In a private room on the same floor, Jiang Hansheng had also been awake for a short while.

Sitting beside him at the edge of the bed was Jiang Bozhi.

Jiang Bozhi handed him a peeled apple.

Jiang Hansheng’s expression was neutral. He took it, thanked him, ate two bites, and set it back in the fruit dish.

“There’s a full-body examination scheduled a little later,” Jiang Bozhi said. “We want to make sure there are no internal injuries. You’re still young—you don’t want to leave yourself with lasting problems.”

“Alright.” A quiet, detached answer. His gaze drifted to the window, and he fell into the kind of silence that made it clear he didn’t feel like talking.

Jiang Bozhi could see that his manner was neither warm nor cold. He tried again to find something to say. “I went to see Zhou Jin. Her parents are there too.”

Jiang Hansheng’s gaze returned to him, and he waited quietly for the rest.

Jiang Bozhi could see he was concerned about Zhou Jin’s condition, and continued: “The doctor says it’s exhaustion, combined with a mild concussion. She just needs rest.”

Nothing serious, then. Jiang Hansheng allowed himself a quiet, internal breath of relief.

At that moment, Jiang Bozhi’s phone rang. He silenced it—and two or three seconds later, the caller tried again. The same thing happened twice more. Clearly something urgent.

Jiang Hansheng could see his difficulty. “Go ahead,” he said lightly. “I’ll be fine.”

Since the day Jiang Bozhi had mentioned wanting another child, the relationship between father and son had been anything but comfortable. An invisible wall of ice had formed around Jiang Hansheng, keeping every person at a careful, silent distance.

Jiang Hansheng refused to have any open or vulnerable exchange, and Jiang Bozhi had no way through to him. The silences between them stretched into rigidity, the atmosphere hardening with each passing minute.

Jiang Bozhi exhaled in quiet resignation and said: “Take care of yourself. I’ll come back tonight to sit with you.”

Jiang Hansheng declined: “There’s no need. I’ll be going home tonight.”

He had once spent a long, agonizing stretch of time in a facility not unlike a sealed-off rehabilitation ward. The particular smell of hospital disinfectant—catching him without warning—had a way of pulling him back into painful memories. The white walls, the blank, sterile expanse of them, made it worse.

He didn’t like this kind of place.

Jiang Hansheng, once he had made up his mind about something, was nearly impossible to sway. Jiang Bozhi didn’t press him further. After leaving the room, he made a phone call, asking the physician who conducted Jiang Hansheng’s routine checkups to come by a little later and take a look.

Before leaving, Jiang Bozhi stopped by Zhou Jin’s room again. She was already awake. Relieved, he turned to exchange a few words with Zhou Songyue in the easy, familiar manner of family.

Zhou Jin, watching the two of them talking and laughing, quickly understood: Jiang Hansheng had not yet told their families about the divorce.

She allowed herself a quiet exhale, got to her feet, slipped on her hospital sandals, and said to them: “I’m going to check on Hansheng.”

She was wearing a hospital gown, and her legs were still a little unsteady beneath her—but she didn’t slow down, and made her way as quickly as she could toward Jiang Hansheng’s room.

When she reached the door, she didn’t knock. She pushed it open directly.

Jiang Hansheng was sitting up in the hospital bed, undoing the buttons of his hospital gown one by one with one hand, preparing to change. He’d gotten halfway through when Zhou Jin came in.

Jiang Hansheng startled.

Zhou Jin took in the view of his collarbones and chest with undisguised appreciation, and let out a low, deliberate whistle.

Jiang Hansheng had felt entirely composed up until that point—but the whistle caught him completely off guard. He choked on it, coughing until his whole face turned red.

He refastened his buttons in haste, and when he noticed that Zhou Jin had already sat herself down beside him, said with considerable exasperation: “Why didn’t you knock?”

“The door wasn’t locked,” Zhou Jin explained.

Jiang Hansheng: “……”

Zhou Jin rested her hand gently on his leg—around where she thought the wound must be—and asked: “How are you doing?”

Jiang Hansheng said stiffly: “I’m fine.”

Zhou Jin studied him carefully from every angle, and finally met his beautiful eyes. She asked: “You haven’t told Mom and Dad about the divorce?”

At the word divorce, Jiang Hansheng’s hand tightened on the bedsheet. After a long pause, he said: “I’ll tell them once the papers are signed.”

Zhou Jin asked: “So as of right now—you still want to divorce me?”

“……”

“What’s your reason?”

“……”

“You resented me for not paying attention to you—that was my fault, and I’m apologizing for it. You said I didn’t want to have your child—for that, we were both in the wrong. Before we married, we agreed we wouldn’t think about it for the time being. You were the one who changed your mind first.”

Jiang Hansheng answered with great difficulty: “You should have refused me.”

What he had always wanted was never really a child—it was Zhou Jin.

Jiang Hansheng had always harbored a small, fragile hope—a quiet fantasy—telling himself that her not refusing meant acceptance. So when he saw the contraceptive pills, every last piece of that beautiful illusion shattered at once, and his emotions swung to the extreme.

“Which is why I said we were both wrong. Not refusing you—that was my mistake. Hiding the fact that I was taking the pills—that was also my mistake. I was afraid that if I told you, we would always end up arguing about children…”

Zhou Jin had been on many arranged dates before marrying. Every time she said she wasn’t ready to have children, the man’s enthusiasm for her would immediately cool. After marrying, she had noticed how much Jiang Hansheng wanted to be a father—and she couldn’t bring herself to keep throwing cold water on that every time he was happy, letting it become a wall between them.

And it wasn’t that Zhou Jin never wanted to have children. She did, very much.

Every day on her way to the serious crimes unit, she would walk past a crosswalk that led to a kindergarten. Sometimes she would catch sight of a group of small children following their teacher across the road, hands raised in the air, faces round and bright with color. The sight of them, so vibrantly alive, would make her smile before she even realized it.

It was only that she couldn’t yet let go of Zhou Chuan’s case.

She was thinking another year, perhaps two—and if the “8·17” case still showed no progress, she would learn to look forward instead, and think about children then.

After explaining all of this to Jiang Hansheng, she asked: “Now that I’ve said all that—can you stop being angry?”

“……”

“Why aren’t you saying anything?”

Jiang Hansheng was as sealed as a locked jar—he simply would not open himself up, no matter what. Even Jiang Bozhi had given up trying. But Zhou Jin was different. She refused to yield a single inch.

Zhou Jin shifted from defense to offense. She moved gradually, pressing closer toward Jiang Hansheng.

Quietly, she said: “Fine then, Professor Jiang. If you can tell me—right now—that you truly can’t stand me anymore, I will sign the divorce papers today. I’ll take the apartment and the car, and we’ll part cleanly.”

She could say it because she had the certainty to back it up. If Jiang Hansheng no longer cared for her, he would not have appeared at Kuang Mountain. He would not have staked his life to cut off that car.

Sure enough, he couldn’t say it. Instead, he said: “Zhou Jin, you don’t understand—this really isn’t about you.”

Zhou Jin saw that he had finally decided to speak. She sat up straight and arranged herself into an attentive, earnest posture, as if settling in for a lecture. “Tell me, then,” she said. “I’ll understand once you explain.”

Jiang Hansheng pressed his lips together briefly. Zhou Jin had every intention of pressing until she had reached the bottom of things, and she was looking at him with those clear, bright eyes that gave him no room to hide.

He couldn’t escape her gaze. “You saw it yourself that day,” he said finally. “Sometimes I can’t control my emotions. I end up hurting you.”

Jiang Hansheng could not forgive himself for having surrendered to jealousy in that moment. It left him profoundly shaken. He seemed deflated—and in Zhou Jin’s eyes, that deflation looked almost like something brittle, something that might break if handled wrong. It made her ache.

“Isn’t that normal?” she said. “I’m the same way sometimes. So the next time you lose your temper with me for no reason—I’ll give you a good beating first.” She made it sound like a joke, trying to ease the weight of his self-blame.

But Jiang Hansheng looked entirely serious. “It’s not the same.”

“How is it different?”

“Because I am not good, Zhou Jin!” His hand seized the bedsheet abruptly. Jiang Hansheng’s brow drew tight. “You don’t know me. Not really.”

Zhou Jin stared at him, taken aback by the sudden shift in his emotion.

Jiang Hansheng said: “You’ve always wanted to know—how I always manage to find you, haven’t you? At the Phoenix Fire, at Jingang, and now at Kuang Mountain…”

He raised his head. The gaze looking back at her was shadowed, as though something dark had settled behind his eyes. He said: “It goes beyond that. In the past three years—I have known every place you have been.”

“……”

His voice was cold and even. “Is that still not clear enough? Zhou Jin—I have been following you. All along.”

Jiang Hansheng had once made the most fatal mistake of his life—he had selfishly kept the pocket watch engraved with Zhou Jin’s photograph pressed to his chest, as close to his heart as possible.

He had always thought of it as a talisman. His armor against any harm. But he had lost that pocket watch in the one place he should never have lost it.

It had fallen into Qi Yan’s hands.

Qi Yan had once held it up before Jiang Hansheng—taking the fine chain between his tongue like he was savoring the lips of a woman—then kissed the photograph inside with a kind of obsessive reverence.

Jiang Hansheng had stood there and watched Qi Yan defile Zhou Jin in that most vile way, and for the first time in his life, he had felt the desire to kill.

That desire had taken root inside him, and it grew—feeding on itself, until it approached something absolute, something capable of consuming and destroying him entirely.

It was under the grip of that desire—without any trace of reason left—that he had fired four shots at the already-surrendered “Qi Yan,” one of them striking him directly between the eyes. He needed it to be completely, irreversibly finished. He could not leave anything behind that might come back.

When the police swept the scene afterward, they never found the missing pocket watch. Though Yao Weihai had confirmed repeatedly that all four criminal members led by “Qi Yan” had been killed and posed no further threat, Jiang Hansheng still could not put his mind at rest.

He needed to atone for what his mistake had cost.

The police could not provide Zhou Jin with long-term protection based on a lost pocket watch. What the police could not do, Jiang Hansheng could only do himself.

After leaving the rehabilitation center, Jiang Hansheng took a teaching position at the University of Science and Technology in Haizhou—and from that day forward, every day, every single day…

He had been watching over her, quietly, from behind.

Just as he had when they were children—following in her footsteps.