Chapter 3

But if the answer were that simple, she would not have told me this way.

There had to be something else.

I sprang to my feet.

“Officer Sun, I need to go somewhere.”

“Where?”

“The cemetery where Lin Shu’s parents are buried.”

Her parents were buried at Qingshan Cemetery on the outskirts of the city.

Three years earlier, the crash had taken them both.

Lin Shu had cried so hard she could barely stand. I had supported her through the entire funeral.

Their shared headstone was black marble, engraved with their names and the dates of their births and deaths.

Below it, a stone slab sealed the compartment containing their urns.

I knelt before the headstone and ran my fingers along the slab’s edge.

It was loose.

My heart began to race.

I heaved it up, revealing the urns.

A bulging kraft-paper envelope had been tucked beside them.

I pulled it out and opened it with shaking fingers.

Inside was a stack of documents. On top lay a DNA kinship report.

It gave a 99.99 percent probability that Lin Shu and a woman named Lin Yao were full sisters, sharing both parents.

A buzzing filled my head.

Lin Yao…

Lin Shu actually had an older sister. A sister born of the same mother and father.

I kept reading.

The second document was an agreement to transfer shares as a gift.

It stated that Lin Shu voluntarily gave Lin Yao fifteen percent of Lin Group’s shares, held in her own name, without payment.

The signing date was March 20, 2026.

Two days before Lin Shu’s trip to Yunnan.

The agreement bore her signature and fingerprint, and the seal of a notary’s office.

It was legally valid.

I clutched the documents, large tears falling onto the pages.

After her parents died, Lin Shu had often told me, “Xiaoyu, sometimes I feel so alone. As though I’m floating in the air, with nothing under my feet.”

So when she learned that she still had an older sister, someone of her own blood, born of the same mother, she must have been overjoyed.

That was why she had hugged me before her trip and said, “When I get back, Xiaoyu, I’ll have good news for you.”

This was the good news.

She had wanted to give half her shares to an older sister she had never met.

She could not even wait until she returned. She had signed the agreement already.

And now…

I thought of the woman with Lin Shu’s exact face.

That very sister might well have been the one who took her life.

I gripped the papers, shaking all over.

Officer Sun stood behind me. After a long silence, he said, “We need to take these back to the station.”

“Go home and rest. Leave the rest to us.”

I shook my head.

“I’m not leaving. I want to stay with her.”

“Who?”

“Lin Shu.”

The forensic examiner was still conducting further examinations.

I sat on a bench in the corridor, staring at the white wall opposite while the details replayed in my mind.

Lin Yao.

Lin Shu’s older twin sister.

They looked identical.

That was how Jiang Yue had been able to let Lin Yao replace her.

No. Looking alike was not enough.

Lin Yao must have spent a great deal of time learning everything about Lin Shu.

Her speech, her habits, the way she dealt with people. Every little thing between her and me.

But how could Lin Yao know so much?

There was only one answer: Jiang Yue.

He had been Lin Shu’s boyfriend for three years.

In that time, he had learned everything about her.

Her eating habits, her social connections, all the little secrets between her and me.

He had told Lin Yao all of it.

That was how he had turned her into another Lin Shu, one nobody but me could recognize as false.

But he had missed one thing.

The promise between Lin Shu and me.

She had said that whenever we ate together, she would use only her right hand.

Had Jiang Yue known about it?

Perhaps she had told him. Perhaps she had not.

Even if she had, he surely would not have cared.

Who would take a promise about which hand to eat with seriously?

Lin Shu had.

And I remembered.

That was why Lin Yao had failed.

In the end, this one detail had undone her.

I leaned against the wall, tears falling again.

Footsteps sounded at the end of the corridor.

Officer Sun approached with a folder.

“Miss Song, we have some progress.”

I looked up.

“We obtained the airport surveillance footage. Lin Shu did go to the airport on the day of departure, and she checked in.”

“But before passing through security, she hurried out of the terminal.”

“No one saw her after that.”

My heart clenched.

“That afternoon, there was also a passenger named Lin Yao on the same flight.”

I clenched my fists.

“Then the real Lin Shu had already… at the airport…”

“That is how it appears at present.”

He paused.

“We have also located Jiang Yue and Lin Yao. We will arrest them tonight.”

I shot to my feet.

“I want to come.”

“No. You cannot.”

I looked him straight in the eye. “I want to come.”

“She was my best friend. She’s dead. I have to see them arrested myself.”

Officer Sun was silent for a long time. At last, he sighed.

“You stay in the car. Do not get out.”

Jiang Yue and Lin Yao lived in an upscale apartment complex east of the city, in a home Jiang Yue had bought the year before.

I had visited once. Showing me around, Lin Shu had smiled and said, “Look, Xiaoyu. This is the home Jiang Yue has prepared for me.”

Her face had been full of happiness.

She had not known that the man preparing her “new home” was plotting to take everything she had.

With their lights off, the police cars parked silently in a row outside the complex.

Officer Sun led more than ten plainclothes officers into the building under cover of darkness.

I sat in the car, gazing through the window at a lighted window above.

Three minutes later, his voice came over the radio.

“Secured. Both are here.”

I opened the door and ran.

The elevator took me to the eighteenth floor. As soon as the doors opened, I heard Lin Yao’s voice.

She was crying.

“What right do you have to arrest me? I haven’t done anything wrong!”

When I entered the living room, two female officers were holding her down on the sofa.

She wore pajamas. Her hair was disheveled, her face wet with tears.

The moment she saw me, her crying stopped.

She stared with a strange expression.

As though she understood.

As though she could not accept it.

As though she was curious.

“You called the police?”

I said nothing.

“How did you know?”

She tilted her head slightly. The movement was exactly Lin Shu’s.

“Her voice, her habits, her expressions—I practiced for two years.”

“Even Jiang Yue said there were times he couldn’t tell us apart.”

Genuine puzzlement showed in her eyes.

“How on earth did you recognize me?”

I stared at her face.

Lin Shu’s face.

“Lin Shu promised me she would use only her right hand whenever she ate with me.”

Lin Yao froze.

My voice shook.

“You learned so much about her. But you never learned that.”

She was silent for a long time.

Then she laughed.

“Her right hand… she actually took that seriously.”

“She took everything seriously,” I said. “Especially anything to do with the people she cared about.”

Lin Yao said no more.

The officers led her away.

The corridor fell quiet.

Officer Sun emerged from the bedroom, followed by two officers escorting Jiang Yue.

His head hung low. His hands were cuffed, his face white.

At the sight of me, his lips moved, as though he wanted to say something. In the end, he said nothing.

I looked at him and remembered Lin Shu’s words.

“Jiang Yue is different. He really cares about me.”

Shushu, you were such a terrible judge of people.

Questioning began the next day.

I had expected denials, lawyers, every possible attempt to refute the accusations.

But that was not what happened.

When Officer Sun placed the autopsy report in front of Jiang Yue, he stared at it for five full minutes.

Then he cried.

“I did it,” he said. “Lin Yao had nothing to do with it. Let her go.”

Hearing that from the next interview room, Lin Yao began crying too.

“It wasn’t him. I told him to do it. If you’re going to sentence someone, sentence me.”

The way they competed to take the blame made them look like devoted lovers.

But Lin Shu’s body still lay on a cold autopsy table.

Questioning went on all day.

By evening, they had finally confessed everything.

The truth was crueler than I had imagined.

Twenty-seven years earlier, Lin Shu’s mother had given birth to twin girls.

The Lins were a prominent local family. Lin Shu’s grandfather had founded Lin Group.

But he valued sons over daughters and had always wanted a grandson.

Her mother had given birth twice, both times to girls. The family had treated her coldly for it.

Then a fortune-teller declared that the elder twin had an ominous destiny. She would bring death to her parents and ruin to the family—a calamity reborn.

Lin Shu’s grandfather believed him.

He had the newborn elder girl carried away and abandoned in a burial ground outside the city.

Weak after childbirth, Lin Shu’s mother had not even had the strength to resist.

That abandoned baby was Lin Yao.

She did not die.

An elderly woman from a family surnamed Lin happened to pass the burial ground that day. Hearing a baby cry, she took her home.

The family was poor, but the old woman was kind and did her best to raise Lin Yao.

Lin Yao had known since childhood that she was a foundling. She had not known her true origins.