The rain kept up the whole afternoon.

Xu Ye had meant to go see Chen Qingqing. Instead all he could do was call her partway through the afternoon and tell her he'd come tomorrow.

So Chen Qingqing spent the afternoon in her dorm doing nothing, watching the rain come down outside the window, hating rainy days more with every hour.

Xu Ye, Zhang Xinzhou and Li Tongwen sat at the company all afternoon. It wasn't until they'd eaten their takeout and gotten back to the dorm that evening that they found Yang Fei still in bed, dead asleep.

That wasn't like him.

Yang Fei almost never slept during the day.

Even in summer, when the rest of them were napping through lunch break, he'd rather sit down below with his headphones on, messing around on his computer.

Xu Ye and Zhang Xinzhou traded a look. Zhang Xinzhou walked over to Yang Fei's bunk and asked casually, "Yang Fei, what's going on? It's this late and you're still lying down."

"Nothing else to do anyway." Yang Fei rolled over and acted like nothing had happened.

Zhang Xinzhou glanced back at Xu Ye, and Xu Ye asked, "How come you're not off seeing that Lulu of yours?"

"You didn't notice it's pouring out there?"

Xu Ye smiled and let it go.

The rain meant it got dark early. Xu Ye took a shower and was in bed a little after seven.

The dorm was on the second floor and there was grass right below the window, so come summer the room filled up with mosquitoes. Not long after the fall semester started, Xu Ye had bought a set of bed curtains online — partly to keep the bugs out, partly for a little privacy.

He stood his pillow up against the head of the bed and sat back against it.

He woke his phone up, opened WeChat, and started a video call to Chen Qingqing.

It rang for a good while.

Then the call connected.

But the face on the screen wasn't Chen Qingqing's — it was Shen Xinyi, in a sheet…