It was already past 9 p.m. when Jiang Qi walked into the same room he had once spent a night in with Shen Yi, the very room where they had reunited after seven long years, and as he stepped inside, he could feel a strange heaviness settle in his chest. He slowly took off his suit jacket and tossed it on the couch, then loosened his tie with one hand, his movements heavy like his thoughts.
Without turning on the lights, he walked straight to the small bar counter in the corner of the room and grabbed a bottle of alcohol, and after opening the top, he drank directly from the bottle without caring about anything else. This had now become his nightly routine whenever he got off work early, because the only way he could silence the thoughts in his head was by drowning them in alcohol.
