After leaving the interrogation room, Jiang Hansheng went and spoke briefly with Director Liu about the current situation.

He didn’t disclose the specifics of what had been said — only that things were progressing well, and that the next steps would depend on Team Leader Tan’s coordination. Director Liu was, after all, a parachuted-in authority; as long as he had something satisfactory to report, he wouldn’t press too hard on the finer details. Before leaving, he mentioned the fishing outing to Jiang Hansheng in passing.

Jiang Hansheng agreed, of course.

About two hours later, Zhou Jin finally emerged from Tan Shiming’s office.

She hadn’t expected Jiang Hansheng to still be waiting for her.

He was sitting at her desk, reading the Chinese edition of The Lord of the Rings she’d bought some time ago.

Zhou Jin had bought it to learn more about the things Jiang Hansheng loved — but these past days she had been so consumed by the case, run completely ragged, that she’d never found the time to open it. The book was still pristine.

Jiang Hansheng caught her figure in his peripheral vision and looked up, offering her a gentle smile.

“Why haven’t you gone home to rest?” Zhou Jin asked, reaching out to press her hand to his forehead. “It’s not hot anymore. Have you taken your medicine?”

Jiang Hansheng caught her hand and answered quietly, “I’m all right.”

It was already past the end of their shift. Zhou Jin said, “Let’s go home. I’ll get the car.”

Jiang Hansheng was quiet for a moment, then suddenly asked her, “Zhou Jin — are you very tired?”

“Not at all.” Zhou Jin looked at him with a faint note of surprise, then smiled, trying to put his mind at ease. “I’m perfectly fine.”

Jiang Hansheng looked steadily at Zhou Jin. But there was no warmth in her eyes.

Back at home. The entryway.

These past few days, Zhou Jin had accumulated injury upon injury, large and small. Jiang Hansheng had fallen into the habit of looking after her; he reached out now and helped her off with her coat.

Zhou Jin’s hair had grown a little long. It brushed across the back of his hand as she moved, light and ticklish.

Jiang Hansheng caught a soft strand of it between his fingers.

In the interrogation room, Jiang Cheng had touched her hair. Even Yan Bin — they could both show that easy, natural affection toward Zhou Jin without a second thought.

They were people who held a particular place in her world.

Zhou Jin noticed Jiang Hansheng toying with her hair and pulled it back, laughing. “What are you doing with my hair?” She ran her fingers through it carelessly and murmured to herself, “Maybe I should get it cut…”

Jiang Hansheng was quiet for a long while and said nothing. He hung up her coat and went to the bathroom to wash his hands again.

Zhou Jin leaned her head around the doorframe and called, “I want to take a bath — are there towels in there?”

Jiang Hansheng said, “On the balcony. I’ll get one.”

“Thank you.”

Zhou Jin pulled off her inner top with one hand and tossed it into the laundry basket, then went into the bathroom.

The sound of rushing water filled the air. Jiang Hansheng bent over the laundry, sorting out the lighter-coloured clothes one by one and loading them into the washing machine on the balcony.

The sky had begun to dim. It had turned that soft, hazy shade of grey-blue.

Jiang Hansheng opened the balcony window. Wind swept through with a sharp, biting chill. He leaned against the window frame and smoked a cigarette at an unhurried pace, then waited afterwards for the smell to fully disperse before closing the window.

Back in the living room, he ground the cigarette butt out and dropped it in the bin, then took the rubbish bag out with him as he left the front door.

He had barely sat back down when he heard a crash from the bathroom — the sound of something shattering like glass, followed immediately by a heavy thud, and at the same moment, Zhou Jin’s sharp cry of pain.

Jiang Hansheng jumped to his feet and rushed into the bathroom.

Zhou Jin was on the floor, clutching the fingers of her left hand. Fragments of glass were scattered all around her. She must have knocked over the glass they used for rinsing their mouths when brushing their teeth.

She was still barefoot.

Jiang Hansheng steadied himself and said calmly, “Don’t move.”

He crouched down and asked her first: “Did you slip? Where does it hurt? Can you move your legs?”

Zhou Jin shook her head. She had a clear enough sense of her own injuries — aside from the pain, everything else seemed to be fine.

“I’m all right,” she said. “I just took a fall.”

Jiang Hansheng reached out and lifted her carefully into his arms, carrying her to the bed and setting her down gently.

He touched her forehead, and was just about to call a forensic doctor friend of his to ask whether this sort of situation warranted a trip to the hospital, when Zhou Jin said: “My hand’s been cut.”

Jiang Hansheng looked — she was pressing the fingers of her left hand together. The wound was very small, barely anything, the kind a shard of glass might leave.

He stood to go and get the medicine box. Zhou Jin suddenly called out, “Hansheng.”

Jiang Hansheng saw that her expression had shifted in a way that wasn’t quite right. He sat back down on the edge of the bed. The two of them were quiet for a moment, before he asked: “Zhou Jin — are you tired?”

Zhou Jin’s eyes had gone a little distant. She said: “Do you know — when I was little, I was bullied once. On the way home from school, there was a boy who always used to yank my braid for fun. I got angry and hit him, and he got angry too, and shoved me down onto the ground. I fell, and my hand got hurt, and I was hurting all over, and I felt so wronged that I just started crying.

My brother and Jiang Cheng were waiting on the roadside to walk me home from school that day. When they saw I was being bullied, they went over and pinned that boy down and gave him a proper beating…”

It had caused quite a scene. Teachers and security staff from the school came running, and it took a great deal of effort before they managed to pull Zhou Chuan and Jiang Cheng apart.

Jiang Cheng was still seething and wanted to hit the boy again. One of the male teachers seized him from behind and landed two or three heavy blows on his back, telling him to stop.

Jiang Cheng thrust out his leg to kick him anyway, furious, and snarled: “If you dare bully her again, I’ll beat you to death!”

Zhou Chuan was the gentlest of people — had always been, from the time they were small — yet even he had lost his temper that day. While Jiang Cheng was hitting the boy, Zhou Chuan had simply kept Zhou Jin sheltered behind him and made no move to intervene.

Because Zhou Chuan was always the older one, the one in higher grades — and for an older student to beat up a younger child, when word got back home, naturally meant a proper hiding from Zhou Songyue.

Zhou Songyue came at him with a feather duster. Jiang Cheng knelt down beside Zhou Chuan and insisted on being punished alongside him. Zhou Jin, watching them get hit, wrapped her arms around Zhou Songyue’s legs and wailed.

She had thought to herself then: if she had known Zhou Chuan and Jiang Cheng would be punished for her sake, she wouldn’t cry next time. No matter what.

The three children made such a commotion that Zhou Songyue’s head ached, and in the end he only struck Zhou Chuan a few token times.

Then he gathered Zhou Jin into his arms. Knowing she was the one who had been wronged, he didn’t dare say anything too harsh, and only sighed: “What am I going to do with you — you little troublemaker. Grow up quickly and spare your brothers some worry.”

“It’s always been them, protecting me.”

Zhou Jin held her bleeding fingers and let the tears fall.

In the interrogation room, she had been strangled by a suspect until she nearly blacked out — and she hadn’t cried. During Operation Jingang, a sniper’s blade had carved a wound across her — and she hadn’t cried. At Jian Liang’s home, boiling soup had scalded her arm until her hand nearly lost all feeling — and she hadn’t cried.

Now she sat pressing her bleeding hand against her forehead, and broke apart completely, weeping without restraint.

Jiang Hansheng finally understood what she had been hiding all this time. Beyond the worry, beyond the anxiety — there was something deeper: a profound, consuming guilt and remorse.

“The truth is, the August 17th mission was never supposed to be my brother’s. He swapped shifts with someone to free up the time so he could celebrate my birthday.”

Jiang Hansheng was momentarily struck silent. Then quickly, he reached out and pulled Zhou Jin into his arms, pressing her against the hollow of his neck, and said to her, word by deliberate word: “Zhou Jin. Listen to me. This had nothing to do with you. Not a single thing.”

Zhou Jin bit down on the sound of her crying and kept talking: “The day we were notified to identify the body — I was outside by myself. I could hear my parents crying, and I didn’t even have the courage to go in and look.”

She gripped Jiang Hansheng’s clothes with both hands, her hands trembling, forcing down the sob in her throat. She said: “And Jiang Cheng — he did all of it because of me. Back in Guhua Prison, to earn He Wen’s trust, he took a knife for him. They said Jiang Cheng had a wound on his back, seven or eight inches long.”

The more she spoke, the harder the tears fell.

“I felt the pain from just a sliver of glass — and yet what Jiang Cheng went through…”