他抱来满天气球那晚，她收下了妈妈的钱

If the key image of the last stretch of summer was a pool full of goldfish, this stretch is a whole sky of balloons — and a necklace that never made it into her hands.

Let's start with the brightest scene.

The school held a "send your wishes to the sky" event, where students wrote down their wishes, tied them to balloons, and released them into the sky together.

Someone like Lu Xixiao would normally sneer at this kind of group activity.

But the moment he heard Zhou Wan would go, he said nothing more and showed up with a huge armful of colorful balloons.

He didn't make a wish for himself; he just stood beside her and said, word by word: I hope everything you want comes true.

It was that one utterly defenseless line that made the string always drawn tight in Zhou Wan's heart suddenly loosen.

She almost let herself believe this summer could stay this warm forever.

But fate, right at that moment, turned over its coldest card.

A woman appeared before her — the mother who, more than ten years ago, had cast her aside and vanished without a trace.

Meeting again, her mother's face held not a shred of apology, and she couldn't even be bothered to ask whether grandma was alive or dead.

Only now did Zhou Wan learn that, over the years, her mother had completely reinvented herself, married into the Lu family, and become Lu Xixiao's stepmother in name.

In other words, she and Lu Xixiao had now become "step-siblings" with no blood between them — and what her mother feared most was exactly this being exposed.

Her mother held out a bank card, the condition cold as a knife: take this money, keep away from Lu Xixiao, and never see him again.

The ever-more-frightening medicine bills for grandma flashed through Zhou Wan's mind, and in the end she still reached out and took the card.

From that moment, she began tearing down, with her own hands, the thing she had worked so hard to build.

She grew colder to Lu Xixiao by the day — so cold he was completely baffled; how could someone laughing at his side days ago change overnight?

What he didn't know was that, in those days, he'd been holed up in the repair shop, hammer stroke by hammer stroke, forging her a necklace shaped like an arrow.

Just as the necklace was taking shape, he overheard, around the corner, Zhou Wan settling the matter in public: he and I are not friends, never were, and never will be.

Lu Xixiao stood in place for a long time, not a word of protest, and only quietly tucked the necklace back into his pocket, never to take it out again.

Misfortune came as if by appointment, one after another.

Grandma's heart gave out without warning and she was wheeled into the emergency room; to keep watch at her bedside, Zhou Wan simply abandoned an exam that decided her future.

And on the other side, Lu Xixiao's home caved in halfway that summer too, and the study-abroad dream he'd talked about for so long fell through entirely.

The part that grips your chest hardest comes later: she stumbled onto a few thugs cornering Lu Xixiao and raining down blows.

The one who'd just finished saying "not friends" didn't hesitate for a beat — eyes red, she rushed in and shielded him with her own body.

You see, this whole summer, Zhou Wan took her mother's money with one hand, and with the other shoved away the one person who truly cared for her.

Every heartless word she spat out, not one was what she truly wanted to say.

She pushed the person she most wanted to be near further and further away, only because what she was allowed to want, and the life she was allowed to live, were never hers to decide.

The summer isn't over yet, but this thread she cut with her own hands has already begun to ache faintly.

If it were you, could you bear to push the person you most want to keep out the door — all to hold on to the person you must protect?