The wind carried the scent of old winter, biting at my skin as I stood before the towering gates of the Li family estate. My shoes, secondhand and cracked, sank slightly into the snow-covered stone path. I was eleven years old, suitcase in hand, wearing a donated coat that didn’t quite fit. Five years in the orphanage had taught me many things—how to stay invisible, how to smile when your heart is hollow, how to dream with lowered expectations.

But today, I was going home. Or so I believed.

The door creaked open. A maid peeked out and frowned.

“Who are you?”

Before I could speak, my mother appeared behind her, wrapped in a silk shawl.

“Oh. It’s you,” she said, as if she had forgotten my name.

I opened my mouth to greet her, but she turned and walked back inside.

The maid stepped aside. “Don’t bring the snow in.”

So I wiped my feet and followed.

The house was larger than I remembered. Taller ceilings, colder floors. The warmth I had imagined melted away like snow in a passing breeze.

My two sisters stood in the hallway, staring. One hid behind the other.

And then he stepped forward.

Li Wenjie.

A boy my age. Neat haircut, fresh clothes, eyes full of practiced kindness. He looked at me like I was a question he had already answered.

“This is my son now,” Father said that evening, motioning to Wenjie at the dinner table.

I sat at the far end. No one spoke to me. The rice was cold.

From the start, it was clear: I had returned, but not as a son.

Wenjie had already filled that role.

He smiled at guests, served tea with grace, and called my mother Mama with such affection that even I believed he meant it. He kissed her cheek. She laughed.

When I tried the same, she turned her face away.

“Don’t be strange.”

Wenjie was clever. He could lie like breathing. When a vase broke, he cried and said I pushed him. When pocket money went missing, he "found it" beneath my pillow. When I came home late from school, he whispered to my father that I had been sneaking around.

I stayed quiet.

In our culture, to argue with a younger brother—even if adopted—is seen as shameful.

So I watched as he became the light of the house. Praised, gifted, loved.

And I became the shadow that flickered in the corner of family photographs.

But I did not hate him. Not at first.

I worked hard in silence. I cleaned the floors before school. Cooked when the maids were away. I took up part-time jobs at night—delivering groceries, washing dishes in the back of old teahouses. I left the money under Father’s desk drawer. He never asked who gave it.

When my youngest sister fell sick, I sold the only thing I owned of value—a small jade pendant given to me by my birth grandmother. It fetched just enough for medicine. I told no one.

Wenjie, of course, brought the pills home with a proud grin and said, “I picked these up today.”

They praised him. Again.

Years passed.

One winter night, fire broke out in my younger brother’s room. I was the first to smell the smoke. I rushed in, pulled him from the flames, burned my arm trying to beat back the fire with a wet towel. Wenjie was outside, screaming for help. Tears streaming.

The next morning, the neighbors clapped him on the back.

“Such a brave young man.”

No one mentioned me. Not even when my left hand couldn’t hold chopsticks for weeks.

I graduated quietly.

On the day of my university acceptance letter arriving, my mother called me into the study. She didn’t look up from her tea.

“We’ve done enough. You’re an adult now. It’s time you find your own path.”

Disowned. Just like that.

Wenjie stood beside her, arms crossed, eyes shining with something unreadable.

“Take this as a lesson,” Father said. “Ungratefulness will only lead you to misery.”

I bowed. I packed my things. I didn’t cry.

But in my chest, something loosened. A string snapped.

For ten years, I drifted like fallen leaves. I wrote stories under a pen name—fiction about ghosts, broken families, lost children. Modest success. Enough to live.

Enough to give.

When the Li family’s company faced bankruptcy again, I sent anonymous donations. When Father needed heart surgery, the hospital received an envelope with full payment.

They never knew.

Wenjie claimed he arranged it all.

“He’s grown so responsible,” my mother posted online, beneath a smiling photo of him. “He takes care of us so well.”

I should have been numb by then. But something still ached.

I told myself it was loyalty. Maybe love.

But I realize now… it was hope.

Then came the betrayal I could not swallow.

They accused me of cyber theft. Leaking company secrets. Police knocked on my door. My name was dragged through courtrooms and news headlines. Wenjie testified against me.

I begged for a moment to explain. My father turned his back.

“You’ve always been a stain on our family.”

They cut all ties. The lawsuit dropped later, once the real culprit vanished.

But the damage was done. My landlord evicted me. My editor dropped me. I slept on rooftops and in subway stations.

And then one night, someone slipped a letter beneath my door.

I recognized the handwriting instantly.

"You should’ve died in that orphanage."

My mother.

Now, I stand at the rooftop of Building 42, overlooking a city that never cared if I lived or died.

I take out my notebook—the one I've carried since I was sixteen—and tear out the last page. I write:

"To the Li family: I never wanted your riches, only your warmth. I never asked to be praised, only to be seen. I gave what I could in silence, believing that love did not need proof. But perhaps I was wrong. I will not return in another life. This is where our thread ends."

I fold the letter carefully. Slide it into an envelope addressed to no one.

And I jump.

[End of Chapter 1]

The morning sun struggled to break through the thick clouds, casting a pale light over the city. Wenjie sat in the living room of the Li family estate, eyes vacant as he stared at the untouched breakfast in front of him. The morning was quiet, too quiet for his usual routine. His hands, still trembling from last night, folded the newspaper—headlines blaring about the sudden death of the estranged son—before setting it aside.

He should have been relieved. He was relieved. Weren't the years of patience, of pretending, all for this?

But the emptiness in his chest grew, like a growing weight he couldn’t ignore.

"Father, did you hear?" Wenjie’s voice broke the silence, almost too loudly, as if forcing his words to fill the void left behind. But no answer came. Father was absent, buried in his study. Mother had not spoken since last night—her expression, lifeless and distant, haunted the walls.

He tried to remember the warmth of the family dinners, when they were all together. He and that boy—no, his brother. The thought of him as "that boy" made his stomach twist.

He couldn’t place it—this growing discomfort in his chest. After all, he had played the role perfectly. They had accepted him. They had loved him. They had—loved him?

Wenjie rose, his legs feeling heavier than usual. Every step felt like trudging through quicksand. He went upstairs to his room, passing the familiar doors that used to feel like home—except now, each one felt like a weight, a reminder of someone who had been swallowed up by it all.

The door to his room creaked open. He hesitated, the cold air of the house clinging to him. The sight of his old brother’s empty room—it hit him like a hammer to the chest. Nothing had changed. The bed, the empty desk, the books scattered across the floor... Nothing had ever changed. That room was still his. He had never stopped pretending it wasn’t.

He walked over to the desk, fingers grazing the edges of the scattered papers. Then, his eyes caught something—a folded letter. His heart clenched.

To the Li family: I never wanted your riches, only your warmth. I never asked to be praised, only to be seen.

His throat constricted. The letters blurred before his eyes as he read, the words burning into his memory. He could feel the heaviness of the words settle deep into his bones.

“I was wrong,” he whispered to himself. The realization hung in the air, thick and suffocating. He had never seen it. He had never felt it before. His heart had hardened to the point of numbness. He had thought it was a game, that everything was just a matter of playing the part. He had been wrong. So wrong.

The silence in the house grew unbearable. Wenjie dropped the letter, his mind whirling with a storm of emotions. Guilt. Regret. A sickening feeling of wanting to undo everything—everything that had led to this moment.

He could hear his mother’s muffled sobs from downstairs, a sound that seemed foreign and almost too much for him to bear. She had never cried like this. She had never shown him vulnerability, or love—not really.

It was his fault. He had played the role too well. He had been so good at convincing them all. But now, he realized what he had done. What they had both done.

Wenjie stumbled out of his room, as if the weight of his thoughts was too much to bear. He could no longer stand the sight of the house. His feet carried him out, past the grand doors and into the world that awaited beyond.

The city was bustling, indifferent to his inner turmoil. The streets were filled with people—busy, focused, and oblivious. Wenjie walked aimlessly, lost in thought, until he found himself standing at the edge of a bridge. The cold wind bit at his face, and the city sprawled before him, just as it had always been.

His hand tightened around the railing. There was no going back. He had made his choices. But in the pit of his stomach, there was something gnawing at him—a feeling he couldn't ignore.

A voice.

It was the voice he had never wanted to hear again.

"You should’ve died in that orphanage."

He looked down at his hands. The boy had written those words with such finality. But what if—what if he was the one who had died? What if all the damage, all the hate, had been self-inflicted? Wasn’t this his fault too?

Wasn't it his fault that his brother had disappeared from their lives so completely?

His fingers trembled as he reached into his pocket, pulling out a crumpled piece of paper. The words were fading now, but they remained etched in his heart, like a scar that would never fade.

For the first time, Wenjie wanted to face the truth. The truth he had buried deep within.

The weight of his guilt pressed against his chest, and he closed his eyes.

"I’m sorry," he whispered to the wind. "I’m sorry."

[End of Chapter 2]

The house was too quiet now.

Lina sat in the parlor, staring at the vase in front of her, its white porcelain surface gleaming under the dim light. It was her favorite piece, the one she had brought from her travels when she was still young and hopeful. She had bought it thinking that it would fill the empty space in her life, that it would remind her of the woman she once was—before marriage, before children, before this family.

Now, the vase seemed like a cruel reminder of everything she had lost.

She hadn’t expected it to be like this. She hadn’t expected to wake up to the heavy silence of a house emptied of her son.

She hadn’t even expected to miss him.

At first, when he arrived—small, hungry, and timid—she had thought of him as a duty. She was expected to love him. She had done so dutifully, almost mechanically. But after years of his quiet suffering, his shadow that lingered too long in the background of their family, Lina had learned to turn away, just as her husband had.

"He's not our son. He is not Wenjie," she'd told herself for so long. Those words had become a mantra. After all, they had adopted him out of pity, hadn't they? They had offered him a home, an opportunity. He had never been truly one of them.

At least, that was how she had rationalized it.

But now… now, it felt like a betrayal.

Lina put down her teacup, the porcelain clinking lightly. She hadn’t noticed how tightly she had been holding it. The scent of jasmine tea filled the room, but it did nothing to calm her. She stood and walked to the window, looking out at the city streets. The sky was clouded over, a faint gray mist hanging in the air. Everything felt suffocating.

Was it always like this?

Her thoughts drifted back to the letter, the words her son had written just before his death.

She should have known. She should have seen the signs. How many years had passed, and all she had ever given him were scraps—cold dismissals, hurried words, empty promises.

He had tried, hadn’t he? In his own quiet way, he had tried to get her attention. But she had ignored him. She had let him become a shadow. He had remained on the edges of their world, never once truly being seen.

And now, it was too late.

She walked to the small desk in the corner of the room, the one that had once belonged to him. She hadn’t touched it in years, preferring to keep her distance. It was still filled with his things—his notebooks, his drawings, his old childhood trinkets that she had packed away so carelessly. The remnants of a life she had never truly wanted to understand.

Her fingers brushed over a faded drawing of a family—a mother, a father, two children, all smiling. At the bottom, in her son’s small, childish handwriting, it read: I wish I was really one of you.

Her heart constricted. The tears came then, unbidden, spilling down her cheeks.

She sank into the chair, clutching the drawing to her chest as if it could somehow hold the weight of her regret. It was a simple wish. A wish that had gone unspoken for so long. A wish she had never bothered to hear.

“Why didn’t I listen?” she whispered, the question hanging in the stillness of the room. “Why didn’t I love you when you needed me?”

Her mind wandered back to the day they had found him at the orphanage. He had been so small, so fragile, his eyes wide with uncertainty. She had been told he was a "special case," a child with no future. He had come to them with nothing but his broken spirit and a small, dusty suitcase.

Back then, she had told herself that he was just a temporary fixture, someone to fill the empty space in their home. She hadn’t known how wrong she was. She hadn’t known that in the end, it would be her who was the one broken.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a car pulling up in the driveway. She didn’t have to look to know who it was. It was Wenjie.

Her chest tightened at the thought of him. Her perfect son, the one who had never asked for anything, who had always done exactly as expected. She hadn’t seen him cry in years, not even when his brother had been taken from them. She hadn’t heard him speak of him since that night.

Wenjie had always been the child she could depend on. The child who never made demands. The child who always did his best to fit in.

But today, he came through the door with a look that Lina had never seen on his face before. It was one of guilt—guilt, and something more. Something... haunted.

“Wenjie?” she asked softly, her voice trembling.

He didn’t respond immediately, just stood there, staring at the ground. His hands were clenched into fists, and his lips were pressed tight, as though holding something back.

Finally, he looked up at her, and there was a sadness in his eyes that she had never noticed before.

“Mother,” he said, his voice quiet, almost distant. “I… I failed him.”

The words hit her like a punch to the gut. Her son, the one who had been so perfect, so well-behaved, so dutiful, was now standing before her, a shadow of the boy she had once known. The realization swept over her with brutal force.

It wasn’t just her son who had failed. It was all of them.

They had failed him together.

“You didn’t fail him, Wenjie,” she said, but even she knew it was a lie. Her words felt hollow, empty. She couldn’t lie to him anymore. Not now.

“I did,” he insisted, his voice breaking. “I didn’t see him. I never saw him.”

The guilt between them was palpable, a silent weight they both carried, too heavy to acknowledge but too real to deny. They stood there, in the quiet of the house, both of them shattered in their own way.

“Mother, I’m sorry,” Wenjie whispered, his eyes brimming with tears for the first time in years.

The truth hung in the air, unspoken and impossible to erase. They had failed him, and in doing so, they had failed themselves. There was no going back now. The doors to redemption were closed.

And in the silence that followed, Lina realized that the family they had once been—fragile, imperfect, but still whole—was now nothing more than a broken memory.

[End of Chapter 3]