I thought Zhou Haiyan wasn’t coming back.
So the moment I saw him appear in the doorway carrying a thermal food container, my eyes went wide, afraid it might just be an illusion.
He walked over and set the container down by the bed.
Sounding put out, he said, “The kid didn’t listen, so discipline is discipline, but I can’t exactly throw you away, can I?”
I stared at him without blinking.
Tears slid down again without my meaning them to.
He turned and met my eyes, lips moving before he finally forced the words out.
“Crying, crying, always crying. You’ll cry away all your good fortune.”
However harsh his tone sounded, the hand wiping my tears was just as gentle.
I choked out, “I’m sorry, big brother. I won’t do it again, I promise. Please don’t be angry with me anymore.”
The moment he appeared, I had to admit that every word I’d used to console myself had been a lie—I’d only been fooling myself.
I couldn’t bear to lose him. I couldn’t bear to lose Auntie. I couldn’t bear to lose that home.
He didn’t say anything, just twisted open the container and poured out the pigeon soup inside.
Once it had cooled, he held the bowl and fed it to me himself.
Unsure of where I stood with him, I ate the soup one spoonful at a time, mixed with tears.
Only once the bowl was empty did he finally speak.
“What’s there to be mad about? A grown-up doesn’t hold a grudge against a kid’s mistake.”
The weight lifted off my chest at once, and I couldn’t help the corners of my mouth curling up.
It was the joy of getting something back after fearing it lost forever.
Suddenly I thought of something.
“Big brother, does Auntie know? Please don’t tell her—just say I went to school.”
He raised an eyebrow slightly, his tone flat.
“Scared now, are you? Too late for that.
“Guess who made this soup?”
“…”
Sometimes, someone who doesn’t get angry is far more frightening than someone who does.
When Auntie saw me, she didn’t say a single harsh word—she just cried out of sheer heartbreak, blaming herself for not taking better care of me.
She said that if anything terrible had happened to me that day, she would have lived the rest of her life in guilt.
She asked me if there was something she hadn’t done well enough, if she hadn’t given me enough sense of security, and that was why I didn’t feel settled.
I felt so guilty I didn’t know what to say.
I hadn’t regretted collapsing on the ground covered in blood. I hadn’t regretted misunderstanding that Zhou Haiyan didn’t want me anymore. But seeing Auntie cry—that, I regretted.
Because I saw, so clearly, real maternal guilt and worry in her—an emotion I had never once seen in my own mother.
After a week in the hospital, once I was back home, Auntie squeezed into the same bed with me for a whole month just to make it easier to look after me.
She bathed me, combed my hair, changed my bandages, tending to every last detail.
A gentle blade cuts the deepest.
I swore over and over that I’d never do anything like that again, and only then did the worry Auntie had been carrying for so long finally settle.
…
Sometimes life takes an unexpected turn, and beyond the dead end, a whole new path opens up.
Just when I thought there was nothing to be done about my father—
one evening, Officer Fu was chatting with my brother, mentioning that a new cheating technique had recently surfaced at the gambling dens, and quite a few families had been destroyed because of it.
In a flash, I suddenly remembered that afternoon I’d gone home to grab my piggy bank—I’d seen a deck of playing cards on the table, and beside it something that looked like a pair of glasses, even though my father wasn’t nearsighted.
So I asked Officer Fu exactly what this cheating technique involved.
He explained that cheaters would carry a specially made deck of cards, indistinguishable from ordinary ones on the surface—but once they put on specially made contact lenses, hidden fluorescent numbers and symbols on the backs of the cards became clearly visible.
It matched exactly with what I’d seen.
And it was right around that time that my father had suddenly gotten lucky and started winning big.
I told my brother and Officer Fu about my discovery.
Within a week, my father was caught cheating red-handed at a gambling den run by an out-of-town boss. Behind the scenes, the one who’d supplied him with the equipment turned out to be the very casino boss, surnamed Zhu, who had indirectly driven my mother to her death all those years ago.
Conflict between the two gambling operations erupted almost immediately—a victim reported it to the police, and it came out that Boss Zhu’s operation had been using cheating schemes to rake in enormous profits, repeatedly.
To get himself off clean, someone needed to take the fall. Boss Zhu pushed my father forward as the scapegoat—whatever benefit he’d secretly promised him, it was enough to make my father go to prison willingly on his behalf.
And so, on January 1st, 2014, came the best news of all.
Tang Shiguo, having committed gambling and fraud offenses of a serious nature involving a substantial sum, was sentenced to four years and nine months in prison.
The moment I learned he’d gone to prison, I felt an overwhelming sense of relief, as if a great weight had lifted.
Finally, this wasn’t just false hope again.
It was only then that the last shred of worry standing between me and truly belonging to the Zhou family was finally swept away completely. My soul returned to them, like water flowing home to the depths of the sea, and I felt, truly and fully, the aliveness of my own existence.