With me around, things are different now.

"Isn't our family just an ordinary family?"

The car I arranged will be downstairs soon, Mom. You should come with us to the hospital for a checkup; otherwise, Zhen'er and I won't leave because we're worried, hehe.”

There's always a finely chopped ginger in the wontons at home. The man, who doesn't usually eat ginger, was sweating a bit today as he ate them, finishing all the soup. Seeing that his mother still refused to go to the hospital, he started to act spoiled to appease his mother-in-law's stubbornness.

After a two-minute standoff, the old lady, who had never yielded to her for decades, finally turned around, changed her clothes, and silently followed them downstairs and into the car to the hospital, at her son-in-law's insistence.

The private hospital was as efficient as when she first accompanied her husband there; the test results were ready before noon. The specialist stared at the screen for a long time before cautiously confirming that she needed to stay in the hospital for a while longer.

Knowing that he couldn't act willfully anymore once he got to the hospital, the retired teacher looked at the data and diagnosis results, hesitated for a moment, and finally agreed.

“Let’s go home and pack up the things we’ve been using for the past few days in the hospital. I’ll come to the hospital to keep Mom company. You can stay home and organize all the important things.”

A professional organizer will be with you this afternoon. Let's take this opportunity to help her move; it's not good for a sixty-year-old to climb stairs every day.

Where to find a suitable new house in such a short time? The thought only flashed through Lin Zhen'er's mind before she suppressed it. It wasn't difficult for the man beside her to provide a building for his mother-in-law in Pingyang, so there was nothing to ask.

My mother's temper has never been good, even when she was young. She is strong-willed, stubborn, and always sensitive and fragile, rejecting other people's kindness, afraid that even a trace of sympathy would hurt her overly strong sense of self-esteem.

But Jin Yanzhi seemed completely unconcerned about all of this. He dropped him off downstairs and then hurriedly returned to the hospital. It was as if the person living there wasn't his mother-in-law, whom he had only met a few times, but his own mother, with whom he had lived every day since childhood.

The woman who stayed inside tidied up her room quickly; she had rarely returned to live there in recent years. Besides clothes she hadn't worn in years and old books from her school days, there was practically nothing else in that small space. The girl, from a poor family, had few dolls and accessories; everything here was a carefully chosen, essential necessity.

The other bedroom, however, was a place he had rarely entered since childhood; his mother's room was forbidden territory. It was filled with arguments, shoving, and the tears that the hardworking old teacher could only shed sitting on the edge of the bed after years of suffering.

There had been so much heartache in this family in the past that behind every closed door lay things she didn't want to touch or face.

Although the room was larger, everything inside was quite old. The wardrobe and bed that her husband had recently added looked out of place against the yellowed and peeling wallpaper. Lin Zhen'er carried the items out of the wardrobe one by one while taking stock of the other miscellaneous items.

The woman stopped what she was doing when she opened the bottom drawer of the wardrobe and saw that it was full of things related to her. She took out all the brand-new photos and posters, which were all the production-related items she had collected since she entered the industry.

There are small-budget movies and music videos where I started out doing odd jobs at film and television companies and could only appear as crew members in the densely packed end credits. There are also stills and posters from the hit TV series after I got married. Many of these photos are daily updates from the crew's social media accounts.

In those everyday videos, the woman who works as a screenwriter often appears on the sidelines of group photos or as a fleeting frame in behind-the-scenes videos. She has no idea how these moments were captured and printed out by that little old lady who seemed to have no interest in the internet.

Below each photo is that familiar font, displaying the broadcast date and film title. The photo in the very center, carefully wrapped in a scarf, is from her nomination at the Turin Film Festival. In the photo, she wears a spirited smile, and the various faces and joys around her are captured on the colorful photograph.

The person who printed this photo carefully wrote a few words in the lower right corner: "A souvenir of my daughter winning an award abroad."

They never talked about these things. The old teacher, who always had a stern face and didn't acknowledge herself, never affirmed herself to her face.

She always had a stern face, her brows furrowed as she helplessly watched her disobedient daughter. She refused to return to Xijiang to work as a primary school teacher, stubbornly staying in Pingyang to make a living. Then, amidst a deluge of news reports, she was suddenly betrayed by her rich second-generation boyfriend and immediately married into the Jin family.

Lin Zhen'er sat in the room for a long time to calm her emotions before packing the things into boxes. She opened the door to welcome the organizers in, and they busied themselves tidying up until evening, finally starting to move the packed cardboard boxes downstairs.

"Oh, Teacher Lin is moving out? Every time I see her I have to say, 'You're so successful, she should have moved to a nicer neighborhood a long time ago.'"

She said she didn't want to cause you any trouble; she even tripped and fell last month.

The speaker was the old man who guarded the neighborhood, and he had been a friend of theirs for decades. She still remembered that when her family was struggling financially during junior high school, this uncle had given them a lot of vegetables and eggs that he had grown himself.

The person who heard the mother fall widened their eyes and turned to look at the uncle who had inadvertently let it slip.

The other person, however, seemed to have opened a floodgate, and before she could ask, they recounted what had happened that day:

"That day, when she came back from grocery shopping, she kept staring at her phone. I thought to myself, at our age, how come your mother is still so addicted to playing on her phone?"

Before I could even get close, she tripped over the flowerbed. Guess what she was doing? She was arguing with those people online who were criticizing her. Young people type so fast, in short paragraphs, while she was typing one character at a time with a Wubi input method. How could she possibly keep up?

Finally, not watching where he was going, he fell down...

The sounds around her continued, but the woman's vision blurred as she lowered her head. For many years, she had believed that their symbiosis was the most hopeless and painful thing in the world, with neither of them able to escape the torment of a scumbag.

She hated her mother for being weak and timid, and her mother for being a nuisance. She thought that the love hidden in the deep-rooted hatred, the love that refused to show itself, had long since vanished without a trace in countless arguments.

In those years, the mother who stayed in Xijiang refused to visit Pingyang no matter how many times she was invited. And the woman who was working hard alone in another place was also rarely willing to come back to stay in that old house and face the broken family she had built up.

Avoidance has been the most common tactic used by the mother and daughter to get along over the years, so the old lady would rather wear her reading glasses and carefully print out each still from the play and sign the date than send her a message to congratulate her in person.

So even when she was being criticized by various news outlets to the point that she didn't dare to open social media, she never went home to cry once.

"Madam, the last truckload of things has been moved. Let's go take a look at the new house together."

Xiao Xie's voice rang out at the right moment. She turned to look at the window she had seen since childhood, which had finally turned off its old white light tonight, becoming a black hole standing in the past, no longer reaching out to try to trap her. She sighed softly.

Jin Yanzhi arranged for a new home located at the border of Xijiang and Pingyang, only a ten-minute walk from her mother's former workplace and their home. It's the safest and most well-equipped neighborhood in the area, and the house is simply and warmly decorated, perfect for moving in immediately.

By the time she finished packing and rushed to the hospital, it was already past midnight. She packed her mother's favorite steamed dumplings and preserved egg congee, and walked towards the ward with mixed feelings. She felt apprehensive as she approached home; her emotions had fluctuated so much that the closer she got to the person she wanted to see, the more afraid she became.

"This is still after she lost weight. You don't know, when I first saw this puppy, I thought Lin Zhen'er was really capable. Such a small breed, she raised it to look like a small truck. When it ran over, the flesh on its neck was trembling."

The husband's voice entered her ears the moment the door opened. Unexpectedly, Lai Cai, who usually ate, slept, and played at home, was brought to the hospital. He was wearing a slightly tight sweater and was seriously accompanying his sick grandmother. When he saw his mother, he only wagged his tail perfunctorily.

“I told her not to keep a dog before, it stank.”

The old lady, leaning against the headboard, saw her daughter come in and pretended to complain about the little ball of fur that was already turned upside down. But she immediately reached for a washed strawberry from the bedside table, held it to the puppy's mouth, and smiled.

"Mom and I have already eaten. Please eat the food you brought while it's hot. These are all Mom's favorites, just like you told me about them."

The man took the lunchbox and walked to the coffee table next to him, opening each item one by one. The mother and daughter, who were feeling a little awkward, relaxed as they listened to his words. They drank their porridge and watched the familiar figure chatting and laughing with their mother.

Lin Zhen'er quickly swallowed the tears that were about to well up in her throat. This was a scene she never thought she could have.

In the following days, she would rush to the hospital after finishing her work during the day, and Jin Yanzhi would stay with her at the hospital night after night. Every day, they would wait until dawn before going home to take a shower. Although the private ward was luxurious, it was still much simpler than home.

With their company, the mother gradually became more talkative. She would ask them what time they would come in the afternoon and whether they wanted to have dinner together. She would also nag them to go home when they got up at night.

She would also secretly save the meat from each meal's soup to share with the little dog that wagged its tail every day when it came to the hospital to see her grandmother.

The days were peaceful and repetitive, but they brought a happiness that the mother and daughter had never experienced before.

"Actually, I can manage on my own. The company has been busy lately, and you can't keep working all night like this."

My mom had surgery before, and I used to bring her lunch after school. Things are so much better now..."

On the way home that day, Lin Zhen'er looked at her husband who kept rubbing his eyes and couldn't help but speak up with heartache.

"But now you have me, things are different from before..."