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Yu Ziyuan's marriage was never a particularly happy one, but their parents were traditionally minded, and - well. Jiang Fengmian's preferred bride had already married his best friend, and Yu Ziyuan's marital preferences were never an option at all.
They had two children to whom Jiang Fengmian was an indifferent father, and their home life was, at least, stable.
And then Jiang Fengmian's preferred bride and his best friend died, and Jiang Fengmian spent months looking for their son until he found the boy - or at least, found where the boy was supposed to be, because he'd run away from foster care. Again, apparently.
Jiang Fengmian brought him home, because what else could he have done?
Yu Ziyuan wouldn't have minded, except that the man who had always been indifferent to his own children suddenly doted on the orphan he'd brought home, and Yu Ziyuan saw her own son take that like a body blow.
She'd been furious. Of course, she'd still put her name to Wei Ying's adoption papers - the boy had no-one else, he had to be theirs.
She'd let Jiang Fengmian lavish his adoration on Wei Ying, and done her best to be both mother and father to her biological children. Surely, she'd thought, they needed her more than Wei Ying did, when Wei Ying had all of their father's attention.
Perhaps, she'd thought shamefully, they were even better off, when Wei Ying under Jiang Fengmian's influence was a mess. He was skipping school, and his grades were failing not due to lack of capacity - his work, when he submitted any, was brilliant - but due to lack of will, because he rarely did submit anything. Every report card had the same theme: Gifted, but must try harder.
Yu Ziyuan and Jiang Fengmian were fighting about it daily. She thought he should be stricter on Wei Ying, and perhaps reserve some of his praise for the other children. He thought she was too hard on Wei Ying, and Wei Ying was acting out from his trauma, and would come around, given time. She thought if it was trauma, he should be in therapy for it - that's a thing now, after all. Jiang Fengmian refused to pathologise his problems.
And then Wei Ying ran away from home.
Yu Ziyuan told A-Li to look after A-Cheng, and told A-Cheng that at thirteen he did in fact need to be looked after, and she and Jiang Fengmian took separate cars to go out in search of their missing son.
It was Yu Ziyuan who found him, and the rush of relief from her hours of frantic terror made her shout at Wei Ying the entire journey home.
The memory would haunt her nightmares for years after that, because Jiang Fengmian did not come home. Jiang Fengmian's car was struck in a head-on collision with a drunk driver. Yu Ziyuan was told that his death was instant.
She doubted it. It seemed like the kind of lie people would tell.
She had more important concerns, because she was suddenly the widowed mother of three grieving children, and Wei Ying was now her responsibility. In her fear for him she had realised that she loved the boy as she did her other children, but it equipped her no better to communicate with him.
Being strict with him only made a difference while she was watching.
She put all three children into therapy, because they'd lost their father, and she knew she would not be well-suited to helping them deal with that. A-Cheng seemed to find it helpful. A-Li definitely did.
Wei Ying started sneaking out of that, too. Yu Ziyuan stopped trying to make him go, but she was frustrated by her inability to find a way to reach him. Talking to him herself had never gone well - he'd say what he thought she wanted to hear, never what he really thought, and she'd find herself shouting at him and -
What Wei Ying needed, she thought, was a mother, but she didn't know how to become one for him. He and A-Cheng fought and made up as often and as constantly as breathing. A-Li loved them both, and Yu Ziyuan wondered if her daughter was the only person keeping Wei Ying from spiralling completely out of control.
And then Jinzhu, looking... concerned, came to speak to her.
About Wei Ying's nascent drinking problem.
Yu Ziyuan didn't want to believe that her sixteen-year-old son had already reached the point of substance abuse. The bottles hidden in his room might have another explanation, but -
She got a home breath testing kit and made him use it.
"How often?" she asked, and he shrugged.
"I don't get really drunk," he said, eyes bright, movements steady, not a slur to his words, and she'd pressed him for a real answer, it was yet another fight but he was drinking every day, all the time, and she had to accept at that point that she'd failed him.
He was out of her reach, but she had to do something.
Yu Ziyuan had grown up on the Yu estates, a beautiful, sprawling area that held every happy memory she had outside of her children. She'd since gone on to inherit it. She didn't want to disrupt the children's schooling to uproot them and move them there, but she'd looked forward to returning there, perhaps, when the children were grown.
The adjacent Cloud Recesses Academy had wanted the land for many years. She had been adamant that she would not ever sell it.
But it made an excellent bargaining chip to get Wei Ying a place at the Academy, with its strict rules of conduct and rigorous curriculum that might be challenging enough that even Wei Ying - brilliant yet wayward as he was - might actually find reason to care.
She negotiated firmly with Lan Qiren. The sale would not be immediate, but she contracted to sell it at a price that was fair - she would not rob her children of their inheritance in financial terms, even if the Yu estates now would never be theirs to call home - if Wei Ying graduated, having been fairly challenged and fairly treated.
Her children were devastated by Wei Ying's departure. Yu Ziyuan drove Wei Ying there herself, hating herself for her inadequacy all the while, and then parked at the estates and allowed herself to walk the well-loved halls and grounds before she went back to the house where she had lived since she married, the house that would now, if this worked out, be her home forever after all.
Perhaps, she thought, she deserved it. The penance for her failures as a mother.
A-Li, she thought, understood, even if she grieved Wei Ying's absence nonetheless.
A-Cheng didn't stop glaring at Yu Ziyuan resentfully until he finished high school himself and followed Wei Ying to his choice of university, because it did work out.
Wei Ying finally found the stabilising influence he'd so desperately needed.
Yu Ziyuan heard about it from A-Li. He'd been assigned a roommate, Lan Qiren's own nephew. She'd worried that this might be intended to place unwelcome pressure on him - but the contract had been careful, detailed - but A-Li said Wei Ying seemed to like him, though Wei Ying didn't think this Lan Zhan liked him very much.
At first. By the time they graduated, Wei Ying and Lan Zhan were good friends, A-Li reported. They'd both planned to go to university right here in Yunmeng.
Yu Ziyuan used part of the proceeds of the sale of her childhood home to buy them an apartment to share.
"I'm sure we'll find places to stay." Wei Ying had tried to refuse.
"Wei Ying." She's never known how to get through to him. "It's clear to me he's been the good influence you needed." She'd almost lost control of herself for a moment, but got it back. "I would rather you have somewhere stable to live that suits you both."
She'd turned to Lan Zhan. He was a handsome boy, but his demeanour was cold. Yu Ziyuan supposed that if he only knew of her from what Wei Ying might have said about her, she should be thankful he was merely cold.
"If it's not to your standards, I can find something better," she'd told him. A son of the Lan will be used to high standards, but she wouldn't want him to leave Wei Ying because the best place she'd found for them wasn't good enough. Real estate near the university was very hard to come by. "You've been good for him. If these accommodations are insufficient -" Let him think she was desperate. She was.
"They are fine," he said icily.
What must Wei Ying have told him about her, she'd wondered. Whatever it was, she probably deserved it.
She'd left them there, cried in the car on the way home and pulled over streets away to fix her makeup so no-one would know it.
Wei Ying and Lan Zhan seemed happy enough. Wei Ying remained stable, thrived throughout university, even stayed for graduate studies. He reconnected with his siblings, and A-Li persuaded him to start coming to family dinners at her home.
It's become a steady pattern. It's as good as things have ever been. Even A-Cheng is speaking to her again.
But Wei Ying doesn't bring Lan Zhan to family dinners, even though it's obvious whenever he talks about him - and he talks about him a lot - that Wei Ying is in love with Lan Zhan.
Yu Ziyuan wonders if Lan Zhan doesn't return his feelings, because Wei Ying doesn't even seem to have hopes for him, Wei Ying is dating other people who are patently not good enough for him.
Until Wei Ying stops dating other people, but speaks of Lan Zhan more glowingly than ever. Wei Ying occasionally fails to hide love bites on his neck, or on one notable occasion, bruises on his wrists.
It's about time, she thinks.
"Do you think he and Lan Zhan finally figured it out?" A-Cheng asks, over lunch at Yu Ziyuan's home, which Wei Ying still finds reasons never to attend.
"Definitely," A-Li says.
A-Cheng scowls. "Then why isn't he at dinner?"
At the next dinner, A-Cheng asks Wei Ying where Lan Zhan is.
"He's at home," Wei Ying says blithely.
Lan Zhan isn't even doing anything - he has no other obligations that are preventing him from attendance. He just isn't valuing Wei Ying enough to attend Wei Ying's family dinners, it turns out, and Yu Ziyuan and A-Cheng are both outraged.
It doesn't go well.
And then the next morning, Yu Ziyuan receives a phone call from Yinzhu.
"Wei Ying is here," she says. "He's in his bedroom. There's a duffel bag, and he seems very unhappy."
Yu Ziyuan is at a social engagement an hour away from home, but she leaves immediately, because this is alarming.
"Wei Ying? What are you doing here?"
"I needed somewhere to stay while I look for a new place," he says dully. "I'll try to keep out of your way."
There are many issues to take with that statement, including the implication that he thinks that Lan Zhan has the right to throw Wei Ying out of the home that Yu Ziyuan bought - the title deed is in Wei Ying's name, the very idea - but that is a secondary issue. Wei Ying can always come here, if he feels safer.
"What did he do?" she asks, calculating the pathways by which she can destroy the entire Lan family if she has to.
"I - you mean Lan Zhan?" he asks, as if there were any other candidate.
"Yes," she says. "If you haven't been bringing him to family dinner because he's mistreating you you only had to say so, Wei Ying. What has he done?" She will have blood.
He stares. "He - Lan Zhan didn't do anything, I promise, Auntie Yu," he says, but he would, wouldn't he.
"Does he hurt you? That time you had bruises on your wrists - was that not consensual?" She will bring the Lan down until the Cloud Recesses Academy is repurposed as a halfway house for juvenile delinquents.
He insists they were consensual, but he's red-faced, and she doesn't know if she believes him.
She calls her daughter.
And then she clears her day. She has to find someone to cover her volunteer shift, and others to stand in for her at meetings for her charity boards, but just because she has always failed Wei Ying in the past does not mean she will willingly continue to do so now.
As she expected, A-Li gets to the heart of his problem immediately.
As she did not quite expect, but probably should have, the problem is that Wei Ying believes himself unworthy of love.
Naturally.
How could he feel otherwise? She raised him, after all.
"Fuck," she says aloud, and walks away before he sees her cry. Today is about him, not about her.
She allows herself five minutes to sob alone in her room, weeping for the boy she failed. Wei Ying has many virtues, and sees none of them, and it is no-one's fault but hers.
And then she fixes her makeup to make sure it doesn't show and emerges to learn that A-Li is making brunch, and Lan Zhan is going to be coming over to ask Wei Ying to marry him.
She thinks she'll come around to being happy for him, but for now, she is simply relieved.
Wei Ying has always been loved, but has never seemed to know it. Lan Zhan loves him in ways that he sees, that he recognises, and she has feared the possibility that he and Lan Zhan would be parted.
She doesn't know how to tell her soon-to-be son-in-law how thankful she is for him - for his being what Wei Ying needed, when she never could be. He's always so clearly found her too weird and threatening for that to be a possibility.
Perhaps someday she'll find it. Wei Ying isn't lost to them, yet, and she has hope that with Lan Zhan, he never will be.
Yu Ziyuan has never known how to reach Wei Ying, but Lan Zhan is proof that it can be done.
She'll keep trying, for as long as it takes.