Ice Cave
The days are like a thick rag soaked in ice water, weighing heavily and wetly on everyone's chest, and every breath is accompanied by a biting chill and a difficult pull.
The company's collapse wasn't a bang, but a series of small, humiliating, and irresistible disintegrations. Like a death sentence, the court seals covered the once-gleaming glass facade of Evergreen Group's headquarters. The first sign was the freezing of bank accounts.
It was an ordinary morning. Lin Xiaoning habitually picked up her phone and wanted to use online payment to order a new batch of complementary foods for Lele. However, a cold prompt popped up on the screen: "Transaction failed, account status abnormal." She was stunned for a moment and changed a card, but the result was the same. She tried several major accounts in her name one after another, but without exception, all of them became stagnant and unable to move. Her heart seemed to be suddenly gripped by an invisible hand, and cold sweat instantly soaked her back. She dialed the bank customer service with trembling hands, and a formulaic, emotionless voice came from the other end: "Ms. Lin, your account has been frozen in accordance with the law due to involvement in relevant legal procedures..."
The phone slipped from her hand, hitting the floor with a dull thud. At that moment, Lin Xiaoning distinctly heard the sound of something shattering—not the phone, but the last barrier to respectability she had relied on. The severing of their financial lifeline meant they were instantly relegated to a state of pennilessness. His father's pension was the family's bread and butter, his mother's. This drastic, stark decline in material wealth declared their fallen reality more cruelly than any words could.
Then came the confiscation notice for the lakefront villa. It arrived as expected, yet it still struck like a hammer on everyone's already fragile nerves. Lin Xiaoning's face paled as he signed the document, his fingers tightly gripping the paper as if to crush it. The move felt more like a hasty evacuation than a housewarming. There were no farewells, no lingering feelings, only an urgency to escape this magnificent ruin.
Lin Xiaoning's new "home" was an apartment he'd purchased early in his career with his bonus from the Catalyst Incident and financial help from his father. It was located in an ordinary residential complex. The apartment was only about 80 square meters, simply decorated, and cramped. The huge shift from a luxurious villa overlooking the lake to the small house that had once marked the beginning of his life brought with it a sense of fateful, suffocating repetition. The air was filled with the odor of worn furniture and a faint musty smell. Outside the window, the mottled walls and densely packed windows of the building opposite shrank into narrow, fragmented views.
What Lin Xiaoning found most difficult to bear wasn't the actual gazes from the outside world, but the fears and fantasies that grew and magnified within her. She became extremely sensitive and paranoid. Every time she went downstairs to take out the trash or pick up a package, she felt like the neighbors she happened to pass by in the hallway were sizing her up, their gazes filled with scrutiny, inquiry, and even contempt. She could almost hear their whispers as they passed by: "Look, that's her, the female CEO of the bankrupt company..." "I heard she's in big trouble, her accounts are frozen..." "She used to have so much glory, now she's hiding in this little place..." These voices swirled in her mind like hallucinations. Even though she knew it was likely just her overly sensitive imagination, her depression magnifying all negative perceptions, she couldn't control the feeling of being pinned to the pillar of shame by countless eyes. She began to fear going out, any moment of contact with the outside world, as if she were a tainted person, someone to be ashamed of, whose very breath would pollute the ordinary yet "clean" air.
The black Mercedes she'd been using for transportation had long been impounded to pay off her debts. She could only rely on public transportation and Wang Shumin's newly purchased used car. Every time she squeezed into the smoky subway car, jostled by the people around her, Lin Xiaoning felt like a fish stripped of its scales, exposed to the rough sand. Every inch of her skin felt prickly and uncomfortable, as if everyone around her could see through her desolation and misery.
Lin Xiaoning was most pained by the changes in Wang Shumin. He came home later and later, and the smell of alcohol and cigarettes grew stronger. The man who used to maintain his appearance and a clear gaze even when tired was now often unshaven, his eyes bloodshot, and silent as a stone eroded by time. He no longer took the initiative to hold Lele, and even deliberately avoided the child's closeness. Finally, he told Lin Xiaoning that he had voluntarily applied for a transfer from the branch office to work at a grassroots detention center in the suburbs with difficult conditions, citing "it's quiet there, and there's a subsidy for working the night shift."
Lin Xiaoning knew this "peace" was false; escape was the real deal. Escape from this suffocating home, from his tainted wife, from the unspeakable humiliation and disappointment within, and perhaps even from the endless "auditory hallucinations" of his colleagues' gossip in his head. The high walls and iron bars of the detention center perhaps gave him a distorted sense of security, insulating him from the world outside that left him powerless and caused his wife immense suffering. For him, home had gone from a temporary haven to a cage filled with invisible pressure, one he needed to escape.
The thought of divorce hung clear and distant, like a cold star in the darkness, on the trajectory of the future, visible at a glance. Lin Xiaoning knew it was an almost inevitable outcome. How could this marriage, built on gravel, withstand such a violent storm? More than once, she had seen Wang Shumin staring blankly at the inky night sky outside the window, his back stiff and lonely. An unbridgeable chasm had already separated them, filled with suspicion, shame, and unspeakable pain.
However, whenever this thought came to mind, Lele's tender and innocent little face would come into her mind. The child was just over one year old, just learning to walk unsteadily, babbling "Mom". His clear eyes were not yet tainted by the complexity and filth of the world. What does divorce mean to this child who is just beginning to understand the world? A broken family, lack of fatherly or motherly love? Lin Xiaoning didn't dare to think about it. The instinct of being a mother, like a thin but extremely tough silk thread, bound her, making it impossible for her to say the word "divorce" easily. She was trapped, in a dilemma. Divorce, she would be sorry for the child; if she didn't divorce, wouldn't it be a burden and torture to Wang Shumin? Her life seemed to have entered a dead end with no exit.
The final straw that broke the camel's back was the avalanche of mental stress compounded by the already weakened breastfeeding body. Lin Xiaoning's insomnia worsened, and she went from one sleeping pill to two, sometimes with no effect at all. She could only lie awake until dawn, listening to the occasional car whiz by outside the window, feeling time slicing at her nerves like a blunt knife. Her hair was falling out so horribly that the sink drain was often clogged with tangled black hair, a shocking sight. The woman in the mirror, her face sallow, her eyes sunken, her gaze as hollow as two dry wells, was a shadow of her former self.
Unsurprisingly, the hospital's psychological assessment gave her a diagnosis of "major depression with anxiety symptoms." The doctor prescribed more medication, urged her to relax, and urged her family to show more concern. But in such a desperate situation, "relaxation" and "concern" seemed so pale and powerless. She felt her energy completely drained, even breathing was a struggle. Ending her life, a thought that once seemed distant and terrifying, now frequently loomed in her mind like a phantom in the darkness. Perhaps, that was the ultimate relief? No longer having to face all this unbearableness, no longer having to endure this endless inner torment, no longer being a burden to anyone. This thought, with its eerie allure, whispered quietly to her at her most vulnerable moment.
Her temper became like a volcano that could erupt at any time, and she couldn't control herself. The smallest of things—Lele knocked over the milk bottle, her mother added too much salt when cooking, her father's unintentional sigh—could become the fuse that ignited her emotions. Without any warning, she would break down and cry, her voice hoarse and desperate, frightening Lele to burst into tears as well. She would yell at her cautious parents, and distort the anger and self-blame in her heart that had nowhere to vent, pouring it out on the people closest to her. She would accuse Wang Shumin of indifference and evasion, and use the harshest words to hurt him, as if this would ease her pain a little. After each outburst, there would be deeper self-blame and emptiness, and the cycle would repeat, turning this small home into an extremely cold ice cellar where everyone was in danger. His parents' eyes were filled with pain and helplessness, and Wang Shumin became even more silent, and he came home less often.
Family, the last safe haven, is also riddled with holes and filled with coldness.
Finally, on a rare night when Wang Shumin wasn't on duty, after Lele had gone to bed, the house was filled with an eerie silence. Lin Xiaoning took a deep breath, as if exhausting all her strength, and spoke to Wang Shumin, who lay reclining beside her bed. Her voice was hoarse and calm, yet it carried a desperate determination.
"Shumin, let's talk."
Wang Shumin's body stiffened slightly, without turning his head, he just said "hmm".
Lin Xiaoning began by recounting her journey, from her naiveté upon joining Changqing Chemical to her gradual entanglement in the maelstrom of power and profit, to the suspected assault at the annual meeting that changed everything, to how she had used that "accident" as leverage to rise to the top, to how, under Xu Wu's will, she had repeatedly exploited her gender advantage to engage in sleazy "PR," to her inner struggles, numbness, and ultimate downfall... She concealed nothing, even deliberately magnifying the most unsavory details, including the half-hearted deals and the blurred boundaries between her and Han Dong and the others. Like a cold surgeon, she personally opened up her festering and rotting wounds layer by layer, exposing them to him in all their blood.
Finally, she spoke of Zhao Xianqi. The man she once considered a spiritual mentor. She described their bond, a connection that transcended the relationship between teacher and student, a blend of dependence, understanding, and a twisted yet genuine connection forged during a period of profound confusion and emptiness. She enunciated the words "sexual love" clearly, even as they burned her lips like a red-hot iron. She described the few times they had shared physical intimacy, a kind of almost tragic intimacy that sought mutual comfort amidst despair.
Her purpose in saying all this was naked and cruel: "Look, this is who I am. From the inside out, I'm completely filthy. I don't deserve this from you. You just arrived at the new unit and have a future ahead of you. You shouldn't be dragged down by me. Let's get a divorce. Lele... I'll take care of him, or... you find a way. Let yourself go."
After she finished speaking, the air in the room seemed to freeze. She could hear the frantic, chaotic beating of her own heart in her chest, and the faint noises of the city outside the window, which made the silence inside even more dead. She didn't dare look at Wang Shumin's face, but stared at the tiny crack in the floor, as if it was her only support.
Time ticked by, each second feeling as long as a century. Wang Shumin remained silent, motionless, and silent. Just when Lin Xiaoning expected him to explode in anger, or perhaps to walk away in apathy, he let out a long, heavy sigh. That sigh contained so much—shock, pain, disbelief, and perhaps even a hint of...relief?
He finally turned his head and looked at Lin Xiaoning. His eyes were so complicated that it broke Lin Xiaoning's heart. There was no love or anger in them, but a deep fatigue that seemed to see through the root of all tragedies and... a strange tolerance.
"Xiao Ning," his voice was unusually hoarse, yet strangely calm, "You're saying this to force me to leave, right?"
Lin Xiaoning bit her lip and nodded, tears flowing uncontrollably, but she stubbornly didn't cry out loud.
Wang Shumin shifted his body, moving closer to her, but didn't touch her. "I've already... guessed something. From the rumors, from other people's gossip, from the look in your eyes when you were looking at your phone... I just didn't want to think too deeply about it." He paused, as if struggling to form his words. "You said you were dirty and unworthy of me. But have you ever considered that I came down from the plateau with nothing but this military uniform. It was you, and the world you once represented, who accepted me. I enjoyed the convenience and... the halo you brought me. Now that it's collapsed, should I just turn around and leave? What's the difference between me and those who only care about your appearance and status?"
His words stunned Lin Xiaoning.
"As for Teacher Zhao..." Wang Shumin's voice lowered a little, "That happened before me. I... am not qualified to judge. When people are desperate, they will grab anything they can. I understand." His words, with a profound understanding beyond his age and experience, were like a faint light that suddenly shone into Lin Xiaoning's dark heart.
"Divorce won't solve the fundamental problem," he finally said, his tone firmer. "That's not a way out, it's an escape. Just like my application to go to the detention center was also an escape. We were both wrong. If you have the ability to solve your problems, and if we are truly unhappy, I might agree, but not now."
He raised his head, his gaze seeming to penetrate the mottled ceiling, gazing into the unknown distance: "Everything will pass. No matter how difficult it is, it will pass."
"But...how do I get through?" Lin Xiaoning finally asked the question that had been lingering in her mind countless times, her voice filled with despair and helplessness. "I can't hold on any longer, Shumin. I really...can't see any light. Every day is torture. I...I want to die..."
Hearing the word "death," Wang Shumin's body trembled violently. For the first time, he reached out and tightly grasped Lin Xiaoning's cold, trembling hand. His palm was rough, yet it held a firm strength.
"For Lele." He stared into her eyes and spoke slowly, "Also for... for what we once had... even if there was only a little bit of truth... Live on. Even if it's out of hatred, out of unwillingness, you have to live on. Time... time will take away some things, but it will also leave some behind."
That night, they exchanged no more words. Wang Shumin hadn't agreed to a divorce, but his words of comfort, "This will all pass," seemed so pale and distant to Lin Xiaoning. How could it ever pass? This long night, this bone-chilling cold, this boundless despair, and the lingering, terrifying image of others' gazes—how could he ever see an end?
She lay beside Lele, listening to the child's even breathing, tears silently soaking the pillow. Wang Shumin's understanding and perseverance were like an unexpected lifeline, but could a drowning person simply grasp at a straw and float to the surface? She didn't know. She felt only fatigue overwhelm her like a tide, and the tempting whisper of "the end" briefly receded before resounding faintly in the dead silence. Outside the cold kiln, the night deepened, and the cold wind howled, seemingly endlessly.
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