Lan. She was taken aback by the scene in the room, then seemed to understand.
She placed the thermal flask she was carrying on the table, sighed, and said to Lin Zhou, "Miss, can we talk alone?"
Lin Zhou glanced at Shen Che and nodded.
They walked to the window at the end of the hospital corridor.
"My name is Zhang Lan. I was Xiao Che's neighbor, and I'm a social worker," Zhang Lan introduced herself. "I know a little about his situation."
Zhang Lan told Lin Zhou that Shen Che's parents had died in an accident when he was in college, and he had been on his own ever since. When he was diagnosed three years ago, he seemed to have grown up overnight. He refused help from all his relatives and shouldered everything himself.
"When he first started treatment, his condition was very bad. Because he had no money, he could only use the most basic drugs, which had terrible side effects. He often couldn't eat, and he would be in so much pain at night he couldn't sleep. There were a few times I thought he wasn't going to make it," Zhang Lan's eyes reddened.
"But he pulled through. What kept him going was you."
Zhang Lan said that in Shen Che's room, there was only one photo of you. Every time he came back from the hospital, he would stare at that photo for a long time. He told her that as long as he thought of you, he felt he could endure any hardship.
"He chose to live above you not to spy on you or to laugh at you. He just... missed you too much. He wanted to be closer to you. Even just hearing your footsteps was a comfort to him."
"He always said you were his light. He was afraid his illness would extinguish your light. So he would rather stay in the darkness himself than let you know the truth."
Listening to Zhang Lan's account, Lin Zhou's tears fell silently again. She finally pieced together the lonely and painful life Shen Che had lived for the past three years, a life she had known nothing about.
He wasn't a liar, nor a coward.
He was just a fool, loving someone in the most clumsy, most extreme way.