Chapter 17: Deeply in Love, Forever and Always (Part 1)
I heard Wesley Wei's words, and for a moment, I couldn't process them.
Wesley Wei drove me to his car. In the backseat, a baby sat in a child safety seat, pacifier in mouth, gazing at us with curious eyes.
As he drove, Wesley Wei told me about their story.
He and Nora Zhao had known each other for a long time.
In those days, everything moved slowly—transportation, letters, even love.
Wesley Wei had met Nora Zhao at a night school. He was a newly graduated teacher, and she was a worker from the factory next door, taking adult education classes to change her fate. That was how they found each other.
The highlight of Wesley Wei's week was Nora Zhao's attendance. He'd catch himself staring at her during lectures, and when she noticed and looked back with a playful smile, he'd blush and hide behind his textbook, too shy to meet her eyes.
Young Wesley Wei was terrified of missing his chance. He worried that once she finished her courses, he'd never see her again. So he poured his heart into a love poem—only to have a mischievous classmate find it and read it aloud in front of everyone.
In those days, love poems were a bold declaration.
The classmate meant no harm—just a prank. But the night school administration didn't see it that way. They accused Wesley Wei of corrupting morals and dismissed him. Down on his luck and without a job, he happened to catch the wave of martial arts novels sweeping the country and began writing serial fiction for newspapers and magazines.
Nora Zhao was always in his heart. He embedded his longing in his stories—every heroine named Lotus, or Little Lotus, or Dreaming Lotus. Eventually, Nora Zhao showed up at his door and told him to stop writing—she'd read every word, every narrative arc, every secret confession.
Her playfulness made him wish the ground would swallow him whole.
In truth, Nora Zhao had Wesley Wei wrapped around her finger. She'd tug at his heartstrings, sending him soaring to the clouds one moment and plunging him into the depths the next.
But when he finally gathered the courage to confess again, Nora Zhao turned him down.
She'd been diagnosed with hepatitis B, and it had already progressed to liver fibrosis.
In those days, hepatitis B was far harder to treat than it is now. Today, a month's worth of antiviral medication costs barely ten yuan. Back then, there was nothing on the market—and even when drugs finally appeared, they were prohibitively expensive, a few hundred yuan per box. Combined with the costs of other treatments, Nora Zhao saw no hope.
Wesley Wei chose to stay by her side, fighting alongside her.
But liver fibrosis was considered irreversible in that era. Treatment after treatment failed. Her condition progressed to cirrhosis—a virtual death sentence for Nora Zhao.
Their love never found its natural path forward, but her illness kept advancing. Medications worked at first, then grew less effective. New drugs were prescribed, and resistance developed again. As her viral load climbed, she told him her body was an incubator for disease—no immunity to the virus, but total immunity to the medications that were supposed to save her.
When a new generation of antivirals finally became affordable, Nora Zhao could only weep for being born too soon. Had she arrived a decade later, her life might have been entirely different. She hated everything—hated that by the time TDF, a truly effective drug, cost ten yuan a bottle, her body had already moved beyond its reach. In the years she remembered, the only options were overpriced telbivudine and adefovir, hundreds of yuan per month, with poor efficacy and worse side effects.
By the time I was released, TAF was widely available. But Nora Zhao and her generation of hepatitis B patients had spent their lives waiting for drugs that arrived too late.
She watched her disease progress from early stage, to middle stage, to late stage, to liver cancer.
Because of her condition, Nora Zhao had never accepted Wesley Wei's love. The playful girl she'd once been had become someone who counted every penny, earning a few hundred yuan a month and spending it all on medications. She couldn't bear to burden Wesley Wei—but he was a fool in love, faithfully buying her pills every month and leaving them at her door.
When the cancer diagnosis came, Nora Zhao couldn't hold back anymore.
That day in the hospital, she hurled the test results in his face and sobbed, "I've told you a thousand times it's hopeless, but you force me to keep treating it! I've told you to go find someone else, but you refuse to leave me! If I were alone, I could face death with dignity. Why do you have to be here? You think you love me, but every day you're torturing me!"
Wesley Wei said nothing. He quietly picked up the test results from the floor and went to stand in line outside the doctor's office, as practiced as someone who'd done it a hundred times before.
Nora Zhao had no commercial health insurance—only her employee plan. Most insurers refused hepatitis B patients outright. And the doctor had been blunt: "We'll try conservative treatment. There are some new drugs that show promise, but they haven't been added to the insurance formulary yet..."
From that day on, it was like setting money on fire.
She was never Wesley Wei's wife, but he gave her his entire life.
From youth to middle age.
From his prime to his first gray hairs.
Sometimes love isn't companionship—it's torture. It was a slow stripping of Nora Zhao's dignity. She felt her self-respect being peeled away piece by piece, reducing her to a life of obligation and pain. The more she owed Wesley Wei, the deeper she sank into misery.
Which was why she and Victor Li had found each other so effortlessly.
Nora Zhao had bought into the stalled project at a different time than the rest of us. She purchased when rumors of trouble were already circulating and prices had plummeted. Most people warned against investing—saying it would never be completed. But some saw it as an opportunity to buy at the bottom.
Nora Zhao was one of those buyers. People assumed she'd simply made a bad investment. They didn't know that from that day forward, she was already Victor Li's co-conspirator. The purchase was just her cover story.
Her repayment to Wesley Wei was a single night of tenderness.
Wesley Wei had never understood why Nora Zhao asked him to stay that night. He'd only brought over her new medication. But she'd pulled him close, stroked his hair, and wept as she asked, "You've spent your entire savings on me. You're getting older. If I leave this world, who would ever look twice at a poor, aging man?"
Wesley Wei had answered, "But I'll always have the memories of being with you."
That night, she turned off the lights. That night was their first and only time together. That night, a new life began. Fate was cruel that way—two people, losing their virginity on the same evening, creating a child they would barely get to know.
She hadn't needed money for a long time. She knew death was coming. But her pride remained, and so did the debt she felt she owed Wesley Wei—owed him for a lifetime.
She'd once told him... I love you, and I want to love you with dignity. So I'd rather bear the world's condemnation and hold onto what pride I have left.
Nora Zhao had already decided to turn herself in. My arrival and the tiny life growing inside her gave her second thoughts.
She knew her body couldn't endure childbirth, but those final months would be the happiest of her life. She wanted to spend a little more time with Wesley Wei—let him press his ear to her swelling belly and grin like a fool, pick out baby clothes together, dream about their child's future, debate what name to choose.
That was Nora Zhao's last wish before she died. And I had destroyed it.
I remembered her slumped on the ground, crying, telling me she'd planned to turn herself in after a few months.
Now I realized—only that one sentence had been the truth. Because she knew she didn't have much time left.
After her sentencing, Nora Zhao, suffering from both cancer and pregnancy, received relatively good medical care in the hospital. Though she'd lost her freedom, she stayed safe enough until she went into labor.
The doctors had repeatedly presented her with risk waivers. They told her that childbirth could kill her. She just smiled and told them that her child was the last thing she'd leave behind in this world.
Before the delivery, the hospital allowed her a visit with Wesley Wei. She gave him her will, telling him it contained her estate—earnings from legitimate orders she'd secured through Victor Li's company. Though their relationship was tainted by crime, the money itself had been earned through lawful means and couldn't be confiscated by the police.