Chapter 5

She examined her glossy red nails and sneered.

“One last time. Give me half your shares, and I guarantee not a word of your dirty deeds gets out.”

Her beautiful face looked hideous to me.

Twisted.

More hateful than Tôn Đình's!

In that instant, I couldn't hold back.

I lunged and seized her throat.

She struggled, but the difference in our strength was too great.

Her eyes rolled white.

She was almost dead when the last scrap of reason dragged me back.

I let go.

I couldn't kill anyone.

Murder meant prison.

I didn't want prison.

Coughing violently, she clutched her throat.

Perhaps I'd frightened her.

She scrambled toward the door.

“I helped you escape Tôn Đình, and this is how you treat me!”

From the elevator, she shouted:

“Hứa Lâm Hoa, you deserve her whole family walking all over you! Coward!”

“Get out!”

I clenched my fist and smashed it into the sofa.

I wasn't a coward.

I wasn't!

I planned.

I worked hard.

Otherwise, how could an orphan have established himself in this city and opened his own company?

I'd only taken the wrong path.

I shouldn't have married into Tôn Đình's family.

I should have married a gentler, richer woman.

Yes.

I was intelligent.

I repeated it like self-hypnosis.

Tô Tô couldn't threaten me.

I'd caused my child's and wife's deaths, but I hadn't actually killed them with my own hands.

The baby had died in the womb.

I wasn't criminally responsible.

As for Tôn Đình, I'd merely engineered her madness.

Clean up the traces, and no one would discover it.

She'd run into the train herself after losing her mind.

Exactly.

I hadn't killed anyone.

It was all that bitch Tô Tô's fault for seducing me!

I kept hammering the thought into my mind.

Emotion surged. My mouth grew dry.

The stamina medication was taking effect.

Flustered, I went to the water dispenser and drank repeatedly.

Then sat on the sofa, trying to calm down.

Click.

The lights abruptly went out.

Dense darkness filled the living room.

I hurried to use my phone's flashlight.

But as I stood with it, a pale face suddenly appeared before me.

“Darling...”

“Darling... Our baby's still alive.”

“She's been bricked into the wall.”

The face spoke mechanically, sentence by sentence.

My whole body locked up.

Fear seemed to stop my breath.

“Đình... Tôn Đình?”

Hee hee hee...

A child's laughter came from the bathroom.

Closer.

“Baby, Daddy didn't hurt you.”

I collapsed onto the sofa.

The phone's beam shook, then fell beneath the coffee table.

As the light disappeared, Tôn Đình's pale face split open.

Blood sprayed.

Cold, sticky droplets struck my face.

Instinctively, I wiped it.

My hand reeked.

“Darling...”

Hands suddenly caught my legs.

A voice poured into my ears from every direction.

“The baby's really been bricked into the wall...”

“AAAAH!”

I screamed.

My mind emptied.

Light shattered before me. Memory splintered into broken flashes.

Darkness swallowed me.

I fainted.

When I woke, it was noon.

I shook my head.

It pounded.

One sentence kept repeating:

“The baby's in the wall. I have to break it open and get her out.”

It coaxed me.

Forced me.

At last...

I did exactly what Tôn Đình had done.

I took a hammer to the wall behind the bathroom mirror.

The mirror shattered across the floor.

Glass pierced my skin.

I only wanted the baby out.

Numb all over, I struck again and again.

Crash!

After a tremendous bang, a fat black arm crawling with maggots protruded from the water heater beside the wall.

“AAAAH!”

I screamed wildly.

The police rushed in.

A neighbor had reported me for smashing a load-bearing wall.

As they detained me, I held up the little arm and kept repeating:

“She really... really was in the wall...”

At first, they thought it was a murder.

On closer inspection, the thing in my hand was only a realistic silicone arm.

Stuffed with rotten pork and fly eggs that had hatched into maggots.

That was the source of the smell in the heater.

After leaving the station, I was too shaken to stay home.

I went to my office.

My head was heavy and confused.

Everything spun.

Dizziness, blurred vision, terrible thirst.

I poured water and gulped it down.

Weakness followed.

I collapsed.

Hee hee hee...

That uncanny baby laughter sounded beside my ear.

I opened my eyes.

A dead fetus's face was in front of me.

Pale, with black eyes fixed on mine.

“Stay away!”

I shouted and ran from the office.

Outside were countless dead babies and Tôn Đìnhs.

They floated around me, laughing shrilly.

Gasping, I grabbed the fire axe and struck.

“Get away! All of you!”

Their blood hit my face.

Warm.

Even wounded, they kept laughing and crowding around, scratching me.

I went completely mad, swinging wildly.

Then the spinning and weakness returned.

I blacked out again...

When I woke, I'd been admitted to a psychiatric hospital and confined to a small room.

A psychiatrist stood before me, reading the case notes.

“The patient experienced a psychiatric episode at work, mistook employees for ghosts, and injured them with a fire axe. He was admitted for treatment.”

Distraught, I muttered:

“Baby, Daddy's sorry... Darling, I'm sorry...”

Beyond the glass, I saw a familiar face.

Tôn Đình.

She was here again!

“Darling, I was wrong! I really was! I'm worse than an animal!”

“You certainly are.”

On the other side, she spoke coldly.

“Oh, congratulations on your excellent judgment. That promiscuous Tô Tô was arrested for providing sexual services to rich young heirs.”

“I'm worse than an animal!”

I screamed.

“I'll break the wall! I'll listen to you! I'll get our baby out!”

Her face stayed cold.

She said nothing more.

The psychiatrist beside her said:

“He's suffered a severe shock. His mental condition is very serious.”

Tôn Đình gave a faint smile.

“He deserves it.”

Looking at Hứa Lâm Hoa's still rather handsome face, she remembered their first meeting.

They'd been university classmates.

She'd fallen for his looks at first sight.

Because he was an orphan, she'd always helped him.

Perhaps it was pity.

Perhaps a maternal instinct.

Perhaps, eventually, it had become love.

Without quite realizing it, she'd become his girlfriend.

She shared her living allowance with him and went hungry herself, surviving on steamed buns.

Willingly, she'd funded his university education.

At last, she'd married him as she'd wished.

Only afterward did she discover that his ambition exceeded his effort.

He refused practical work.

Lazy, poor at following through.

Apart from holding out his hand for money to amuse himself, he wouldn't do anything, large or small.

At first, she patiently encouraged him to support himself.

He always said his aspirations and future were too grand for such trivial tasks.

Eventually, she couldn't stop herself scolding him for depending on his wife's money.

Calling him cowardly.

Only then did he stir and consider starting a company.

She supported him wholeheartedly.

With her quiet assistance, he found several successful hometown acquaintances to invest.

They raised enough startup capital.

Before long, she realized he couldn't run the business.

So she began managing it herself.

She genuinely wanted it to succeed.

An executive at a partner hospital demanded three glasses of baijiu before signing a contract.

To close the deal, she drank them.

Once she was drunk, he tried to get her into bed.

She fought desperately and managed to protect herself.

For the company and their family, she continued working hard even while pregnant.

Then she discovered her husband was involved with a little hospital nurse named Tô Tô.

She was angrier than she'd ever been.

She called him shameless.

An animal.

He showed no remorse.

Instead, he tried to harm her.

She saw him put an abortifacient in her food.

At that moment, she decided to turn his plan against him.

She pretended to take the drug.

When he wasn't watching, she spat it out.

Secretly, she had relatives set a trap and record Tô Tô accepting patients' cash gifts.

The nurse lost her job.

On the day of the operation, Tôn Đình gave birth to a healthy girl.

The blue-purple “baby” was a realistic silicone doll she'd bought.

To avenge herself, she entrusted her daughter to a distant aunt and followed his plan by pretending to lose her mind.

Then Hứa Lâm Hoa heard she'd been killed by a train.

How could she be dead?

She'd bribed someone at the mortuary, found a corpse of similar build, and put her ID in its clothes.

A staged death.

He'd assumed the train victim was her.

Afterward, she secretly returned to their home and office and put a powerful hallucinogen in the drinking-water dispensers.

Just as he'd done to her, she played recordings beside him while he slept.

“Darling... Our baby's really in the wall. Save her... Your wife and child have become ghosts. They've come to find you...”

“Hee hee hee...”

She believed the drugs and recordings would make him smash the wall.

And once he did, he'd find the silicone doll stuffed with dead pig flesh in the water heater.

She'd paid Widow Vương to retrieve that doll from the hills.

Hứa Lâm Hoa had wanted her declared insane so he could seize control.

In the end, he was the one sent to a psychiatric hospital.

With a certificate confirming her own sound mental health and video of him attacking employees, she reclaimed the shares before the board.

She'd made many preparations.

In the countryside, she'd bribed Widow Vương, a woman on a low income whose husband had cheated.

Widow Vương hated unfaithful men.

Outraged, she'd said she would help punish him even without payment.

She spread the rumor that the buried child had crawled out of the hills.

As the saying went, an innocent conscience didn't fear a ghost at the door.

Hứa Lâm Hoa was guilty about poisoning the fetus.

Her words would terrify him and keep him wondering where the baby was.

Whether she'd really crawled out to find him.

In fact, on the very night of the burial, Tôn Đình had asked Widow Vương to dig it up.

The widow said the wooden coffin was broken when she retrieved the doll.

Blood from the dead pork had seeped into the earth.

He must have used too much force and packed the soil too tightly, breaking the coffin.

She handed the meat-filled doll back to Tôn Đình.

Tôn Đình put it in the water heater in their city apartment.

She'd originally intended to hide it in the wall.

But it was load-bearing.

She couldn't touch it.

Whatever the details, he had finally gone completely mad.

Her counterattack had succeeded.

In gentle sunlight, a breeze passed over the pram.

The little girl watched the hanging bell and laughed happily.

Tôn Đình smiled without realizing it.

When her daughter grew up, she would tell her:

“Love always takes effort from both people. May you find someone mature to love. May stubbornness bring you less pain, and may it never be too late when you finally see clearly.”

Inside the psychiatric room, after Tôn Đình, her daughter, and the psychiatrist left, I stopped pretending.

Stopped acting out.

She hadn't given me much of the drug.

I'd been a little confused.

Not truly insane.

I'd kept screaming because only by becoming a madman could I escape her completely.

I knew her.

She wouldn't divorce me.

My plan had failed utterly.

From now on, I'd always live beneath her shadow.

Over my attempt to kill the baby, she held every moral and legal advantage.

She'd use every means to humiliate me.

Curse me.

Bully me.

Even reform me.

She'd make me surrender all my shares and turn me into a programmed robot.

At home, a cleaning expert and emotional dumping ground.

In bed, an endlessly performing, groveling “good husband.”

At work, a superhuman labor machine.

That was her definition of a good man.

It wasn't the life I wanted.

She always thought a man who loved her should change for her.

With Tôn Đình, I became less and less myself.

Less willing to oppose her.

Less able to make my own decisions.

More cowardly.

Deep inside, something gradually woke and screamed:

“Why am I always the one who has to change?”

“Tôn Đình, when will you change a little for me?”

“Can't you stop berating me so cruelly?”

That “reform” was the gentlest, cruelest blade.

Perhaps she only wanted to scold me into improving.

Becoming better.

She'd always believed the whip could forge a successful husband.

Believed that one day, she'd finally scold me awake.

Then I'd truly strive to get ahead.

I couldn't accept that method.

I couldn't endure the pain of her “teaching” anymore.

Better to stay in this psychiatric hospital.

It was good here.

At least...

No one would call me a coward again.