The woman's sobs faded into something like calm. Ding Jia watched the transformation finish, half-convinced none of this had actually happened. That she'd simply fallen asleep at her own front door and dreamed the whole encounter.
Then the woman was suddenly standing directly closer, in front of her, and the doubt evaporated.
She didn't look transparent anymore. If anything, she looked more solid than most living people Ding Jia had met, and if she hadn't witnessed the blood and the bruises firsthand, she would have mistaken this woman for simply another person standing in her living room.
Is this what a ghost actually looks like once it's calm?
"Thank you." The voice came soft now, almost musical, nothing like the raw scream from minutes earlier. For what?
And then, in a blink, she dissolved — not vanished, but scattered, breaking apart into countless points of silver light that drifted upward and disappeared into nothing.
Where she'd stood, a single white lily lay on the floor.
Ding Jia reached for it before she'd consciously decided to, drawn in by something she couldn't quite name. Up close, it was unlike any lily she'd ever seen — petals too bright, too fresh, as if it had been cut from the stem only seconds ago, with a faint, glittering dust caught deep in its center.
The instant her fingers brushed the petals, the room dissolved around her.
She found herself somewhere else entirely. A brightly lit practice room she didn't recognize, mirrors lining every wall, and there, walking toward her in heels and a tight-fitting dress, was the same woman. Alive. Younger. Anxious in a way that hadn't shown in death.
Ding Jia understood, distantly, that she wasn't really here. She was watching, somehow living inside, a memory.
The woman practiced her runway walk over and over, each pass through the mirror a little more deflated than the last. Behind her, two other girls arrived and began their own routines without sparing her a glance, moving with an effortless, magnetic confidence that the first woman clearly didn't have and was painfully aware of lacking.
Ding Jia recognized the gap instantly. She'd spent her entire career around people who had it and people who didn't. That particular, indefinable pull some performers carried into a room, the thing that made an audience unable to look away even when the choreography was identical. It couldn't be taught. It couldn't be faked for long.
This woman didn't have it, and she knew it more clearly every single day she watched herself fail to summon it.
The memory shifted, unspooling forward through months Ding Jia absorbed in fragments, countless rejections, countless nights spent watching girls with less training and more spark get chosen instead of her, the light in her eyes dimming a little further each time. The toll of it showed plainly on her, thinner, paler, more brittle with each passing scene and Ding Jia felt the ache of it without needing the details spelled out: exhaustion, despair, a hollowed-out kind of hopelessness that had stopped being about the mirror a long time ago.
She watched this woman walk straight unhesitatingly, one final time, toward the small artificial lake near this very neighborhood.
She watched her stand at the water's edge in the dark, completely alone, and step forward without looking back.
The water closed over her, and didn't give her back.