Crooked, hasty, yet stroke by stroke, unmistakably—Rong Wanqing’s handwriting.

“You’ve seen her?”

I grasped the girl’s wrist with my hand turned backward, my palm stinging from those elaborate ornaments. 

Only after the words left my mouth did I realize I had lost my composure. 

No matter what, I shouldn’t have pressed and intimidated a teenage girl like this. 

I hurriedly released her and consciously took half a step back. 

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you, it’s just… I’m a bit anxious.

“You just said it was she who asked you to give this thing to us?”

Yu Baijin held that corner of the photograph between his right index and middle fingers, flipping it repeatedly, then waved it twice before the girl’s rapidly blinking eyes. 

She still giggled foolishly, unlike ordinary people or animals who had instinctive attention to moving, living things. 

She only immersed herself in her own world, speaking in fragments, her tone mixed with an abnormal excitement: “I, I’ve seen you two! Sister said, the photo can only be given to you two, no one else, can’t trust anyone else.”

She shook her head, suddenly covering her mouth again, as if she had risked her life to reveal a tremendous secret. “Sister, Sister came specially to say goodbye to me, then she… flew far away!”

“Did she leave on her own? Or was she taken away by someone else?”

I grew inevitably agitated again, trying to press for answers, but was stopped by Yu Baijin’s outstretched arm. 

From the end of the corridor came a string of hurried footsteps. 

A burly, aggressive-looking middle-aged woman trotted forward, unceremoniously pulling the girl over, creating a safe distance from me, her face full of displeasure as she demanded: “Who are you? What do you want to do to my young miss?!”

Her voice was far louder than mine, thunderously exploding in the silent, empty corridor of the afternoon, blasting open several doors. 

Three to five curious or displeased heads poked out from within, casting their gazes toward where we stood.

“Tiaotiao?” An elderly voice called out. “What’s wrong? Don’t pester people, you don’t even know them. Be good, go back inside with auntie.” 

Someone advised with euphemistic words: “Sigh, this little girl’s mental state isn’t quite… The family has money and cares about face, won’t let her stay in a hospital, afraid it would sound bad if word got out, so they sent her here. Usually she has no playmates, only close to Wanqing, and Wanqing… tsk.”

“My young miss has nothing to do with your messy affairs, please leave! Don’t come asking us questions!”

The nanny-like woman, like protecting a fledgling, gathered the girl named Tiaotiao under her wings. “She doesn’t know anything!”

“Do you believe that?”

Yu Baijin lowered his head slightly, asking by my ear. 

From the corner of my eye I could glimpse his upturned mouth corners, pupils pitch black, staring straight ahead.

“If you don’t believe it, I’ll ‘find a way’ to ask again.”

“Don’t.”

I stopped him with one hand, and with the other hand I tucked that damaged photograph into my jacket’s inner pocket, placing it together with Duan Wenshu’s metal business card, and asked Tiaotiao, who was huddled in the nanny’s embrace: “I’ll confirm one last thing. As long as you answer properly, I guarantee I won’t come to disturb you again in the future.”

The nanny who had been glaring fiercely at Yu Baijin’s face eased slightly, but was still full of vigilance.

“Speak.”

“How did Rong Wanqing give you this photograph?”

Tiaotiao thought for a moment.

“Through the door crack, she slipped it in!”

That night, long past curfew hours, she had turned off the lights and gone to bed. Just as she hugged her sleeping companion, an old teddy bear, a familiar call came from the doorway.

“Tiaotiao.”

It was the sister she liked.

“Shall we play a game?”

Hearing this, her drowsiness vanished completely. 

She jumped out of bed barefoot, wanting to open the door, but the lock had been fastened from outside and wouldn’t turn.

“Tiaotiao, be good, listen to me.”

Sister was just outside the door, no more than a few feet away from her, her voice soft.

“The rules of the game are: don’t make a sound, don’t open the door, don’t talk to people you don’t know.”

She was best at playing games. 

Her heart began pounding wildly, and she nodded vigorously through the door.

“This is… a corner of a treasure map, very important. Give it to ‘people you’ve seen,’ remember?”

A slip of paper emerged from the narrow gap against the floor. 

She picked it up, her feet ice cold, but her cheeks flushed red with anticipation. “What about Sister?”

“Sister has to go to a very far place.”

“Will you come back?”

“I’ll try.”

“But!”

“Shh.”

The female voice outside the door paused for a second.

“I hereby declare, the game begins.”

At five o’clock in the evening, Yu Baijin and I left the sanatorium. 

Watching in the rearview mirror as the building complex gradually shrank until it became a mass of fog-shrouded, elusive phantom, I raised the car window, shutting out the howling wind by my ears, turned on my phone’s speakerphone, and called Duan Wenshu while driving.

After briefly sharing the intelligence we had gathered, I raised my question to him: “A photograph is missing from Miss Rong’s reading notes. Does Mr. Duan have any impression of that notebook?”

“Reading notes?”

It was very noisy on the other end of the line. 

He pondered amid the clamor. “Yes, Wanqing has loved reading since childhood, handwriting, excerpts—there are several similar notebooks, all filled densely, placed on the bookshelf at home. I can testify to that, but I haven’t really looked at their contents,” he said matter-of-factly. 

“Even if it’s not a diary, that’s still her privacy. It wouldn’t be right for me to flip through it casually…”

At that time he had just come out of the police station and, sure enough, had been besieged by tabloid reporters and unscrupulous paparazzi. 

This swarm of mosquito-like pests that couldn’t be driven away kept bringing up sensitive topics, spouting nonsense, and insisting on dragging in this year’s May electoral campaign. 

They also asked Duan Wenshu, this prospective son-in-law who hadn’t yet entered the family, what he thought. 

“What can I think,” he was unable to cope, exhausted. “I can’t eat, can’t sleep. Every time I close my eyes, my mind can’t help but imagine the worst outcome…”

“What about surveillance and fingerprints?”

I interrupted him, having neither the time nor the charitable heart to accompany him in venting useless negative emotions, even if this made me appear particularly cold-blooded. 

“Who has entered and exited her room, who has handled her notebook? Oh right, there’s a girl named Tiaotiao—”

Yu Baijin on the passenger seat suddenly reached his hand toward the center console, covering the phone’s lower microphone. 

After several seconds of silence, Duan Wenshu said “hello” twice in confusion. 

“The signal is really bad, it seemed like it disconnected just now, I didn’t hear clearly. Mr. Jian, have you returned to the city?”

“We’re almost there.”

Yu Baijin said leisurely, steadying my steering wheel with one hand, signaling me to keep driving, while taking the phone with his other hand and holding it near his mouth.

“I was just saying, there’s a little sister at the sanatorium. I heard Wanqing had contact with her before she disappeared. Has the police questioned her?”

“Ah, is she a heavily made-up little girl who dresses quite exaggeratedly?” Duan Wenshu said hesitantly. “But I remember she has mental problems…”

“A psychiatric patient’s testimony isn’t completely without reference value, right? Worth a shot? What if we can get something out of her.”

“That makes sense…”

I kept my eyes on the road ahead, slowed down, and tried my best to control myself from being distracted. 

When I couldn’t see Yu Baijin, I almost thought a stranger was sitting beside me.

A person I had never met, never understood, yet had fallen for as if possessed.

“Alright, I’ll coordinate with the police again. I really am so grateful—”

Yu Baijin decisively cut off the call.

I also drove the car to the roadside, stopping under a patch of tree shade.

As evening approached, the sunset painted the streets a pale honey yellow. 

Everything was so peaceful and harmonious. Yu Baijin and I sat side by side. 

On the zebra crossing before us, a family of three was slowly crossing—a young couple holding their child’s hands, with nothing in their eyes but their own happiness. 

I asked him: “Why?”

He faced the window, pretending not to hear, sticking out a pinky finger to dig at his ear.

“Don’t like hearing you talk on the phone with another man all the time.”

I paused for a long moment, then my left hand suddenly thrust into the gap under the driver’s seat, pulling out the dagger I kept hidden there for self-defense. 

But he moved simultaneously with me, not a split second off—the instant I pressed the blade’s back against his throat, he successfully blocked it, firmly gripping my elbow.

“You probably won’t understand for your entire life.”

His Adam’s apple moved, looking up at me from below, his eyes burning intensely, like two black holes scorched through by fire.

“Your furrowed brows, the blade you swing at me, your movements precise as if calculated—all of it makes me unable to resist.”

“Even if you fucking suspect Duan Wenshu, you shouldn’t use a mentally ill little girl to test him.”

I pressed him down into the seat, my knee against his still-unhealed wound on his abdomen, yet I couldn’t bring myself to apply force. 

I found myself absurd. “You have no heart, Yu Baijin.

“This is the reason I separated from you.”