My father’s words had done real damage to Auntie.

After she came to, the time she spent every day just staring blankly at the osmanthus tree grew longer and longer. I knew she couldn’t take much more of this kind of shock.

Brother already had the extra burden of raising me; it weighed heavily on him. The tattoo shop was his one source of income supporting this household, and his business couldn’t keep getting sabotaged over and over again.

And my father had latched onto the Zhou family like a leech.

But whether or not they paid him, it wouldn’t fix the root of the problem—it would just drag on endlessly.

I was enjoying the happiness they’d given me, while making them bear the trouble I brought with me. There was no justice in that at all.

The story of the farmer and the snake could play out with anyone in the world—but it absolutely could not be me.

[Our country currently has no dedicated legislation specifically addressing domestic violence, and the issue of domestic violence against minors in particular has not yet received adequate legislative attention. However, under Article 234 of the Criminal Law of the People’s Republic of China, domestic violence resulting in minor injury may constitute the crime of intentional injury, punishable by up to three years’ imprisonment.]

This was information I’d looked up in the school computer lab.

Now, laid out before me, this seemed to be the only path left.

I never meant to hide it from them. I simply, stubbornly, believed this was Tang Heqing’s own Gandhian movement at fourteen—a way of using nonviolent resistance to challenge and break free from fourteen years of colonial rule under a patriarch’s iron fist.

So I deliberately provoked Tang Shiguo, delivering myself right to his door.

By the time Zhou Haiyan and Officer Fu arrived, I was lying on the ground covered in blood, my consciousness fading, nearly unconscious.

I woke up again in the hospital.

My whole body hurt too much to speak.

I looked at the bandages covering me, and the cast around my wrist.

I thought I’d succeeded.

But in life, things rarely go the way we hope—the world working against your wishes is the true norm of existence.

The injury assessment report stated: “The patient has multiple soft tissue contusions across the body, a fractured right wrist, multiple scalp abrasions, and a forehead laceration from being struck with a bottle, requiring five stitches.”

This only qualified as a minor injury—not even a Level 2 minor injury.

In actual practice, the standard for a Level 2 minor injury classification was set very high, and I fell far short of it.

Officer Fu told me my father had been arrested, but since it only counted as a minor injury, he could only be held administratively responsible, not criminally. Meaning, he’d get ten days of detention, a five-hundred-yuan fine, a promise not to do it again, and would cover some of my medical costs—and that would be the end of it.

I’d let myself imagine things far too optimistically.

Because of my own naivety and foolishness, Zhou Haiyan lost his temper with me for the first time.

In the hospital room.

From the moment he walked in to when he stood looming over my bed, staring down at me, a full half hour passed.

For that entire half hour, he didn’t say a single word.

Knowing I was in the wrong, I kept my eyes lowered, not daring to look up.

Then, abruptly, he spoke.

“From yesterday until now—do you think you did something wrong?”

His voice was low, unreadable.

I wanted to nod, but my head was wrapped in bandages, and it hurt.

So instead I said quietly, “Yes.”

He asked, “Wrong how?”

I said nothing.

He raised his voice. “Look at me. Wrong how?”

The man’s eyes were bloodshot from a sleepless night, and a shadow of stubble had grown along his jaw.

The bitterness and guilt inside me were about to drown me whole.

“I’m sorry. I was wrong to act so recklessly and cause you trouble, to make you worry, and to waste so much money on medical bills for nothing.”

He let out a cold laugh, his eyes as sharp and merciless as a blade meant for slow torture.

“Tang Heqing, you don’t even know what you did wrong!

“If I’d arrived even a moment later, do you think you’d still be lying here right now? Do you really think you’re clever enough to precisely control human nature? You know full well there’s no limit to how far your father will go when he loses it, don’t you?

“Did you even ask me before making this decision? Did you think about the consequences at all?”

The man’s eyes had reddened, his questioning voice carrying a faint, suppressed tremble.

Some inexpressible feeling churned up from deep inside me, surging up to my throat until it choked off my words entirely.

He paused, and when he spoke again his tone was calm, tinged with self-mockery.

“Or maybe—you never actually thought of me as your brother at all. Never thought of this place as home.”

In an instant.

It felt as if a piece of my heart had been violently torn out, leaving nothing but panic and fear slicing through me like a blade, cutting me into pieces.

Tears poured down in a rush, and I shook my head, stammering out an explanation, incoherent.

“That’s not it, that’s not it at all.”

I really did think of them as family.

It was just that they were too good to me, and I didn’t want to be a burden on them—I wanted to do something too.

He stared into my eyes, the fingers hanging at his side twitching, then falling still again.

After a long while.

His voice was very quiet. “Don’t do that again.”

Then he turned and walked out of the room.

Watching his figure disappear around the corner, I finally couldn’t hold it in and burst into tears.

A tangle of complicated emotions—wronged, grieved, helpless—washed over me like a tide, binding me tight, until my whole body ached from the pressure.

Life has no walls, and yet I was trapped within an invisible one all the same.

There had been so few people who were good to me; the environment I’d grown up in had always been cold, lacking in kindness.

So when kindness suddenly arrived one day, unconditional, I longed for it and feared it at once. I didn’t know how to repay it. I was never born with the ability to accept it gracefully—there would always be seeds of inferiority and cowardice buried somewhere inside me.

The day I realized I was a thorough-going pessimist was the same day I realized I’d single-handedly ruined everything.

Relationships between people are like a maze, and as I made my way deeper and deeper into it, I discovered that everyone in this household carried some unspeakable pain of their own—every single one of them a walking contradiction.

There were things they didn’t want to talk about, so even when I guessed the truth, I pretended not to know.

They called Auntie a crazy woman, but Auntie was the kindest, gentlest person I’d ever met. She was only trapped in grief over the loss of the man she loved, unable to find her way out of it for a time.

They called Zhou Haiyan a hoodlum, but Zhou Haiyan never once raised his hand against anyone without reason. He gave others tattoos but never got one himself. He was fiercely clean, almost obsessively so, and he was smart—genuinely brilliant, in fact.

Officer Fu called him “squad leader,” and the two of them often reminisced about their college days.

Fragments of memory surfaced unbidden in my mind.

At the police station once, I’d overheard them mention that Officer Fu had graduated with top honors from the Public Security University.

So the answer was obvious—Zhou Haiyan had studied at the same university. If something hadn’t gone wrong somewhere along the way, he’d be a police officer today, just like Officer Fu.

I didn’t know exactly what had happened.

But what I did know was this: Auntie wanted Zhou Haiyan to live a peaceful, settled life, and Zhou Haiyan wanted Auntie to finally step out of her pain.

And my father’s presence was a wound to them both.

So I did regret it—but what I regretted was only that I hadn’t thought it through more carefully, that I hadn’t managed to get my father locked away for good.

I was nothing but an arrogant troublemaker. It was only right that Zhou Haiyan was angry.

I sniffled quietly, comforting myself.

It’s fine. Things are just back to how they were before.

I’d already had so much happiness these past months. A person ought to know how to be content.

Because, after all, I’d started out with nothing at all.