Chapter 1

My husband was dead. His body had been found at the pork market at dawn.

Only last week, we had celebrated our tenth wedding anniversary. Last month, he had been appointed a doctoral supervisor.

Losing him was devastating. But what shocked me even more was what he had done the night before he died.

The first vendor to arrive at the market had discovered Mạnh Tuyền's body.

It was five in the morning, just getting light. My husband lay naked on a butcher's counter, surrounded by knives and chopping boards the vendors had left out. Facedown on that table, he looked like a pig waiting to be slaughtered.

Dark bruises covered his body. More than a dozen layers of tape had been wound around his face, distorting his features. That was what had killed him.

His mouth and nose had been sealed shut. He had suffocated.

I rushed to the scene in a daze and could barely believe that this was my husband.

The man who had once stood at a lectern, enthusiastically presenting his research, had died stripped of all dignity.

At the police station, they showed me the last footage of him alive.

On the black-and-white surveillance recording, two figures writhed together in the grass.

The outdoor camera's image was blurred, but I recognized one of them immediately.

My husband, Mạnh Tuyền. A University's youngest doctoral supervisor, only thirty-five.

“Ms. Lý, this is the last known footage of the victim. Can you confirm that the man in the video is your husband?”

I stared at the screen, cold all over. For a long time, I couldn't answer.

He had gone behind my back and done that with another woman out in the open?

In the recording, he looked like a primitive animal.

“Yes... that's him. Mạnh Tuyền.”

I shut my eyes, buried my face in my hands, and sobbed.

Almost six hours had passed since his body was discovered. From the moment I heard he was dead, grief had been tearing me apart.

Now that footage made a mockery of all my suffering.

I broke down right there in the station. A policewoman signaled to her colleague to stop questioning me.

“Give her some time. We can continue when she's calmer.”

They took me to a room where I could rest.

Several of Mạnh Tuyền's students stayed with me. Clearly, they had seen the footage too.

They looked appalled, but still tried to comfort me.

“Please try to take care of yourself, Mrs. Mạnh. If Professor Mạnh could see you now, he wouldn't want you to be so upset.”

Such naïve children.

He had cheated on me. Why would he care how I felt?

“The woman in the video,” I asked wearily. “Have any of you seen her before?”

They all shook their heads.

“Go on out. I'd like to be alone.”

At my insistence, they left one by one.

As a tall young man was about to go through the door, I called him back.

“Could you... come here for a moment?”

He looked surprised, but came over.

“What's your name?”

“Lâm Thanh Thần.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-four.”

Tall and handsome, he had all the vitality of youth. Exactly ten years younger than me.

“When I was your age, I'd just married your professor.”

Despite my grief and anger, I managed a smile.

“Lâm Thanh Thần, may I ask you something? Why did you secretly record the surveillance footage just now?”

“I... thought the woman looked familiar. I wanted to send it to a friend and see if we knew her.”

That remark gave the police a lead.

But when they brought the woman from the video to the station, I suffered another blow.

Her name was Vương Mạn Mạn.

She wore a denim jacket and platform shoes, with heavy, garish smoky eye makeup. Her hair was dyed pink and blue, and a chunky metal chain hung around her neck.

She even arrived with a cigarette between her fingers.

I found it hard to breathe.

Wasn't she the very picture of a wild party girl?

Mạnh Tuyền hadn't merely cheated on me. He had trampled my self-respect into the dirt.

I, Lý Tĩnh Nguyệt, might not have been a breathtaking beauty, but people had always praised my gentleness and refinement.

And he had cheated with someone like her?

Now everyone knew that my husband had slept with this sort of woman.

How could I ever show my face again?

My chest tightened as I looked at her. I wanted to charge over and demand an explanation.

But they quickly took her into an interview room.

Before she went in, I distinctly saw her stick out her tongue at me and give me the finger.

I was so furious I nearly fainted.

My own statement was finished. The police told me to go home and wait for news.

Instead, I sat on the edge of a flower bed outside the station and thought about my years with Mạnh Tuyền.

When we met, he had just begun his PhD. Friends had introduced us.

He was attracted to my looks. I was impressed by his education and prospects.

We married soon afterward.

Mạnh Tuyền came from a remote village. He had been the first person there to get into university. His name was still on the village's honor board.

He had an exceptional gift for research.

After our marriage, his career took off. He rose from lecturer to doctoral supervisor.

We had moved twice since our wedding and now lived in an upscale development in a prime part of the city.

He was gentle and considerate.

I didn't want children, and he had never pressured me.

To everyone else, we were the perfect couple.

Everyone envied me.

Then he suddenly died.

My phone rang almost nonstop. Messages poured in, all asking after me or offering comfort.

I called my parents back, told them I was at the station, and said I wasn't ready to go home.

A little later, Vương Mạn Mạn came out.

I stepped into her path.

“Move, old lady!”

She swore right in my face.

“What exactly was going on between you and Mạnh Tuyền?”

I ignored the insult and confronted her, casting an anxious glance across the road.

Why weren't my parents here yet?

To be honest, dealing with someone like her frightened me a little.

“What do you think? He's the father of my baby.”

She inspected her nails as she answered, too contemptuous even to look at me.

“You... you're pregnant?”

I shook with rage.

“Have you no shame?”

Smack!

She slapped me hard.

“You ***! Look at that miserable widow's face. You can't even keep your own husband, and you think you can insult me? ***!”

Filth streamed from her mouth.

My cheek burned.

I was about to hit back when a car pulled up beside us. Several reporters hurried out with cameras on their shoulders.

They were clearly looking for me.

I'd almost forgotten. Mạnh Tuyền was well known in City A as an outstanding young academic.

News of his death that morning had shocked the whole city. The media were following the case closely.

With reporters present, everything changed.

I didn't strike back.

Holding my cheek, I said calmly, “Yes, I'm a widow. How are you any different? You're carrying a bastard whose father died before it could even be born.”

“***!”

She flew into a rage, grabbed my hair, and started punching and kicking me.

It hurt terribly.

But I didn't dare fight back. I could only try to look helpless in front of the cameras.

The commotion brought police officers running to pull us apart.

My parents arrived at the same time.

Once we had been separated, an officer took me aside and lowered his voice.

“Ms. Lý, please calm down. Vương Mạn Mạn's baby isn't your husband's. The father is her boyfriend, Triệu Cương. We're arranging to bring him in for questioning.”

“Her boyfriend killed him?”

I couldn't think straight.

“Based on her statement, we have strong grounds to suspect him.”

Was that really it?

Why did I keep feeling that there was more to this?

I turned my head.

Across the road, my gaze met a pair of clear eyes.

Lâm Thanh Thần's.

At one in the morning, I woke from a dream, drenched in sweat.

The killer hadn't been caught. I couldn't find a moment's peace.

Who had killed Mạnh Tuyền?

Would that person come after me too?

Unable to sleep, I pushed aside the covers, got out of bed, and took a beer from the fridge. I tipped my head back and drank more than half the can.

It was the middle of the night, but the internet was still buzzing.

I opened the trending topics on my phone. Two headlines caught my eye.

“Thirty-Five-Year-Old Doctoral Supervisor Murdered in City A”

“University Lecturer Suspected of Sexual Assault”

I tapped on them apprehensively.

As expected, both were about Mạnh Tuyền.

One was the police announcement of his murder. The other contained the surveillance footage shown at the station.

The image had been blurred, but that did nothing to stop the flood of comments.

“Professor liked to party, huh? A good education clearly doesn't make you a good person.”

“Serves him right. Rapists deserve to die!”

“A doctoral supervisor could have his pick of women. Maybe someone set him up.”

“The man's dead. Have a little decency.”

Comment after comment scrolled past.

But what concerned me was who had put those videos online.

Besides those two, there was another recording of my confrontation with Vương Mạn Mạn outside the station.

In it, she attacked me like a madwoman while I looked utterly weak and defenseless.

The angle told me that whoever filmed it had been standing well away from us. It was nothing like the reporters' camera angles.

I knew.

It had to be Lâm Thanh Thần.

No one could fault Mạnh Tuyền's research, but he could be too demanding with his students.

Had Lâm Thanh Thần killed him over some grievance?

Once those videos went online, Mạnh Tuyền's reputation was finished.

Many people spoke up for me, outraged by his infidelity and condemning him for raping Vương Mạn Mạn.

But I knew the difference.

He had cheated. That was true.

The rape allegation was nothing more than an unfounded internet rumor.

According to Vương Mạn Mạn's statement, she had met him in a bar two days earlier.

“He came up and started talking to me. I was lonely, so I got in his car.

“I didn't know his name, let alone that he was some doctoral supervisor. I didn't even finish middle school. Why would I know about that stuff?

“You think I'm easy? I just wanted to piss off my boyfriend, so I didn't bother asking questions.

“Besides, we're both adults. If it's fun, why overthink it?”

That was what she had told the police.

Her boyfriend, Triệu Cương, had also been brought in and investigated. In the end, they established that he had nothing to do with the murder.

She had implicated him on a whim, making it all up.

For that, she received three days' detention.

I kept scrolling through the fierce arguments on the university forum and its Weibo page.

For the first time, I truly understood what it meant to be utterly disgraced.

Then one comment caught my eye.

“My name is Hứa Ngọc Dao. I graduated from A University four years ago. Mạnh Tuyền used to teach me. Under my real name, I am reporting that he sexually assaulted me and used his position as a lecturer to threaten me into not going to the police.”

A chill went through my heart.

I couldn't help wondering.

Who was the man I had shared a bed with for ten years?