Chapter 3

I followed Frost to Ethan's hospital room.

I stood at the door like some shameful voyeur, peering through the gap. I could see everything inside clearly.

Frost's face wore the gentle smile I hadn't seen in so long as she bent down to take Ethan's temperature.

Her movements were delicate, like handling fragile porcelain.

After checking his temperature, she turned to pour water, tested its warmth, then counted out two pills from the medicine box and placed them in Ethan's palm.

Ethan lounged lazily on the sofa. He took the pills but didn't swallow them right away.

Instead, he pulled Frost into his arms and kissed her forehead.

Frost smiled and pushed him away—that smile I'd never seen at home.

The corners of her eyes curved, her lips turned up, looking like a girl acting coquettish.

She held the water glass to Ethan's lips and watched as he obediently swallowed the pills before nodding with satisfaction.

I stood outside the hospital room, the cold wind in the corridor blowing through me. My heart felt frozen.

After donating my kidney to my daughter, my health had deteriorated. Fevers of 104 degrees were common.

She had never treated me with such tenderness.

She would never smile at me like that.

Never speak my name with honey in her voice.

She would only call "Zachary" in that flat tone, like addressing a casual neighbor.

She wouldn't take my temperature or feed me medicine—she'd just tell me to take fever reducers, then sleep in a separate room.

The difference between love and indifference was so painfully obvious.

I pocketed my phone and turned to leave.

Back home, I opened my mobile banking app to check if last month's salary had been deposited.

The kidney failure medication cost three thousand dollars a box. I needed to scrape together the money.

The number on the screen made me freeze for a full ten seconds.

Balance: $87.42

I checked the transaction history again.

Besides the money transferred to Ethan for his "company emergency," there were several recent purchases:

Department store shopping $32,000, phone store $9,900, luxury boutique $21,000... all charged to my credit card.

I collapsed onto the sofa and called Frost.

It rang for a long time before she answered.

"What is it?" Frost sounded impatient.

"The credit card charges—was that you?"

"Oh, I bought Ethan a suit and a phone. He has to meet with investors. He can't look shabby."

"But you used my money. It's almost seventy thousand dollars."

"You're a grown man. Why are you so petty?" Frost's tone was like scolding an unreasonable child.

"Ethan's company is going bankrupt. He needs decent clothes for business negotiations."

"Your medicine? Just borrow some money from your parents."

Ethan's voice came through the phone, lazy and casual:

"Come on, Zachary, don't be so stingy. When my company recovers, I'll pay you back tenfold."

I hung up and called Frost's father.

"Dad, my kidney is failing. The medication costs..."

Her father was silent for a long time, then sighed. "I know you're struggling financially, but your mom and I aren't well-off either. We just helped your brother-in-law pay his mortgage a few days ago. We don't have much left."

"We can give you two thousand at most. That's it. You'll have to figure out the rest yourself."

My phone vibrated. It was a transfer notification from Frost's father.

I sat in the empty living room. Sunlight streamed through the window onto me, but I felt no warmth at all.

My phone vibrated again. A collection notice from the bank.

I stared at the words "minimum payment due" on the screen and suddenly felt like a complete joke.

The next day, I went out in my old jacket. Passing a street corner, a homeless man sat on the ground with a paper cup in front of him. I instinctively reached into my pocket and found only two coins.

As I bent down to drop them in, a passerby looked at me with pity and also threw two dollars into the cup.

I crouched on the curb, staring at those two coins, and laughed for a long time.

I laughed until tears choked out of me.