“Turning himself in is going to get you revenge?! Are you still a man?! You said calling the police could temporarily keep both sides out of each other’s way, and I couldn’t stop you then. But now you’re asking me to persuade Long Ge to swallow his pride and turn himself in — not a chance in hell. Why don’t you persuade He Zhengren to turn himself in?! Since He Zhengren doesn’t dare tell the police the truth, why should Long Ge turn himself in? Why should he go to prison alongside that old bastard He Zhengren?”
“Stopping him once doesn’t mean we can stop him a second time. As long as Long Ge is still in Beijing, trouble is bound to follow. He Zhengren will have to pay a price, but if we wait until he turns desperate and decides to take everyone down with him and strikes back first…”
“I can’t talk to you!” Ba Yunye slapped the table, startling the server up ahead who was clearing away bowls and dishes. “Without Long Ge, I, Ba Yunye, would have turned into nothing but a street thug! I walk the straight and narrow now, earning money through my own honest abilities — Long Ge taught me that! If he were doing this for money or for some worthless reputation, I’d be right there with you, doing everything in my power to stop him, calling the police to have him arrested! But he’s doing it for his wife. You know what that is? That’s what a real man does! I won’t pretend otherwise — even if he killed He Zhengren, I’d still support him!”
“I absolutely cannot let him do this. He Zhengren is currently the only surviving witness who knows the truth about the car accident. He can’t die — at least not right now.”
Ba Yunye towered over him, glaring down at him in fury.
Diao Zhuo met her gaze without flinching. “Until the whole matter has been fully investigated, if He Zhengren dies, the car accident will truly become an unsolvable dead end. Whatever crimes He Zhengren deserves to answer for — hand it over to the public security bureau and the courts. Even if he deserves to die, none of us can be the one to kill him.”
“Very good. So it sounds like today you’ll call the police on Long Ge, and tomorrow, the moment something I do rubs you the wrong way, you’ll call the police on me too. Oh, and by the way — I’ve also broken into those thugs’ homes and forced information out of them. So tell me: if you hadn’t been able to find me back then, would you have called the police on me too?” Ba Yunye let out a long exhale, seemingly giving up on any possibility of negotiation. “We were never the same kind of people. Today we’ve finally made that clear to each other. People who walk different roads can’t make plans together. We might as well just…”
Diao Zhuo seemed to sense what she was about to say. He shot to his feet. “Ba Yunye, don’t make a scene!”
“We’re not walking the same path. We should cut ties now while—”
He grabbed her by the shoulders. “Calm down!”
“I am completely calm! Thank you for the reminder!” Ba Yunye swept his hands away with one swipe, fixing him with a hard stare. “You and I — we can’t walk this road together. From now on, you go your way and I’ll go mine. Stay out of my business. This is where the two of us end.”
With that, she turned and walked away.
“Ba Yunye.”
“Oh? What is it?” She turned back with a smile — a smile utterly carefree and unbothered.
“You’re saying this out of anger. I’m not taking it seriously.”
“You should take it seriously.” She gave a cold snort. “Let’s part on good terms.”
It was Hippo who broke the standoff in the end, greeting him in a low, respectful voice. “Long Ge.”
Long Ge gave a faint nod, seemingly paying him no mind whatsoever. Hippo’s face shifted between green and white — he didn’t dare look Long Ge in the eye, and quietly shuffled his way behind Li Haozhang.
“Renlong Duoji, nothing urgent going on — you should still come with us, sign a form, and give your family a call.” The police weren’t so easy to fool. They waved him over, gesturing for Long Ge to come with them.
“A’Long, listen to me — don’t let your temper get the better of you. Go back and have a proper talk with them. That’s just how Chinese people are — they always think you have to get married and have children. If you keep refusing to marry, I’d lose my patience with you too, were I in their shoes.” He Zhengren patted Long Ge on the shoulder — his trousers were still dripping wet, yet he spoke with the worldly-wise air of a man who had been through it all. His performance was genuinely moving. “We’ll keep drinking another time. Go home now.”
Long Ge glanced at the police officers, then stepped silently out the door. Hippo and Li Haozhang immediately surged into He Zhengren’s home. Hippo turned back to Long Ge with an apologetic grin. “Long Ge, send my regards to Master Ba.”
Long Ge ignored him, turned around, and followed the police officers into the elevator.
At the police station, after signing the necessary forms, he put on a pretense of filial concern in front of the officers and called his parents to ask after their health. He then bought a plane ticket for a flight to Chengdu that same evening, hailed a cab to the airport from the police station’s entrance — and then refunded the ticket and doubled back into the city.
Although his revenge plan had been derailed midway by the police, the few hours of calm had allowed him to notice something: there seemed to be more worth digging into where He Zhengren was concerned — perhaps something more significant than simply forcing out the truth about the car accident. And so, he would have to keep his teeth sunk in.
He went to a shopping mall and bought a complete outfit entirely unlike his usual style, then settled back into his stakeout near He Zhengren’s home.
“I’m fine. In a bad mood, and I won’t be showing my face for a while. Help me keep an eye on things at the club and the guesthouse.”
At the front desk of the Lhasa Deji Guesthouse, Ba Yunye finished checking in a new group of trekking tourists and cast another uneasy glance at the text message she had received the day before. The arrival of the police seemed to have doused Long Ge’s white-hot rage — from his tone, it sounded like he hadn’t ended up being taken in that day, though he had been forced to leave He Zhengren’s home. The failed “revenge” had left him in a foul mood; apparently he wanted to go somewhere to clear his head.
After escorting that group of clients to Lhasa, and before the next leg of the Dian-Tibet route began, Ba Yunye was temporarily helping out at the Deji Guesthouse while posting ads to drum up clients willing to share fuel costs on trips through Yunnan.
It had to be said — Diao Zhuo’s gambit of using He Zhengren’s fear of telling the police the truth as leverage, calling the police to stop Long Ge from doing something extreme and letting Long Ge walk away clean — it had worked. But the price was that the two of them had exploded into a fight and broken up.
Diao Zhuo was clearly the kind of person who was clean and decisive about things — if it worked, stay; if it didn’t, leave. He wouldn’t lower himself to hold on to a woman. In a relationship, the emotional intelligence of a man made of steel, the mindset of a science-brained guy who dealt in facts and logic — he would never know how to coax a woman.
He still hadn’t agreed to Ba Yunye’s suggestion of breaking up, but a break-up wasn’t like canceling a contract. It required both parties to agree.
For Ba Yunye, Long Ge wasn’t just an ordinary boss and friend — right now, they were comrades on the same front line. She could tell anyone else to turn themselves in, but she couldn’t bring herself to watch Long Ge end up behind bars. The contradictions, the wishful thinking, the loyalty, the pride — even knowing that Diao Zhuo was right, she refused to yield a single step. On top of that, she didn’t know how to face Long Ge; she even suspected that his refusal to come back right after being forced out of He Zhengren’s home meant he had grown resentful of her — Long Ge had trusted her enough to tell her plainly that he intended to kill He Zhengren, and yet she and Diao Zhuo had called the police and obstructed him.
By now, Diao Zhuo had probably returned to the Kizilsu Kirghiz Autonomous Prefecture. With the project back in operation, he would be buried in work for another year and a half. By the time he had any time to himself again, the two of them would most likely have long since drifted into mutual forgetting.
These past few days, certain words kept floating up in Ba Yunye’s mind.
“Diao Zhuo, if you weren’t driving, I’d bite you to death.” “Come on then. I can’t wait.”
“Many years from now, when you’re dragging around a whole family, a kid in each hand — I wonder if you’ll remember that there was once a person called Master Ba who turned your world completely upside down, if only for a little while.”
She had also had a dream. In the dream, she was in an unnamed city at an intersection, waiting for a red light, when she happened to glance over and spotted Diao Zhuo in the car beside her. The two of them looked at each other, and neither said a word — until the rear window of his car rolled down, and a woman and a small boy strapped into a child’s car seat peered over at her with curiosity. The little boy pointed at her car and said to Diao Zhuo —
“Daddy, that red car is so pretty.”
The Diao Zhuo in the driver’s seat responded with utter indifference — a flat “Mm” — and didn’t look at her again.
The light changed. She turned left. He went straight. In the end, the two of them never exchanged a single word, each heading off toward a different direction and a different destination, going their separate ways.
The scene felt strangely familiar — as though it had already appeared a thousand times somewhere in the depths of Ba Yunye’s subconscious.
“Hey, are you a Tibetan?”
Ba Yunye was miles away in her thoughts when a young man knocked on the counter and sat down in front of the high-stool behind the reception desk — apparently one of the trekking tourists she had just checked in. He had a pair of flirtatious, peach-blossom eyes that women tended to find irresistible, and a figure that looked quite decent. He had probably just showered; there was a clean, soapy scent about him, though the lingering notes of musk were a little overpowering, almost sharp.
“No.” Ba Yunye smiled. “I’m just an outsider here working for a living.”
Peach-Blossom Eyes tipped his chin toward the few short-trip and local tour flyers tacked to the shelf behind her. “We were thinking of finding a car to go check out Namtso. Is it doable today, do you think?”
“It’s already one in the afternoon. If you’re willing to drive through the night, it’s technically possible.”
“How do you mean?”
“Speed limits,” Ba Yunye said, as smooth and practiced as ever. “Five hours each way. Say you spend one hour there — do the math yourself and figure out what time you’d get back. Switch the plan to Yamdrok Lake instead — round trip wrapped up in seven hours, and you’d still have time to find a bar to enjoy the evening. How does that sound? Say the word and I’ll sort a car for you right now — a guaranteed experienced driver. Price is flexible; you’re staying at our guesthouse so you get the friends’ rate. Don’t believe me? Go ask around.”
“Is there a bar you know well, sweetheart? Take me — give me a taste of the nightlife?” Peach-Blossom Eyes raised an eyebrow, those eyes of his flashing messages left and right. An innocent young girl would have had real trouble resisting.
Ba Yunye, who had been living between Lijiang and Lhasa — two cities famous for their romantic exploits — for years, was naturally nothing of the sort. She gave him a serene smile. “When were you thinking of going, big brother? If it’s the plan where you come back from Yamdrok Lake, grab a meal, freshen up and then head out, it’ll be nine o’clock at the earliest — I’ll need to book you a spot in advance. Or would you like to go discuss it with your friends first?”
“Don’t call me ‘big brother’ — call me ‘little big brother.'”
“Little big brother~”
“About the bar — why don’t you come along too, sweetheart?”
“The bar, sure. Let me get little big brother a car.” Ba Yunye picked up her phone, and as she dialed, she tossed the man a flirtatious wink for good measure.
Peach-Blossom Eyes was clearly thinking with the wrong head — he nodded frantically and ran off to round up his friends.
“Tch.” Ba Yunye watched his retreating figure and rolled her eyes, then spoke into the phone once it connected: “Get a seven-seater. Yamdrok Lake.”
Before long, a vehicle pulled up in front of the Deji Guesthouse. The clients filed out one by one and got in. The Peach-Blossom Eyes from earlier winked at her — clearly he hadn’t told his friends about his plan to take a beautiful woman to a bar that evening.
Once all the clients were seated, the window of the seven-seater commercial vehicle rolled down, and the driver inside called out to her — “Master Ba, we’re off!”
“Go, go!” Ba Yunye bent her head over the accounts, but as if drawn by some inexplicable force, found herself staring again at the profile picture of the person who hadn’t been in touch for several days. The last thing he had said to her was “Arrived in Kashgar,” and she had replied with “Take care.”
No blocking. No blacklisting. After all, there was no deep hatred between them — they were both adults who had weathered their share of partings and reunions. They had simply, in the course of their argument, realized they were ultimately not walking the same road.
Still — that scene from the dream. Ba Yunye hoped she would never live to see it come true.