As they neared their stop.

The quiet carriage started to get noisy again.

Xu Ye and Chen Qingqing were both woken by it soon enough. Xu Ye rubbed his eyes, reached into her bag and dug out a packet of wet wipes, cleaned his face with one, then opened another packet and passed it across.

On the display above the aisle, the words Next stop Jiangzhou had already come up.

Xu Ye lifted his wrist to check the time, then smiled. "Auntie, you'll be staying at Qingqing's place this trip, I take it?"

"Mm. Your Auntie Meilin and I haven't seen each other in such a long time — we'll certainly have to catch up properly this time. When we'd just graduated and were starting our internships we couldn't afford anywhere big, and the two of us shared one bed for the best part of a year. Every time we met after that we'd still sleep in the same bed, and we'd often talk until the small hours…"

Yang Lin seemed to be remembering her younger days as she spoke, and her face was full of smiles.

Xu Ye picked it up. "You've both got a lin in your names as well. That's fate."

"Isn't it. When we were at university the teachers used to say we were like conjoined twins — eating, going to class, sleeping, always together."

"Auntie, then there's something I should give you fair warning about."

"What's that?"

Xu Ye laughed. "Not long ago my uncle — Qingqing's dad, that is — raised the idea of remarrying with her mom. You'll know what the pair of them are like. The reason neither of them has remarried all this time is, to put it plainly, that each is waiting for the other to give in first. My uncle is purely a man who would rather suffer than lose face, and it's not often he'd bring a thing like this up. Auntie Yang Lin, since you'll be staying at the house over National Day anyway — how about putting in a good word for him?"

Yang Lin heard…