That day, I said “goodbye” to his retreating back.

I thought this parting would mean waiting years to meet again.

But in truth, our next meeting would have to wait for the next life.

It was just an ordinary morning. I walked into the autopsy room as I always did, only to find that the person lying on the examination table was the one person I most wanted to see in the world.

“Deceased, surname Zhou, given name Haiyan, age thirty-one, male, height approximately 186 centimeters, weight 75 kilograms, time of death 48 hours…”

I couldn’t make out anything after that, only a ringing in my ears.

“Xiao Tang, did you know the deceased?”

“No.”

“Then you’ll handle the autopsy this time.”

“Understood.”

I forced myself to stay composed. My senior colleague glanced at me a couple extra times, but said nothing.

Prying open his already-stiffened right fist, I found, clutched tight in his palm, a crumpled ten-yuan bill, folded down into a small triangle.

I thought I would break down sobbing, screaming, howling. But in truth, I felt nothing at all—it was as if every emotion had been completely drained out of me, my heart still as calm water, without a single ripple.

It turns out that when a person’s grief reaches its absolute limit, a strange calm suddenly takes over—calm enough that I completed the entire procedure without so much as a change in my expression.

Along with his body came a video, documenting the inhuman torture he’d endured over thirty hours.

The traffickers had burned his body with fire, smashed his bones inch by inch with a hammer, torn open wound after wound with a whip. As he neared unconsciousness, they’d poured salt into the wounds, struck his face and head over and over with full force… in the end, tortured to death while still alive.

This was the desperate, cowardly last thrash of a border drug-trafficking ring, the largest of its kind, after being dismantled by Chinese authorities.

Zhou Haiyan had gone undercover for six years, working from within in coordination with Chinese police to finally bring down a trafficking network that had run rampant along the border for years unchecked—only to have his identity exposed right as the operation was about to conclude, and be subjected to the traffickers’ brutal retaliation.

…

At the hospital, Officer Fu, whom I hadn’t seen in six years, lay in a hospital bed, bandages wrapped around much of his body, dressed in blue-striped patient clothes, his right hand and left leg simply gone.

He said, “Little sister Tang. It’s been a long time.”

I said, “It’s been a long time.”

We stared at each other in silence for a long while.

Tears surged out of me, completely beyond my control.

“Brother Fu, how did Zhou Haiyan suddenly end up unable to come back?”

He paused, an expression of anguish crossing his face, the words that followed clearly difficult to force out.

“It was your father.”

“He got tricked into becoming a human drug mule at the border. Every time, the amount he carried was small, so his success rate was low, and it started to draw complaints from the people running things. To save his own skin, he did something absurd—he offered you up instead, said he had a daughter he could lure over to help them.”

“Brother Zhou secretly intercepted your information before it reached them. So when the operation was wrapping up, your father spotted Brother Zhou and, out of nowhere, insisted he was a police officer. In truth, your father was only trying to get revenge on him—but he happened to stumble onto the truth by pure, blind chance.”

“Once his identity was blown, he shielded the rest of us so we could get out first. He never made it out himself.”

My back went rigid against the wall, my mind going utterly blank.

I never could have imagined that reality could be this absurd, this cruel.

“So where is my father now?”

“Dead. Drug withdrawal took him.”

I didn’t know whether to laugh at how little his death deserved mourning, or to grieve on behalf of my Zhou Haiyan, for how unjust this world had been to him.

Or perhaps, to hate myself, for having been the one to drag him down.

After a long while.

He asked carefully, “How has she been doing, all these years?”

Then, mocking himself, he added, “Good thing I didn’t hold her back, since I was going to end up a cripple anyway.”

“Two years ago, she was in a car accident and became a vegetative case. Her family had been pressuring her into marriage, and she drove drunk up the mountain, and the car went over the edge with her still in it.

“She’s been waiting for you this whole time.”

In the empty hospital room, two poor souls abandoned by the world traded the very information they’d each most wanted to know, and in doing so, drove the deepest possible arrows straight into each other’s hearts.