To change the subject, Qi Xi decided to redirect the trouble elsewhere: “Never mind me, Mom, even though I take my work seriously, I still know how to balance work and life just fine. You should be the one keeping an eye on Dad!”
Qi Xi complained: “It made sense that Dad was so busy when he first started his own firm, but now that the firm’s on solid footing, and he’s got a team and associate lawyers under him by rights, why does he still act like he has to handle everything himself? Jingge’s a way bigger firm than Dad’s little practice, and any random partner there brings in several times, even a dozen times, more revenue than my dad—but none of them are anywhere near as busy as him. There’s a partner at our firm who makes time to play tennis with his son every single weekend without fail.”
Though Qi Xi had brought up this topic mainly to distract her mother, talking about it now, she couldn’t help feeling a bit frustrated and helpless herself.
Setting aside any rose-tinted view of her father, to be fair, Qi Xi also knew that Qi Ruiming wasn’t exactly a particularly gifted lawyer. Back in college, out of curiosity, she’d once secretly glanced at a complaint document he’d left in his study, and it had actually been written somewhat crudely. She’d also occasionally picked up, from conversations between Xi Wen and Qi Ruiming, that he’d botched certain cases before, even gotten reported by a client to the bar association once, and it had taken quite a while for things to settle down.
It was only since joining Jingge, after seeing the legal documents Gu Xuehan wrote, that Qi Xi truly understood what real professionalism and skill looked like.
So maybe it really wasn’t fair to expect her father to juggle work smoothly while also managing his personal life as effortlessly as elite lawyers like Gu Xuehan. Balancing career and family was already an incredibly difficult art in its own right—only a few could truly manage it well.
Looking at it this way, Qi Xi began to question herself a little too—had she been too harsh in her expectations of her father before? Because her father wasn’t superhuman either, just an ordinary middle-aged man, with plenty of things beyond his own capability, plenty of things in this world he couldn’t accomplish either.
“Xixi, don’t hold a grudge against your dad either. When you were little, he treasured you so much. His neck wasn’t in great shape to begin with, but because you’d always laugh so happily whenever he carried you on his shoulders, he wouldn’t listen to me no matter what and carried you around on his shoulders every single day. He ended up straining his neck so badly one time that he was stuck in bed for a whole week.”
Qi Xi’s mother’s expression turned both exasperated and fond as she said this: “And when you were in middle school, remember your school organized that closed-off military training camp, sent you all out to a training base in a neighboring city, and you sprained your ankle? That place was so remote you couldn’t even buy Yunnan Baiyao there, and there was no delivery or errand-running service back then either. On top of that, there was a once-in-a-century rainstorm hitting the neighboring city that day. Your dad dropped everything he was working on right then and there, and braved the thunderstorm, driving his newly bought secondhand clunker of a car all night just to bring you Yunnan Baiyao…”
If Xi Wen hadn’t brought it up, it would have been one thing, but hearing it laid out like this, Qi Xi’s heart softened too.
She hadn’t forgotten these childhood memories at all—it was precisely because she’d always remembered how good her father had been to her that, growing up, she’d found his sexist views all the more intolerable to accept. He’d never once looked down on her for being a girl when she was little—so why, as she got older, had he started suppressing her more and more, treating her as though her gender alone doomed her to failure?
At the end of the day, the reason Qi Xi couldn’t let it go was precisely because it was her own father—because she cared what he thought of her, because she wanted his approval.
Qi Xi’s mother, gentle by nature, noticed Qi Xi visibly softening and stroked her head: “Everyone has their flaws. Your dad isn’t perfect either, but we can’t write off his whole character just because of one issue, can we? Your dad grew up in the countryside, and in the rural area he came from, sons were seen as the only ones who could carry on the family line.”
But Qi Xi still felt wronged: “But he graduated from Rong University’s law school, got a higher education, moved on from that rural upbringing long ago—how can he still think this way? Isn’t the whole point of education to help people move past those backward, mistaken ideas from rural life?”
“But how could deeply ingrained beliefs like that really be so easy to change?” Xi Wen smiled, explaining with great patience and tolerance. “The things a person absorbs during childhood are sometimes very hard to shake. Your dad’s just an ordinary person too, but deep down, you’re the person he cares about most. Just the other day he was saying he wants to push you to learn to drive soon, and then buy you a car later on, so it’ll be easier for you to come home on weekends.”
Xi Wen patted Qi Xi’s back. “So don’t be mad at your dad anymore, okay?” She smiled at her daughter. “My birthday’s coming up soon—consider it your birthday gift to me, alright?”
With her mother putting it this way, Qi Xi felt like refusing to budge any further would be petty and unreasonable. So even though part of her still felt resistant and reluctant, she nodded anyway.
Seeing Qi Xi’s response, Xi Wen brightened immediately: “You’ve only just started working—no need to spend money on some expensive gift for my birthday. As long as the three of us are all doing well, that’s already the best gift there is.”
Qi Xi pouted. “Mom, are you looking down on my salary or something? I’m someone who earns my own money now—I can’t just not buy you anything at all. If someone doesn’t even get a gift on their birthday, doesn’t that make the whole birthday feel kind of pointless?”
“Won’t your dad give me one?” Qi Xi’s mother laughed. “And even though it’s not my birthday yet, your dad’s already given me plenty of things lately. Last month he got me a spa card at the Hyatt, loaded three thousand—sorry, thirty thousand yuan onto it all at once, and he’s been thoughtfully booking me a set night every week to go get a spa treatment and facial.”
Xi Wen listed this off with a mix of complaint and happiness. “I keep telling him not to spend so much, but he never listens.”
Alright, alright—Qi Xi felt a bit exasperated too, feeling like she’d once again been forced to witness her parents’ unabashed displays of affection.
Though Qi Xi had decided to take a step back and, on this visit home, make peace with her father over a proper meal, unfortunately, Qi Ruiming never gave her that chance.
He’d been getting busier and busier lately, leaving early and coming home late as the new normal, with impromptu business trips popping up constantly. That evening, Xi Wen personally cooked an entire table full of dishes, only to get a call from Qi Ruiming saying he’d be home even later, telling them not to wait up for dinner.
The disappointment on her mother’s face was plain to see, and Qi Xi couldn’t help but grumble a bit too: “Honestly, Dad’s over fifty now—why is he working even harder lately instead of easing off?”
Truth be told, even when Qi Ruiming had been young and hardworking, he hadn’t pushed himself nearly as hard as he did now.
Hearing this, Xi Wen sighed helplessly too: “Yeah, honestly our household expenses aren’t even that high, but for some reason, ever since he turned forty, your dad suddenly developed this intense drive for career success, working himself to the bone, and he’s stopped being picky about the cases he takes on too…”
Qi Xi had some memory of this period, because during those years, Xi Wen and Qi Ruiming had argued about it quite a bit. Xi Wen felt that as a lawyer—especially one whose basic livelihood was already secure, comfortably middle-class—there should still be some sense of social responsibility, some discretion in choosing clients and cases. Certain clients, morally questionable in ways that were hard to accept, shouldn’t be taken on just because they offered a higher fee.
But her father hadn’t seen it that way. Starting from around age forty, he’d seemingly suddenly developed an intense hunger for money, single-mindedly focused on making more of it. Even Qi Xi, from overhearing her parents’ arguments, knew that in his pursuit of winning cases, some of her father’s methods hadn’t exactly been above board.
And yet, despite all that, Qi Xi felt their family’s standard of living hadn’t actually improved because of her father’s relentless money-chasing—if anything, they lived even more frugally than the average comfortably middle-class family.
Having held it in for so many years, Qi Xi finally couldn’t help but ask the question that had been on her mind all along.
“Mom, what’s Dad even working himself to death for money for? Isn’t the whole point of earning money to live a better life? Money’s just a tool, not the goal itself—you shouldn’t give up on actually living just to make money, that’s putting the cart before the horse. You two always say the money’s being saved up for me to use later, but when I actually needed money to study abroad, Dad never once offered to pay for it.”
Xi Wen still defended Qi Ruiming, hoping to smooth over the friction between father and daughter: “Part of it is your dad hoping you won’t overwork yourself either. Part of it is that if you ended up going abroad, you might have stayed there for good, and we wouldn’t have anyone to keep us company as we age. And part of it, well, you have to forgive your dad a little selfishness here too. I’m a full-time homemaker, and he’s a lawyer—even though his income’s decent now, law firms typically pay social insurance at the minimum tier, so when he’s old and retired, it won’t be anywhere near as generous as the pension benefits civil servants get. So your dad wants to save up some money in hand for retirement, and honestly, Mom can understand that side of it too. Not to mention your dad also has to look after your grandparents—if anything happens to them health-wise, the expenses can add up fast too. Your dad grew up poor in the countryside, suffered through hardship as a kid because of it, and now that he’s older, not having money on hand makes him anxious. You didn’t grow up in the same environment or era he did, so it might be hard for you to fully put yourself in his shoes when it comes to this urge to save.”
Even so, Qi Xi still held onto some resentment: “It’s fine if he doesn’t want to pay for my studying abroad, but don’t lie to me about it. If he’d told me earlier he wasn’t going to support me financially, I could’ve applied to schools that offered scholarships instead, or started working and saving up money earlier. At the very least, I wouldn’t have been blindsided out of nowhere right after getting my offer, completely unprepared to deal with it…”
But complaints aside, once that burst of frustration passed, Qi Xi had actually come to terms with not being able to go to America. Parents choosing to support their kids was a kindness, and choosing not to spend money supporting them wasn’t unreasonable either—after all, her father had never actually let her go without in terms of everyday basic expenses. At the very least, he’d given her everything a child from a comfortably middle-class family should have.
Besides, her mother had a point—lawyers earned every cent of their money the hard way. Regardless of anything else, there was nothing wrong with Qi Ruiming wanting to keep some money aside for his own old age.
But just when Qi Xi had finally worked through her feelings and decided to use this visit home to break the ice with her father, sharing a meal together, she and her mother never even sat down to eat at the normal time—they kept waiting for Qi Ruiming. It wasn’t until nearly seven o’clock, almost an hour later, that Qi Ruiming suddenly called—
“Honey, something suddenly came up with that Zhongheng bankruptcy restructuring case I’ve been handling. I’m still at the office in an emergency meeting right now. I can’t make it home.”
Her mother had the call on speaker, so Qi Xi heard every word clearly too. Since it was rare for the three of them to all gather together on a weekend, Xi Wen had personally cooked an entire feast, and now, hearing that Qi Ruiming wouldn’t be coming home, her disappointment was written all over her face: “Didn’t I already tell you? Xixi’s rarely home today, and I made a whole table of food for you two.”
On the other end, Qi Ruiming’s tone carried genuine regret too: “There’s nothing I can do about it either. I’d love to come home and eat the feast you made with your own hands, but with the state the client’s company is in right now, forget a feast—I probably won’t even have time to eat at all.”
Hearing this, Xi Wen, sure enough, immediately stopped caring at all about Qi Ruiming not being able to make it home. Instead, she fussed over him with concern: “The client’s business matters, sure, but your health matters too. No matter how busy you get, remember to eat something. I was worried you might get so caught up you’d forget and end up starving, so I tucked some crackers into your bag this morning—remember to grab them to tide you over.”
“You’re just too good to me, honey. Marrying you was the luckiest thing that ever happened to me!”
…
The two of them exchanged a few more words of concern for each other before finally hanging up.
Say what you will, but even though her father had a bit of a bias favoring sons over daughters, he really was consistently good to her mother. After all these years of marriage, he could still make her blush like a young girl every single time.
Qi Xi couldn’t help but make a face at her mother, expressing she couldn’t bear to watch, earning herself a playful smack from Xi Wen in response.
Although her father wasn’t coming home to eat, Qi Xi certainly wasn’t going to let such a lavish spread of food go to waste. She dug in heartily, complimenting her mother’s cooking skills between bites, leaving Xi Wen positively glowing with delight, quickly forgetting all about the earlier disappointment of Qi Ruiming missing dinner.
After the meal, Qi Xi had originally planned to stay home a while longer and chat with her mother, but unexpectedly, Zhao Yiran, of all people, had forgotten her keys and was currently stuck waiting outside their apartment.
With no other choice, Qi Xi hurriedly packed up her things and left home early to rush over and save Zhao Yiran’s sorry hide by letting her in.
To get back to her rented apartment quickly, Qi Xi hailed a cab directly. As luck would have it, not long after she got in, it started drizzling outside—if she’d left even a few minutes later, she probably wouldn’t have been able to catch a cab at all.
Sure enough, once the rain started, traffic on the main road began backing up. Qi Xi got stuck at a red light, sent Gu Yan a bored cat meme, and started idly gazing out the window, killing time.
But what started as a random glance made Qi Xi suddenly frown.
The car stuck in the lane next to hers, up ahead—wasn’t that her father’s car?
The last digits of Qi Ruiming’s license plate matched her parents’ wedding anniversary, so there was absolutely no way Qi Xi could be mistaken.
But hadn’t her father said he was busy handling the Zhongheng bankruptcy restructuring case?
Zhongheng was an old, established machinery company in Rongshi, with its office and factory located out in the suburbs, far from the city center—nearly a two-hour drive from where this road was. So how could her father possibly have suddenly turned up here?
Could he have already finished up over there and be rushing home now?
But even accounting for the fact that Qi Ruiming had called earlier saying he’d suddenly finished up with the Zhongheng matter and rushed straight here right after, the timing simply didn’t add up—there was no way he could have arrived on this road in such a short window of time.
What’s more, the road Qi Ruiming was currently on wasn’t even the way home at all.
Qi Xi’s heart suddenly began pounding.
She started to feel a kind of weightless, sickening dread, an unwelcome suspicion beginning to take shape in her mind.
Could her father be…
Qi Xi felt her whole heart leap up into her throat.
“Driver, please follow that car.”