Chapter 7

The procuratorate’s opinion was that the circumstances were especially serious.

I visited Father once.

He had grown thin, and his back was hunched.

He kept repeating the same thing.

He said he had been very sleepy that night.

He said Chuyue had cried and told him that unless they made it look real, Ranning would never believe it.

He said at the time he thought it would only last half a month.

Chapter 10

The day of the trial was bright and clear.

The public gallery was packed.

There were reporters, former Su Group employees, and many people I didn’t know.

No one from the Pei family came.

The Pei family no longer needed Pei Xun.

When Jiang Chuyue was led in, she had grown so thin she was almost unrecognizable.

Her gaze swept across the public gallery.

From the front row to the very back.

She was looking for my father.

She was still waiting for someone to speak up for her.

But Father sat in the front row of the defendants’ dock. He never turned around once.

The indictment took forty minutes to read.

Each time a charge was read out, whispers rippled through the gallery.

When the final charge was read, Jiang Chuyue suddenly burst into tears.

She pointed at the three men in the front row.

“You agreed to it too!”

“I wasn’t the only one who staged the whole thing!”

“Pei Xun told us to find the creditors. Father gave his approval when they came to the house!”

“All I did was cry a few times and make a shallow cut. You were ready to do anything!”

She cried and laughed hysterically.

“You didn’t feel indebted to me.”

“You felt indebted to my mother.”

The courtroom fell silent for a moment.

No one contradicted her.

Because half of what she said was true.

The judge ordered her to remain silent.

Then he asked Pei Xun whether he had any final words.

Pei Xun stood.

He was still gripping the pregnancy test result.

The paper had gone soft, its corners frayed and worn.

“I have only one thing to say.”

“I thought she wouldn’t die.”

The first-instance verdict was delivered a month later.

On the day the sentence was announced, Father turned around and looked at Jiang Chuyue one last time.

“I used to think that if I owed someone, I had to repay them at any cost.”

“Only later did I understand that repaying one person shouldn’t mean sacrificing someone else.”

“My debt to your mother was mine.”

“I shouldn’t have used my wife and daughters’ lives to settle my old debt.”

Someone in the public gallery was crying.

The courtroom was otherwise silent.

As Jiang Chuyue was led away, she kept looking back.

The ringleader among the three creditors was sentenced to life in prison. The other two each received twenty years.

Jiang Chuyue, the mastermind behind the unlawful detention that resulted in death, received life in prison.

Pei Xun received fifteen years.

Su Cheng received twelve years.

Su Shaoze received ten years.

The wind swept across the courthouse steps.

I stood outside the crowd, watching it all in silence.

I had hated her.

I hated her for taking my parents, my engagement, and my child from me.

But now I realized she no longer deserved even half an ounce of my attention.

Jiang Chuyue was certainly hateful.

But without Father’s repeated favoritism, my brother’s words that she was “more like his sister,” and Pei Xun’s bottomless indulgence—

A young woman who had just entered the Su residence with nothing to her name could never have made it to the door of the main house.

Malice is a seed.

What lets it take root and grow are those seemingly harmless concessions.

I turned and walked out of the courthouse.

At the end of the long road, Mother was waiting for me at the crossroads.

My sister stood beside her, holding a candle.

It was the candle from the birthday cake.

“Big Sister, my cake…”

She said, “I don’t want the one they dropped on the ground.”

“I bought this one myself.”

I smiled.

The glow in Mother’s arms had turned into a chubby, fair-skinned baby.

He tugged at Mother’s clothes and giggled.

“Let’s go,” Mother said.

I looked back at the city one last time.

The Su Group’s building was still there.

The Pei Group’s building was still there too.

But the people inside those buildings could never come back.

I had once been the eldest daughter of the Su family.

Pei Xun’s fiancée.

The mother of a child who had not yet been born or given a name.

They wanted me to be afraid.

Afraid enough to lower my head, afraid enough to sign, afraid enough to walk out of the Su residence on my own.

But they forgot something.

When a person has been frightened to the limit, there is nothing left to fear.

In those final two weeks, I experienced every fear I could ever have faced in this life.

There are no lamps on the road to the Yellow Springs.

I don’t need them either.

My sister took my hand and asked, “Big Sister, will you get married in your next life?”

I thought about it, then shook my head.

“What do you want to do, then?”

I looked toward the end of the long road.

The dawn was just breaking there, over a vast and open world.