Chapter 2

“Uncle Zhang, my father went back to his hometown. You’ve mistaken him for someone else.”

He answered too quickly.

Uncle Zhang’s face paled. He pulled me half a step back.

“Your father has a card-playing friend, Liu Detai. He looks a lot like Old Xu. Once, I even patted the wrong man on the shoulder when I saw him from a distance.”

“But once you sit down and talk, you can tell them apart right away. Old Liu rubs his fingers together. Your father doesn’t.”

My back stiffened.

Captain Chen had already come over.

Uncle Zhang lowered his voice and told him where the Liu family lived and when they had supposedly gone back to their hometown.

After hearing him out, Captain Chen sent two officers to the mouth of the alley to check their whereabouts and look for surveillance footage.

Liu Zhiyuan craned his neck to listen, but the police stopped him.

The man inside the house began cursing again.

“You say I’m someone else just because I ate a few bites of vegetables? What kind of daughter acts like this?”

I suddenly remembered the envelope from the hospital that I’d picked up from the mailbox when I got home tonight.

My father’s paper medical report had arrived.

I’d been so tired that I’d put it in a second-floor drawer without thinking.

“Captain Chen, I have a report.”

I gripped the stair rail.

“What he just said can be checked against it line by line. I’ll go get it.”

Liu Zhiyuan stepped across and blocked the stairs.

“Sis Ning, Uncle Xu is standing right here, alive and well. What are you going upstairs to look for?”

A female officer pushed him aside.

Captain Chen first asked which hospital my father had visited and on what date. He told a colleague to verify it, then took a call from the officers conducting inquiries.

The room fell quiet for a moment.

It had been nearly forty minutes since that man ate the spinach. He still hadn’t broken out in a rash, and the takeout had gone completely cold.

Liu Zhiyuan opened his folder and pulled out a move-out agreement.

The house’s address, the handover of the keys, a promise not to occupy it anymore.

Every blank had been filled in except the space for my signature.

“Weren’t you supposed to take him to the hardware store to pick up some tools?” I stared at him.

“Uncle Xu asked me to type this up for him.”

Liu Zhiyuan licked his lips and slid the paper across the table.

“I’ll waive the eight years of rent you supposedly owe. Just sign, and we can put tonight behind us.”

I looked up at the man.

“You don’t want the 192,000 anymore?”

“Would I, as your father, really force you to your death? Just move out!”

He replied too quickly.

Captain Chen ended his call and picked up the agreement.

“Why does she have to move out?”

“It’s my house. I can sell it if I want!”

The man spoke, then hastily corrected himself.

“I mean, it’s up to me whether I leave it empty or rent it out.”

Uncle Zhang sat by the windowsill, his expression growing grimmer by the minute.

Captain Chen told a colleague to keep checking the tour booking and asked the man for proof that he had canceled it.

He said he’d just wiped his phone and couldn’t find it anymore.

Liu Zhiyuan kept checking his watch.

Once, his phone lit up. He immediately turned it facedown against his thigh.

I leaned against the stairs and looked at my father’s slippers.

Their toes still pointed toward the door.

As if their owner had only stepped out to take out the trash and would be back any moment.

More than anything, I hoped I really had made a mistake tonight.

I would have accepted it if he yelled at me and demanded eight years’ rent.

But the man hadn’t looked at those slippers once.

“Go get the report,” Captain Chen said, signaling the female officer to accompany me. “Bring the original.”

I ran up the stairs, pulled open the drawer, and found the hospital envelope.

It was still sealed. The note I’d picked up from the mailbox was stuck to the front.

It was in my father’s handwriting.

“Keep Dad’s report somewhere safe. We’ll look at it when I get back. Don’t stay up late.”

At the last three words, my eyes suddenly blurred.

The female officer steadied me. I clutched the envelope and hurried downstairs.

Before I’d reached the last few steps, I heard Liu Zhiyuan say:

“Uncle Xu, the hardware store is about to close.”

The man grabbed his jacket.

“Officer, you’ve asked me everything. I have something to do. I’ll come back and talk later.”

“Wait.”

The moment Captain Chen turned around, I held the envelope up.

“There’s this, too!”

I tore it open and took out my father’s medical report, along with the follow-up records tucked inside, then handed them over.

“Last month, on the twelfth. I took him in myself. The hospital has the original records!”

The man reached out to snatch them.

The female officer stepped in front of me. Captain Chen had already taken the papers.

He skimmed the medical history, then looked up at the spinach on the table.

Just then, the officer beside him held out a work phone.

“Captain Chen, we found this at the Liu family’s place.”

The screen was lit, apparently playing a video.

Captain Chen’s expression changed abruptly.

Holding the report in one hand, he pushed me behind the female officer with the other.

The man was already rushing for the courtyard gate.

Captain Chen shouted:

“Stop him!”

5

The police blocked the courtyard gate.

The man tried to slip around them and knocked over the flowerpot by the entrance.

Liu Zhiyuan tried to squeeze out, too, but the officers twisted his arm behind his back and pinned him against the wall.

“What gives you the right to arrest me? She says he’s allergic, so he’s allergic? Since when is eating spinach a murder?”