Weaving past the shelves packed with goods, the seating area of the convenience store opened up in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows that faced the street.

Zhou Jin and Jiang Hansheng sat down side by side, each with a cup of instant noodles and a can of beer in front of them.

Zhou Jin had to take a work call that came in unexpectedly, so Jiang Hansheng waited quietly beside her.

The store wasn’t very crowded yet. One seat to Jiang Hansheng’s right sat empty, and beyond it, two female high school students in uniforms were seated. They had their hands pressed over their mouths, whispering to each other — and every so often, they stole glances in Jiang Hansheng’s direction.

Most likely discussing his looks, and speculating about his relationship with the woman beside him.

The dining environment made Jiang Hansheng feel a little uncomfortable.

Not long after, Zhou Jin ended her call. She paused for a moment, then hooked the tab of her beer can open with one hand. A sharp hiss of carbonation burst out, breaking the silence between them.

Zhou Jin slid the beer across the table toward him.

Jiang Hansheng glanced at her, mildly surprised. “I’ll skip the beer. I’ll drive us back.”

Zhou Jin said: “I’m going to ask you questions. If you don’t want to answer, drink.”

Jiang Hansheng studied her expression carefully, then asked with caution: “Are you angry with me?”

“Save it.” Zhou Jin raised an eyebrow. “Shall I begin?”

Jiang Hansheng straightened his back. He looked at the chilled can of beer, then turned to face Zhou Jin, and nodded. “All right. Go ahead.”

Zhou Jin rested her fingers on the table and tapped twice. “When did you become a professor at the university?”

Jiang Hansheng: “About three years ago.”

She tapped twice more. “And when did you leave the provincial bureau?”

Jiang Hansheng: “Five years ago.”

She tapped twice again, just about to ask another question — when Jiang Hansheng suddenly reached out and took hold of her hand.

Zhou Jin’s fingers were roughened from work, but they felt soft to the touch. Jiang Hansheng held them in his palm and traced over them slowly with his thumb.

As though she had been seen through entirely, Zhou Jin’s heart tightened without warning.

She saw something settle deep in Jiang Hansheng’s beautiful eyes — a weight, a quiet grief — that left her, for no clear reason, with an aching sense of pity.

His voice dropped very low. “I’m not your suspect.”

Beginning with innocuous questions, using a repeated physical gesture as reinforcement, and gradually building a conditioned link between that gesture and the act of telling the truth — it was an interrogation technique.

“Pavlovian conditioning. That’s the lesson I teach on the first day of my criminal interrogation course,” Jiang Hansheng said. “Zhou Jin — don’t do this to me.”

Zhou Jin pressed her lips together, withdrew her hand, and said quietly: “I’m sorry.”

“Whatever you want to ask — I’ll answer,” Jiang Hansheng said.

“All right. Then I’ll ask directly.” Zhou Jin said. “Do you have feelings for me?”

Zhou Jin’s bluntness left Jiang Hansheng momentarily frozen. For an instant, it felt as though the air around them had solidified, and every set of eyes in the vicinity had turned their way.

He pressed his lips together, but still gave his answer: “Yes.”

“Since when?”

Jiang Hansheng made the decision to lie: “Since the blind date.”

Zhou Jin shot him a doubtful look, then said: “What is it about me that you like? With everything you have going for you, you could obviously find someone far better — someone who wouldn’t be like me, too caught up in work to come home. Someone who could take care of you, who could—”

Jiang Hansheng cut her off: “No one could be better than you.”

He said it without so much as a flicker of expression — delivering what appeared to be a perfectly objective and well-grounded assessment.

Even if the content of that assessment sounded anything but objective.

Zhou Jin had come in direct, but she hadn’t expected Jiang Hansheng to be just as direct in return. His response put her a little off balance. She chose to cut straight to the heart of it, and asked: “Then did you marry me because of your feelings for me — or because of my brother’s case?”

Jiang Hansheng: “Why do you ask that?”

“You worked at the provincial bureau. You were involved in ‘8·17.’ You already knew my brother.”

Jiang Hansheng’s fingers tightened almost imperceptibly. “Who told you?”

Zhou Jin crossed her arms, putting up a guarded front. Jiang Hansheng noticed it without showing any reaction.

She answered his question with a question of her own: “Does it matter? It was someone I trust. They didn’t get it wrong — did they?”

Jiang Hansheng went quiet, clearly reluctant to answer, and picked up the beer and took a long drink.

The sharp, unfamiliar taste made him frown slightly. Still horrible.

Seeing him reach for the beer, Zhou Jin raised an eyebrow. After a short pause, she asked again: “Back then — was it you who gave Chief Yao the leads that allowed him to recover some of the stolen firearms?”

A different angle on the same question.

Jiang Hansheng wrapped his fingers around the cold beer can. A trace of weary resignation surfaced between his brows. “Zhou Jin, this isn’t fair.”

Zhou Jin held firm: “If you don’t want to answer, you can keep drinking. Either way, I’m going to keep asking.”

“…”

The alcohol had brought a faint flush of color to his fine-featured, pale face — yet his expression remained cool.

Zhou Jin couldn’t hold her ground against a Jiang Hansheng like this for very long. In the end, she was the one who surrendered.

She reached across and laid her hand over the back of his, and said softly: “If it were anyone else, I’d be trying every possible way to get everything they knew about ‘8·17’ out of them. But the moment I found out it was you — the first thing I wanted to ask wasn’t about ‘8·17.’ I want to know whether the reason you came into my life was something else entirely.”

“Zhou Jin…”

“Jiang Hansheng — please don’t lie to me.” She pressed down with a little more force, holding his hand tightly.

That kind of devastating blow — she never wanted to live through it a second time.

Back then, she had followed orders and burst into a hotel room, and found him there — a man who had excelled at everything, a man she had looked up to and worshipped like a god for so many years — being marched in at his most broken, most humiliating, and forced to kneel before her.

She could almost hear Jiang Cheng’s trembling voice again.

I never imagined you’d be the one to come.

Xiao Wu — it’s not what it looks like.

Zhou Jin had been so numb in that moment that she hadn’t reacted at all. She had stood there looking at him — and at the beautiful woman beside him, shaking all over, weeping quietly — her mind a perfect blank.

Only when Jiang Cheng was held down by the other officers and removed entirely from her field of vision did a suffocating, crushing ache split open in her chest.

Something twisted in her stomach. Zhou Jin had clapped a hand over her mouth and run to the bathroom, retching over and over.

Perhaps she would never forget that feeling for the rest of her life. She had long since lost count of how many nights she had woken from exactly that nightmare.

What had drawn her to marrying Jiang Hansheng was the loyalty she had sensed in him.

He had always kept himself apart from all of that — absorbed entirely in his academic work, without any history of relationships, without any bad habits, and having never so much as set foot inside a nightclub.

When they went on dates, Jiang Hansheng was unfailingly attentive, unfailingly patient. He was willing to listen to her talk — to sit with her through her rambling, half-finished accounts of cases with no beginning and no end.

When they were together, even in complete silence, Jiang Hansheng never seemed bored.

Zhou Jin could feel it — that every bit of his tolerance and tenderness toward her came from somewhere genuine, not from deliberate performance. Though she hadn’t thought too deeply about it at the time, simply taking it as a reflection of his good character and upbringing.

So when he had gone down on one knee, holding out flowers and a ring to propose, a single thought had passed through Zhou Jin’s mind —

She liked being with him.

By now, the sky outside had gone completely dark. After a sudden crack of thunder, rain came down in torrents.

Driven sideways by the wind, the rain hit against the glass window before her and streamed downward in long trails, blurring the flow of traffic on the street below into something soft and indistinct.

The light that drifted through the night swept across Jiang Hansheng’s face, making those dark eyes and brows appear even deeper, even more still.

A long silence passed.

At last, Jiang Hansheng spoke: “Have you ever heard of the Huaiguang serial murder case?”