Soon, the front door opened.
The young man's eyes betrayed his impatience, and he radiated a suppressed, icy chill.
Cecilia sensed it, and her heart clenched. Mustering her courage, she asked, "What's wrong? You seem really angry." She glanced around. The courtyard was silent. 'Is no one home?'
After taking a few steps forward, she caught a glimpse of a trashed side room out of the corner of her eye.
It was Ian Quincy's room.
He used to live in the main house, but his older brother—not counting the baby currently being born at the hospital—already had three children.
Two sons and a daughter.
The eldest, a girl, was seven, while the two boys were five and three.
The children, sleeping in separate beds, had taken over Ian Quincy's original room.
'Did he get so angry about that he trashed the room?'
'He has such a terrible temper.'
She deliberately covered her mouth and gasped, "Oh my, did you get robbed?"
Ian opened and closed his mouth. "Yeah."
Cecilia Adler stepped inside. The bed, table, chests, and clothes were all overturned and in disarray.
She reached out to set the table and a chair upright.
As she tried to right the bed, she said, "Ian, I can't move this. Can you give me a hand?"
Ian Quincy remained silent, but thankfully, he came over to help.
Working together, they righted the bed. Cecilia closed the door, but the room was still cold.
'The radiator must have frozen and broken.'
'Doesn't he feel the cold?'
She reached out to take his hand. The cold was so intense it pierced her to the bone, making her shiver. She endured the chill and held on, trying to warm him up. "Your hand is freezing. Aren't you cold? Why can't you even take care of yourself? Have you eaten?"
The sudden touch, the sudden concern.
It was like a ray of warm light, slowly melting the ice around him. In that moment, the knot in his heart unraveled, and a faint smile touched his lips. "No."
"Why don't you see if you can fix the heater? I'll go make you something to eat."
"Okay."
Only then did Cecilia Adler relax and head into the kitchen.
There was only half a bowl of rice and two eggs left.
The stove had gone out, too.
'Are Ian's parents staying at their work unit?'
'Did they forget about Ian?'
'And here I thought children with parents were supposed to be fortunate.'
'Turns out an unloved child is no different from an orphan.'
She used fire tongs to carry a fresh coal briquette to a neighbor's house to get some live embers.
The neighbor looked like she wanted to say something but held back.
Cecilia said directly, "Ma'am, if you have something to say, please just say it. I can handle it."
The neighbor waved her hand, but still said, "This is just what I've heard, mind you, but they say Ian has some... mental problems. He likes to get into fights. You'd best be careful."
"Mental problems? He seems perfectly fine to me. Does he just attack people for no reason?"
"Well... sigh... pretty much. He's jealous and holds grudges, and he has a twisted personality. Back in school, if any classmate scored higher than him on a test, he'd beat them up. He gets violent over the smallest things, like a complete psycho. His family has some nerve. They know he's emotionally unstable, yet they sent him so far away for manual labor and even arranged a marriage for him."
'And to such a pretty, hardworking young woman, too. Her own son was a fine, handsome man, but the girl he found wasn't half as beautiful as this one.'
"Maybe there's some misunderstanding. Ma'am, thank you for the embers." Cecilia left, her mind heavy with what she'd heard.
Back at the Quillan house, she glanced into the side room as she passed by.
The man her neighbor had called jealous, vindictive, and emotionally unstable was now carefully inspecting the radiator.
'With his head bowed in concentration, he didn't look like someone with a twisted personality at all.'
'But the vicious aura he sometimes exuded did frighten her a bit.'
'I'll just have to keep an eye on him for now.'
'If it really doesn't work out, I can always just call off the engagement and leave.'
'After all, no one asked for my opinion when the engagement was arranged.'
She returned to the kitchen, immediately put the embers in the stove, then washed the rice and set it to steam.
Ian Quincy came in. "Cecilia, the heater's fixed."
A smile spread across Cecilia Adler's face, and she gave him a thumbs-up. "You're amazing." She took a carefully wrapped pastry from her pocket and held it to his lips. "A reward for fixing the heater. Open wide~"