He had really tried to not think about Weiran while he was serving his sentence. He really did. If anyone asked, he would claim that he thought about Weiran just as much as he thought about Liu Xingyu, Liu Baiyan, and Sun Yue, which was not really that often at all. But the truth was, Liu Xingyu came up in his thoughts quite often, and Weiran made an appearance even more often. For Liu Xingyu, it was thoughts about his childhood—the way Xingyu would help him with his nightmares after he had those early lessons, the way he snuck him sweets when Liu Baiyan and Sun Yue weren’t looking, the way his eyes gazed down on him as Xiaokai was dying—and then, sporadically, thoughts about how he acted after he came back—how he tried to connect with Xiaokai and learn about him, how strongly he reacted to finding out about Xiaokai’s appointments and his suicide attempt. How it was possible that maybe—just maybe—Xingyu was changing. At the bare minimum, that maybe he’d learned how to be sorry.

His thoughts about Weiran were different.