Ruan Yu finished her afternoon meeting just as evening was falling.

With the winter solstice approaching, the December days were especially short. She had only been waiting at the entrance of Huanshi for five minutes before she watched the sky darken by a full shade.

Because of the evening rush hour traffic, Xu Huaisong arrived a little late, so by the time she got into the car, her hands had already been chapped red by the cold wind.

The moment she shut the car door, Ruan Yu turned toward the heating vent and rubbed her hands together, asking as she did: “How did the court hearing go today?”

“Fairly smoothly.” Xu Huaisong didn’t start the car right away. He adjusted the direction of the heating vents, then turned toward her and cupped her hands in his, gently kneading them. After rubbing them for a while, he lowered his head and breathed warm air into her palms. Glancing down, he saw that the scabs on her palms had nearly faded, and after a moment’s thought, he asked, “I’ll be flying to the States right after the winter solstice — shall we visit your teacher that day?”

“What about your parents? Aren’t you going back to see them for the holiday?”

“Su Shi at noon, Hang Shi in the evening.”

“That’s a lot of driving — you’ll be exhausted. There’s no rush; you can come to my place after you’re back from America. Why the hurry?”

Xu Huaisong smiled. “What kind of man doesn’t visit his girlfriend’s family on a major holiday? Don’t get me disqualified before I’ve even started.”

Ruan Yu let out a soft “oh,” turned her gaze away, and pressed her lips together to hide a smile. Suddenly, she recalled what Li Shican had said at noon.

Even back then, Xu Huaisong had already been thinking about marriage — or rather, from the very beginning, everything he did with her had been aimed at the very end.

And so she thought she understood now why he had kept that contingency plan from her.

Marriage, by its very nature, was a decision that belonged to two people. It ought to be pure, untouched by outside influence. He didn’t want their engagement to carry any other meaning in her heart — no weight beyond what it was.

And it was precisely because of how seriously he treated this matter that, even though the two of them had by now reached an unspoken understanding, he would absolutely not be the one to bring it up until he had completely wrapped up his work in America.

Thinking it through this way, Ruan Yu decided there was no point worrying about it. After all, by the time his career at home had settled down, it would inevitably be pushed to next year at the earliest.

With that thought in mind, Ruan Yu asked, “When are you coming back from America this time?”

“I won’t make it back in time for New Year’s.”

Just as she expected. Ruan Yu’s face instantly fell. “Then we can’t ring in the New Year together…”

He looked at her with a smile. “What’s so great about the Gregorian New Year? Be a little more patriotic — we can ring in the Lunar New Year together instead.”

Ruan Yu opened her mouth, wanting to say it wasn’t that she was “worshipping foreign things,” but that New Year’s Eve on the Gregorian calendar held a special meaning for the two of them — yet seeing how completely unbothered Xu Huaisong looked, she swallowed the words back down.

Never mind. It was pointless to expect a man to understand this kind of romance.

Three days later came the winter solstice.

Xu Huaisong had arranged everything with meticulous precision. Early in the morning, he took Ruan Yu back to Su Shi first. After the ancestral rites, the family shared a reunion meal, had afternoon tea, and then drove back to Hang Shi.

By the time they reached the outskirts, it was already four in the afternoon. The setting sun gilded the mountain road, spreading a faint golden haze across the path ahead.

Ruan Yu suddenly thought of Zhou Jun. He and his girlfriend had gotten into their accident somewhere along this very road, between Su Shi’s city center and the outskirts of Hang Shi.

She sighed, and before she even said a word, Xu Huaisong already knew what was on her mind. He steered her thoughts elsewhere and asked casually, “What do you want for dinner?”

“My mom heard we had a sit-down meal at noon, so she prepared hotpot.” She tilted her head to look at him. “Mr. Xu, you’re about to meet the homeroom teacher — nervous? Scared?”

Xu Huaisong gave a small smile. “Scared.”

Ruan Yu was just about to comfort him when she heard him add: “With hotpot, I’ll have to keep blanching things for you nonstop. I’m scared I won’t get to eat.”

“…”

So his feelings really had curdled. Ruan Yu stared out the window, desolate.

Xu Huaisong glanced at her, just about to say he was joking, when he suddenly spotted far ahead that half the road was blocked. Several police officers were gathered in the overgrowth along the roadside, and someone was digging with a shovel.

He quickly wiped the smile from his face and furrowed his brow.

Ruan Yu noticed it too. She was still wondering what was going on when she saw a gloved police officer lift something out of a deep pit.

It was a section of… an arm — caked in mud, rotted and misshapen.

Ruan Yu drew a sharp breath.

Xu Huaisong reached over and covered her eyes, accelerating past.

But perhaps it was that acceleration that drew the attention of the officers nearby. As the car approached the scene cordoned off with yellow tape, a police officer wearing his identification badge waved them down. “Sir, ma’am — sorry to bother you. Could I trouble you to show your ID?”

Xu Huaisong patted Ruan Yu on the head, gesturing for her to keep her head down and not look out the window. He handed over their identification, and the officer’s face broke into a look of surprise. “What a coincidence — Attorney Xu?”

Xu Huaisong nodded. “You know me?”

The officer laughed. “The story of how you helped the police apprehend a criminal suspect has been spreading all through our circles. And that time you got drunk and knocked on more than a dozen doors at Room 302 in Jinjiang City — that story’s pretty famous around our station too.”

“…”

Ruan Yu’s head shot up. She stared blankly at Xu Huaisong.

He gave a low cough and brushed it aside. “Ah — so you’re working a case out here?”

“That’s right. A few days ago, Shanghai caught a criminal suspect who’d been on the run for half a year at a concert. They needed our cooperation for the investigation — so here we are, digging up a body on a holiday out in the middle of nowhere.” He finished his grumbling and gave Xu Huaisong an apologetic nod. “Sorry about that, Attorney Xu. You’re free to go.”

But this time, Xu Huaisong didn’t move. He frowned and said, “You’re saying this suspect buried a body here — half a year ago?”

The officer nodded. “That’s right. He’s a repeat offender. He dismembered the body and buried pieces all over the place. This spot only turned up half an arm.”

Recalling what she had just seen, Ruan Yu shuddered, goosebumps rising all over her skin.

“Oh —” the officer said, “Sorry, sorry. We frightened the lady.”

Xu Huaisong turned and closed his hand over hers, indicating it was all right, but he had no choice but to press on. “If it’s not too much trouble, I’d like to ask about the specific time the suspect buried this arm.”

“That… those kinds of details aren’t something we can really disclose…”

Xu Huaisong nodded. “Then just tell me this much — was it the Dragon Boat Festival?”

A flicker of something strange crossed the officer’s eyes. “How did you know that, Attorney Xu?”

At that, even Ruan Yu forgot to be afraid and lifted her head in shock.

The Dragon Boat Festival — wasn’t that the very day Zhou Jun had gotten into his accident?

Xu Huaisong turned serious. “I think… there may be a case that needs to be re-investigated.”

By the time they left the scene, the sky had grown slightly dim.

Ruan Yu took quite a while to pull herself back from this unexpected development. She asked, “Do you really think it could be connected to Zhou Jun’s case?”

Xu Huaisong shook his head. “I’m not sure, but Attorney Zhang and I did once consider this possibility: if Zhou Jun wasn’t the actual perpetrator, then the evidence had been handled too cleanly — which meant the real culprit was in all likelihood a repeat offender. And a repeat offender striking again would most likely be doing so to cover up a prior crime. It’s just that at the time, we investigated criminal cases that had occurred in Hang Shi during that period and found nothing that matched, so we abandoned that line of thinking.”

And now, a criminal case from Shanghai had surfaced.

“You mean the victim may have been silenced because they accidentally witnessed the killer burying the body?”

“It can’t be ruled out.”

“But the burial site and the victim’s death site are only on the same road — not the same location.”

“If the theory holds, the killer would have acted again, hastily disposed of the scene, then quickly moved to a different location to rebury the remains — that’s the only way it makes sense. If it had been the same spot, the police would have discovered the truth when they examined the original scene.”

A look of agreement crossed Ruan Yu’s face. Once she worked it through, another chill ran through her, and she rubbed the goosebumps on her arm.

Xu Huaisong kept one hand on the steering wheel and used the other to take her hand, wrapping it in his palm. “Don’t dwell on it. Leave it all to the police.”

They turned off the mountain road and arrived at the Ruan family home. Greeted by Ruan’s father and mother, who came out to welcome them with warm smiles, the two of them tacitly said nothing of the incident. But even as they sat eating hotpot, Ruan Yu still felt a lingering unease.

Qu Lan noticed she had barely touched her chopsticks and frowned. “Yuyu, what’s wrong? No appetite?”

Ruan Yu let out a quiet “ah,” not wanting to worry her parents about Zhou Jun, so she shook her head. “I ate too much afternoon tea at Huaisong’s place. I’m not that hungry yet.”

Xu Huaisong knew she hadn’t eaten much that afternoon — the real cause was what they had seen on the road.

He quietly moved the two plates of bright red raw meat away from in front of her and blanched several stalks of vegetables instead, placing them in her bowl.

Touched by his precisely calibrated thoughtfulness, Ruan Yu blinked at him.

Ruan Chengru noticed and exchanged a glance with Qu Lan: Are these two hiding something from us?

Qu Lan: It seems like it…

Ruan Chengru harbored the thought and began to quietly turn it over in his mind, all while casually making small talk with Xu Huaisong — asking about his family, his parents’ health, his younger sister’s grades.

By the time they’d gone through a full round of pleasantries, the food on the table had barely been touched.

Qu Lan said to Ruan Chengru, “Honestly, you’re something else — you’ve been so busy chatting with Huaisong that he hasn’t had time to touch his food. Hurry up and put some sliced beef in for the boy.”

Ruan Chengru quickly responded with two “ohs” and took up the plate of meat to put into the hotpot.

Ruan Yu looked up just as this happened. The memory of that severed arm from the early evening flashed before her eyes, and her stomach gave a faint, sickening lurch. She tried to hold it down, but couldn’t quite manage it — she turned her head aside and covered her mouth, dry-heaving once.

Xu Huaisong immediately reached over to pat her back. “Do you need to go to the bathroom?” Then he looked up — and met the eyes of Ruan Chengru and Qu Lan, who had both simultaneously fixed him with a stare wide enough to rival a walnut, regarding him with an expression that was stiff, startled, and unmistakably questioning.

He froze.

Ruan Yu, still feeling unwell, hadn’t paid much attention to her parents’ reaction. She stood up and said, “Yes, I’ll go for a bit.”

Xu Huaisong came back to his senses, excused himself to the two elders, and followed her into the bathroom, pulling the door shut behind him.

Ruan Yu leaned one hand against her stomach and the other on the edge of the sink. She dry-heaved a few times without bringing anything up, and said weakly, voice low: “The moment I see that bright red raw meat, I can’t help but think of…”

Xu Huaisong turned on the tap and helped her wash her face, saying with a helpless sigh, “Your imagination is really something…” He paused halfway through the sentence, then finished: “Alright — I’ll go back and eat all the meat myself so you don’t have to see it. Happy now?”

Ruan Yu pursed her lips and nodded. Then she saw him seem to remember something and asked, “By the way — why were your parents just looking at me like that?”

“I didn’t notice. What kind of look?”

“It was a kind of…” He furrowed his brow, trying to recall. “…‘What have you done to my daughter, you beast’ kind of look.”

The words had barely fallen before both of them realized it at the same time.

Oh no. This was a very, very bad misunderstanding.

Author’s note: Xu Huaisong: And I wasn’t even doing anything…