Love, in Drops and Drains

Pei Yunxiao's attention to Tang Li is a way of keeping her where the family can draw on her blood. She learns this by overhearing him say it to her foster sister. The Tangs took Tang Li in as a child, and out of gratitude she gave blood for the foster sister's leukemia. The donations did nothing for the way her foster parents treated her, and the sister resented her for being needed at all. Pei Yunxiao was the one person in the house she thought was on her side. At eighteen Tang Li spent everything she had saved on a burial plot for herself. In the days after she overheard the two of them, her foster parents went on talking about her the way they always had and Pei Yunxiao gave her nothing straight. Her foster sister and Pei Yunxiao set a date for their engagement. Tang Li made her arrangements and told nobody where she was going.