Chapter 83

That night, Jiang Zhou didn’t stay over. She had real business the next day and needed to go somewhere tonight, or she wouldn’t have enough time in the morning.

She had never really liked sharing a room with Yu Min. Yu Min was too restrained, too serious, and too dull. On top of that, maybe because she was used to working nonstop, she usually fell asleep soon after getting off work. Sometimes Jiang Zhou wanted to drag her out for a walk, go shopping, or catch a movie, but she could rarely get the other girl to move.

This person always looked half dead, as if somebody owed her money. She only seemed to come alive when she was working at the hospital. Jiang Zhou couldn’t stand that damn temper of hers, and she wasn’t good at coaxing people either. Seeing that Yu Min’s expression was off, she was already ready to slip away.

“Can you handle it? I’m probably leaving for about a week this time.” After packing up everything she’d brought and leaving behind what she couldn’t take with her for now, Jiang Zhou pointed at the mess on the floor. “This stuff too, and what’s over there. I’ll have a housekeeper come clean it up tomorrow. As for the bags, if you have time later, pack them up and have someone send them to that place from last time. If you don’t have time, forget it. I’ll come move them myself next week.”

Yu Min agreed at once. “Sure.”

“It might not even be a week. If I’m not in a hurry to come back, I might stay a few more days. If anything comes up, contact me. I’ll try to get back earlier.”

“Nothing. Go ahead. I’ll also be on more night shifts these next week or two, and I have to rotate through the ER too.”

“How is dermatology this exhausting? Isn’t it supposed to be relatively relaxed?” Jiang Zhou muttered, speaking from experience. She had been the one to suggest dermatology in the first place; from what she knew, that department shouldn’t have been this busy or this tiring. Who would’ve thought Yu Min would throw herself into dermatology and never come up for air, with barely any time to breathe all day, and still end up with so many night shifts and ER rotations?

Night shifts couldn’t be avoided in any department; that was normal. ER consults for dermatology were normal too. There really weren’t few night visits at all. Plenty of people came to the hospital in the middle of the night for acne, hair loss, all kinds of chronic skin problems, and even people who felt perfectly fine but still wanted to stroll over and pick up one or two tubes of ointment on the way. If they didn’t get prescribed anything, they’d complain; some even made a scene and tried to hit people.

“How many complaints did you get this month?”

“Not many.”

“How many?”

“Three.”

Jiang Zhou was both amused and exasperated. “I never expected dermatology to be this chaotic too. That was my mistake.”

Her phone rang; it was an incoming call. Jiang Zhou answered, and the person coming to pick her up was urging her along. There was no time to keep talking, so she hurriedly said goodbye to Yu Min and waved.

“See you next week. I have to go; if I don’t leave now, I really won’t make it.”

Jiang Zhou was always in a rush. The door shut heavily behind her on the way out; the elevator took her down to B1, and by the time she got into the car and it pulled away, the apartment upstairs had already gone dark, swallowed in blackness.

There was no energy to clean up the mess in the apartment. The housekeeper Jiang Zhou had hired came on time the next day; only Jiang Zhou’s bag was packed by Yu Min herself. After she finished, she sent Jiang Zhou a photo and asked her to check and confirm.

It took Jiang Zhou more than half a day before she found time to reply. She enlarged the photo and circled the light-gray Birkin bag in it.

- This one isn’t mine. I didn’t buy it yesterday.

Yu Min: -?

The bag wasn’t Yu Min’s either. She didn’t like that sort of thing, and it definitely wasn’t the housekeeper’s; even after working for three years, the housekeeper still couldn’t afford a bag like this. You had to be full after eating to even think about buying something like that. Yu Min only half knew Jiang Zhou’s things, but she knew this bag was expensive, so she had assumed Jiang Zhou bought it.

Jiang Zhou: -I wish it were mine. It’s so nice. So pretty.

Yu Min: ……

Yu Min: -Be normal.

Jiang Zhou: -I don’t know. Maybe Heaven rewarded me. Moved by a believer’s sincere love for bags, it sent me a little prize.

Yu Min: -Ask Tang Pei.

Jiang Zhou was extremely certain. -It’s not hers. She has the same lack of taste as you; she’s not interested in this at all. There’s absolutely no way she’d buy a bag like this.

After sending that, she changed her tune again.

Jiang Zhou: -Although, it’s not impossible. Maybe she changed her mind and prepared some surprise for someone else, only to send it to the wrong place.

Yu Min: -Oh. Then I’ll ask her.

Jiang Zhou: -Don’t! I was kidding. Why are you taking me so seriously? Fine, wait a second; I’ll ask. A few minutes.

Very few people ever came to the apartment. Aside from the housekeeper and Tang Pei, there was only one other person. Jiang Zhou turned the photo around and forwarded it to Lin Baixin in her contacts, then called her directly.

As expected, the bag belonged to Lin Baixin. She had left it behind yesterday. At the time, she’d been too busy hauling bags and things around; after that, Jiang Zhou kept dragging her into idle chatter, so if Jiang Zhou hadn’t called to ask, Lin Baixin herself might not have realized she was missing a bag. It was a brand-new bag she’d only recently gotten back; originally, it should have been sent to the shop, but because she had been so swamped, it had stayed in the car the whole time, and somehow it ended up at Jiang Zhou’s place.

“Alright, if it’s yours, Manager Lin, that’s fine. I wondered how a bag could suddenly show up out of nowhere. I’ll get a courier to send it back to you, or do you want to come get it yourself?”

“Either is fine.”

Getting a courier wasn’t convenient. Yu Min, who lived in that apartment, barely stayed home during the day; when she did have time to go back, she was basically just catching up on sleep. Jiang Zhou felt sorry for her junior and asked Lin Baixin whether it was urgent. If it wasn’t, then when she got back, she could bring it to Lin Baixin, or Lin Baixin could come pick it up herself. As long as Yu Min wasn’t home, the two of them could avoid each other.

Lin Baixin chose the latter. She’d come by when she had time; no need to trouble anyone else.

But she was also busy these two days. Lin Qi wasn’t around, and a lot of things in the shop needed Lin Baixin to handle personally. With no one to share the workload, it was tiring even in the off-season; in a little more than a month, though, it would be peak season, and preparations had to start now, or things would definitely be a mess later.

At the hospital, Yu Min knew nothing about any of this. She did indeed have night shifts and ER duty, but on top of that she still had to worry about research and papers. Early that morning, Cui Zhen had just called her in for a one-on-one talk, and in the afternoon another teacher came looking for her, telling her to find time this week to go back to school.

Dr. Cui was straightforward; some things were obvious to anyone not blind, and only that big fool Qiu Qiu didn’t bother digging deeper. Dr. Cui usually didn’t care about other people’s private lives unless it was already affecting work. In Dr. Cui’s eyes, Yu Min’s current state was clearly affected, even if the signs weren’t very obvious.

Yu Min didn’t argue. She only said, “Sorry. I’ll pay attention after this.”

“I hope you can sort it out as soon as possible and stop making yourself worse,” Dr. Cui said. Then she paused and spoke sincerely. “You’re the most promising student I’ve met in the past few years. From my personal point of view, I think you’ll definitely achieve something in the future; at the very least, you won’t be worse than me. Try not to let outside troubles affect you too much. Do you understand?”

Yu Min nodded and thanked her. “I understand.”

The talk was over and she was about to leave, but after taking only two steps, Dr. Cui called her back and asked bluntly, straight to the point, “Yu classmate, did you choose this line of work yourself?”

Yu Min stopped and looked at Dr. Cui.

Dr. Cui explained, “I just feel like... or rather, I can tell. You don’t seem to like doing this very much. This isn’t your goal.”

Yu Min was honest. After thinking for a moment, she answered, “Whether I like it or not doesn’t matter. Being suited to it is enough. I don’t want to think that much.”

Night shifts were really exhausting. Being a doctor sometimes felt just like being a machine; after doing it long enough, you went numb. Once you got used to it, even if you were already dead tired under that intensity and pressure, as long as your body could still move, you kept working yourself to death.

Dermatologists often told patients not to stress, absolutely not to stay up late, to keep a healthy schedule and diet, and so on. But when it came to themselves, doctors’ lives were far worse than their patients’. Just getting through work was enough to kill a person, let alone forcing out time afterward to grind on papers. When things got busy, they didn’t even have time to eat takeout; they could only wolf down a few bites after getting off work to pad their stomach. That was a common thing.

Yu Min had long since gotten used to this dull, grating state of constant tension. One of her junior sisters in the same program once said, “Senior, you’re almost living like the walking dead. It’s terrifying.”

“Oh.”

“But you’re the prettiest one among all the ‘corpses.’”

“......”

That day was an ordinary day. Yu Min followed Cui Zhen to see patients and learn. In the morning alone, they saw two patients who had booked the wrong department by mistake: one with varicose veins who should have gone to vascular surgery but came here instead, and one who needed wound care but had also gone to the wrong place. By a little before eleven, a third wrong-department patient appeared; this time it was a burn. She had already run cold water over it at home, but when she came to the hospital she should have gone to the burn unit; instead, she had booked dermatology and had waited quite a long time for her turn.

It was someone Yu Min and Cui Zhen both knew. When the person who raised her head and came through the door appeared, Yu Min froze; then she frowned. When Lin Baixin extended the hand she’d burned, Yu Min’s brow furrowed even more.

Blisters had already formed; the burn area wasn’t small. A patch on the back of her left hand was red all over. Because she had treated it in time, Lin Baixin didn’t feel especially painful yet, and it was still bearable; it wasn’t bad enough to make her truly miserable. After briefly describing the situation to Cui Zhen, she was waiting for a conclusion when Yu Min suddenly stood up first, the chair scraping harshly across the floor.

“I’ll refund your appointment; go to burn care and get it treated there,” Cui Zhen said quickly afterward, then tacitly signaled to Yu Min. “You take Miss Lin over.”

Before Cui Zhen even finished speaking, Yu Min had already pulled the other woman out. Lin Baixin hadn’t recovered yet; she hadn’t expected to run into her here. Her appointment had been made on her phone, and by now it was already well into the morning. There were hardly any leftover slots in dermatology at all; she’d only gotten Cui Zhen’s appointment by luck. And then she’d run into Yu Min again.

“When did this happen?”

This was the first time in several meetings that Yu Min had spoken to her like this. She wasn’t hostile; her tone was quite normal.

Lin Baixin said, “More than half an hour ago. Forty or fifty minutes, no more than an hour.”

“Did you put anything on it, or use anything else?”

“No.”

“Don’t touch the wound. Be careful. Was it boiling water?”

“Mm.”

“Freshly boiled?”

Lin Baixin nodded.

A scalding burn had blistered, and the pain could be delayed. That was more serious than immediate pain. Yu Min grabbed her arm, and when they reached burn care, she went straight to a doctor she knew well and handed Lin Baixin over.

While the doctor was treating Lin Baixin’s burn, the other woman left again. Lin Baixin’s thoughts scattered. She should have been cooperating with the doctor, but after turning to glance around, she moved her hand and almost touched the injured area, scaring the doctor badly.

What had just happened felt like a dream; it was unreal. Lin Baixin was still in a daze. The pain in her hand couldn’t compare to the churn in her mind; she was somewhat at a loss. For a moment, the fleeting flash of urgency in Yu Min just now—when Yu Min pulled her, she even felt her heart skip a beat for the first time in a long while. And yet everything vanished too quickly. She couldn’t adjust; the contrast in that sudden change was simply too much.

TL Note:

a believer’s sincere love for bags (信女爱包的赤诚之心) = a joking way to beg for a reward