Chapter 70

The nursing home erupted into chaos.

Old Lady Gao was very old; a fall like that was no small matter.

Fortunately, both of them kept their heads. Lin Yuewei moved in to check on the old lady’s injuries, while Gu Yanqiu ran to the front to call for someone to take her to the hospital.

Old Lady Gao had fallen out of her wheelchair, but she had not lost consciousness. Her hand groped weakly at the floor, then her gaze suddenly locked onto Lin Yuewei’s face. She lunged forward and seized her ankle.

Her lips kept repeating that one word: “No... no...”

Lin Yuewei leaned close to her ear. “Mom, what are you saying?”

“Not... in... no... dad...” Old Lady Gao’s cloudy tears spilled down both cheeks as she cried uncontrollably.

Lin Yuewei’s heart ached. She could only catch those stubbornly repeated fragments until people from the front courtyard rushed over. She wiped her eyes, and after the medical staff checked Old Lady Gao’s condition, she helped carry her onto the car and send her to the hospital.

Gu Yanqiu had been badly startled too. On the way there, she held Lin Yuewei’s hand tightly, and the two of them followed the car to the hospital.

***

“There are two fractures. Everything else is fine; Old Lady Gao was lucky not to have hit her head. She should stay in the hospital for a while and rest properly. But elderly bones aren’t the same as younger people’s, so she may need to lie down for longer. Also, her condition going forward may be worse; that isn’t certain yet and will depend on how she recovers.”

“Thank you, Doctor.”

“You’re welcome.”

Only then did the knot Gu Yanqiu had been carrying all day finally loosen. Her limbs went weak, and she staggered back a step. Lin Yuewei, beside her, reached out and wrapped an arm around her shoulder, letting her lean into her embrace.

The ward was filled with the smell of disinfectant. Old Lady Gao had an IV in her arm, and the monitoring equipment tracking her vital signs was running normally. The scene that had unfolded a few hours ago still lingered in Gu Yanqiu’s mind.

“Let Grandma rest. Let’s go outside,” Lin Yuewei said, helping her out. With both hands on her shoulders, she guided her to the bench outside and sat her down.

Gu Yanqiu bent forward slightly, head lowered, both elbows on her knees; her mind was a tangled mess, impossible to sort out.

A bottle of mineral water suddenly appeared in her line of sight. Gu Yanqiu looked up. Lin Yuewei handed her the opened bottle and said, “Drink some water. Your lips are dry.”

Gu Yanqiu took it, took a sip to moisten her lips, and asked, “Do you know what just happened?”

She was asking why Old Lady Gao had fallen.

Lin Yuewei sat down beside her, opened another bottle, and shook her head. “No.”

She and Gu Yanqiu had both happened to be angled sideways toward Old Lady Gao at the time; besides, back then all they had seen was each other, so how could there have been room in their eyes for anyone else? By the time they reacted, Old Lady Gao was already on the floor.

Lin Yuewei went on, “But after Grandma fell, she said something. I don’t know what it meant.”

“What did she say?”

Lin Yuewei repeated the broken fragments.

“Not, in, no, dad?”

“Yes.”

“The last word should be referring to my maternal grandfather,” Gu Yanqiu said after a moment’s thought.

“What do the first three mean? They should be a few words in the middle of a complete sentence.”

“I don’t know.” Gu Yanqiu lowered her head and pressed hard at her temples with two fingers. Under her breath, she said, “I don’t know.”

Lin Yuewei raised a hand, wanting to comfort her.

Gu Yanqiu said quietly, “Do you think this is worth it?”

“What do you mean, worth it or not?” Lin Yuewei’s hand stopped in midair.

“My grandma is so old, and I keep trying to tear open her scars, keep hurting her until she ends up like this. The past is already the past; why be so determined to find an answer? My father hid things from me so much; was it because he already knew this matter was deeply entangled and wanted to cut his losses in time? Was everything he did for my own good?”

“I don’t know.” Lin Yuewei paused before answering.

Gu Yanqiu lowered her eyes and gave a self-mocking smile. Human joys and sorrows are not the same; for something she herself couldn’t find an answer to, why expect validation from someone else?

Lin Yuewei said, “But...”

Gu Yanqiu looked up at her. Her lips were pale, her eyes fragile in a way Lin Yuewei had never seen before.

Lin Yuewei’s fingers curled slightly. For a moment, she nearly couldn’t resist wanting to make those lips look better. She lowered her eyes, then said seriously, “My attitude toward whether to do something or not only has one standard: if I don’t do it, will I regret it? If the answer is yes, then I’ll do it without hesitation, no matter the consequences. Just for your reference.”

“You’re only hesitating because you ran into difficulty,” Lin Yuewei said, looking straight into her eyes. “I don’t think you’re really asking for my opinion. You just want someone to tell you that what you’re doing is right, so you can keep investigating. Then okay, I’ll tell you: what you’re doing is right. Just like you said that if I murdered someone, you’d completely respect my wishes, I completely support you. Whatever you do.”

Gu Yanqiu held her gaze for a few seconds, then her brows suddenly relaxed. She tipped her head back and downed half a bottle of water in one go. When she put the bottle down, her smile was bright with beads of water on her lips. “You’re right.”

Lin Yuewei let her eyes drift away from the corner of her mouth and tapped her bottle against Gu Yanqiu’s with a smile. “Cheers.”

Gu Yanqiu said, “I’ve already drunk half a bottle; it’s your turn.”

Lin Yuewei smiled. “I’m not that thirsty, and I don’t have any troubles on my mind.” She took a small sip, then lifted the bottle in a token toast.

Gu Yanqiu looked at her, and many emotions flashed through her eyes at once: relief, joy, and that rare satisfaction and gratitude of finding a true confidante in life. After a long while, she changed the subject and looked at the wall ahead. “Once my grandma’s health improves a little, I’m thinking of bringing her to Yanning. The medical care there, and the nursing homes, are much better than here. What do you think?”

“Hm.” Lin Yuewei made a noncommittal sound.

“Mm?”

“Yanning has your father there, plus Gu Feiquan and He Songjun. Your father is one thing, but what if He Songjun and her son mean her harm? Who knows where their bottom line is.”

“That was careless of me,” Gu Yanqiu said, her expression turning serious as she abandoned the idea.

“She’ll need a long time to heal from this fracture anyway. Better to keep her here for now, hire a better caregiver, and make sure no one mistreats her. Once the Gu family situation stabilizes in the future, you can bring her to Yanning then.”

“That’s fine. I’ll specifically hire someone from Yanning at a high salary.”

“Okay.”

The two of them sat outside the ward, each with a bottle of mineral water, chatting as if they were admiring the moon and stars.

Lin Yuewei asked, “By the way, when you came out earlier, you said you’d found the photos. Where are they?”

“I didn’t bring the album; I only took pictures of all the photos inside.” Gu Yanqiu took out her phone and opened the gallery. The screen was filled with old photos, all very much of another era.

The two of them leaned close together without thinking and flipped through them one by one, their breathing almost touching.

Gu Yanqiu pointed to one of them. “Most of these are from when I was little. This one is the three of us; the woman in the middle is my mother.”

Lin Yuewei looked at the photo, then at Gu Yanqiu, and said, “You can see a little resemblance in the eyes and brows.”

Shen Huaiyu’s beauty was inherited from her parents. Even though the photo looked back through decades of time, Gu Yanqiu’s maternal grandfather was still striking in a traditional vest, with dress pants and leather shoes underneath, elegant and distinguished. Gao Limei wore a qipao, her figure graceful and her face lovely. Neither of them looked outdated at all.

But it was clear from their expressions that they were both a little restrained, probably because they weren’t used to dressing like this.

“What were Grandma and Grandpa like financially back then? What did they do?”

Gu Yanqiu shook her head. “We’re still looking into it. Grandma moved here about ten or twenty years ago. She came alone, and she never chatted about this sort of thing. No one knows where she’s from, not even Cheng Yong. Cheng Yong said he asked her casually once before, but Grandma never answered.”

Lin Yuewei frowned.

That meant that even though they had found Gao Limei, they still didn’t know where Shen Huaiyu had truly been born and raised. If they didn’t know where Shen Huaiyu’s real hometown was, they couldn’t know what had actually happened back then.

“So the urgent priority is finding your mother’s real hometown.”

“Yes. Mr. Liu has already gone to look. Elderly people’s accents are hard to change, so he’s starting from the way Grandma usually speaks.”

Lin Yuewei continued flipping to the next photo.

From these photos, taken across different years, it was clear this had been a very happy family of three. Young Shen Huaiyu had been quite mischievous; one photo showed her climbing a tree to raid a bird’s nest. The couple’s poses in their pictures were all very affectionate, and the love between them was impossible to hide from each other’s eyes.

When she reached one of them, Lin Yuewei’s hand had already moved past it, then she suddenly stopped and pulled back. “Wait a second.”

“What is it?”

Lin Yuewei pointed to the background of the photo. Behind young Shen Huaiyu, who was sitting on a wall and smiling brightly, she narrowed her eyes and said, “Is there a line of small writing here?”

“Where?”

Lin Yuewei enlarged the photo as much as possible. Behind little Shen Huaiyu was a large stone lying on its side, with blurred writing carved into it. Her spirits lifted at once, and she asked excitedly, “Is there any way to process this photo again?”

Gu Yanqiu didn’t understand.

Lin Yuewei said excitedly, “I’ve seen some rural films and documentaries before. In some villages, they put a big stone at the entrance, and the name of the township and village is carved on it.”

Gu Yanqiu froze for a moment, then immediately got up and went to the side to call Mr. Liu.

After Lin Yuewei’s excitement subsided, she calmed down and went over to say, “Though I’m not sure whether this stone was carved with that kind of thing, it’s still a clue.”

Gu Yanqiu was busy telling Mr. Liu where the album in Gao Limei’s room was. Photos taken on a phone were never as clear as the physical originals. She made a gesture toward Lin Yuewei to show she understood.

But her expression had already taken Lin Yuewei’s words as a certainty. She had a strong intuition that the words on it must be her mother’s hometown address.

Mr. Liu was thrilled to get this clue as well. Heaven knew how long he’d been staring at something with no leads at all; now it was like someone handing him a pillow just as he was dozing off. He immediately went to Gao Limei’s room to get the album.

Director Fang had been badly frightened too. After the old lady was stimulated for two straight days and then suddenly ended up in the hospital the next day, that was lucky enough already. And since the family had covered it, if this had happened in any other situation, she would have had two heads and one too many headaches by now.

After confirming that the old lady was safe at the hospital, Director Fang returned to the nursing home and called Gu Huai, recounting everything from yesterday and today in full detail.

Gu Huai coughed violently on the other end; the veins on the back of his hand as it gripped the phone stood out sharply.

“I understand.” Gu Huai gave no response and hung up.

The office was silent. An ever-growing sense of helplessness crept over him, like standing at the edge of a cliff and watching a lit fuse burn silently toward him, leaving him with no way forward or back. Sitting in the broad office chair with his head lowered, Gu Huai turned himself into a mute sculpture.

“Chairman Gu.” The secretary outside called him on the internal line.

“Speak.”

“Oldest Young Master is here.”

“Let him in.”

“Yes.”

“Wait.” Gu Huai suddenly spoke up.

The secretary waited patiently.

Gu Huai said, “Don’t call him Oldest Young Master anymore. Just use his name.”

The secretary’s heart jolted. It was as if he had already learned the outcome of the much-discussed “succession struggle” in the company from his tone. He composed himself and said, “Yes.”

Gu Yanqiu didn’t come to Gu Huai’s office often, but she had come before. Gu Huai’s attitude toward her was completely different.

Gu Feiquan really did look like a younger version of Gu Huai; he was radiant and full of energy, walking with the wind at his back. He nodded politely at the secretary, then smiled and pushed open Gu Huai’s office door.

“Chairman Gu.”

“What is it?” Gu Huai lifted his head from behind the desk and revealed a kindly smile.

“I ran into a small problem at work and wanted to ask you about it. I hope I’m not bothering you too much?”

“Not at all. Go ahead.” Gu Huai rested one hand on the desk edge and pushed his chair back slightly. In a warm voice, he said, “Come over here and ask.”

A faint ripple stirred in Gu Feiquan’s calm eyes. He controlled himself and walked over, stopping about a foot away from Gu Huai, then spread the folder in his hands open in front of him. Gu Huai was a very elegant man who cared about his image. Whether he was younger or now, he often wore men’s cologne. By the end of the workday, the scent had faded to the last note; only a faint trace remained, but it was very pleasant.

Gu Feiquan inhaled the scent around him, a smell that was unfamiliar to him; his father’s smell. For a brief second, he felt dazed.

Gu Huai said something, but he didn’t hear it and had to ask again. “What did you say? Sorry, I just zoned out.”

Gu Huai smiled faintly. “I asked whether you have a girlfriend.”

Gu Feiquan had been asked this many times by He Songjun, but never once had it made him feel like this; a complicated mix of happiness, sadness, and resentment at a greeting that had come so many years late.

He had thought he didn’t care about his father. Over the past twenty-eight years, he’d lived well enough on his own. In He Songjun’s endless nagging and nightmare-like curses, his father had been nothing more than a nightmare he wanted to be rid of completely.

But why did this nightmare peel away his mask, while the warmth and goodwill underneath made him want to draw closer?

Dad.

He silently traced the word in his heart, and with that one soundless address, a surging wave of emotion burst out from the bottom of his heart.

“What’s wrong?”

Gu Feiquan was startled to realize he had accidentally said it out loud.

Gu Huai was flipping through the documents he had brought over and smiling as he said, “Your mother was still telling me last night to hurry you along. Said you’re no longer young, and Yanqiu is already married even though she’s a few years younger than you, yet you’re still single. But I think whether or not someone gets married depends on timing. If you meet someone you like, naturally you’ll want to get married.”

“You and my mother are?” Gu Feiquan blurted out. “Then why didn’t you marry my mother back then, and instead married Gu Yanqiu’s mother?”

Gu Feiquan had prepared himself for Gu Huai to fly into a rage. In his imagination, a father like Gu Huai should have been moody, unpredictable, and someone who would never tolerate anyone challenging his authority. That was how He Songjun had described him. But Gu Huai didn’t.

Gu Huai looked at him with an unreadable expression. After a long while, he stood up, patted Gu Feiquan’s shoulder, then stepped back two paces and bowed to him very seriously. “I’m sorry. I wronged you and your mother.”

Gu Feiquan’s eyes reddened, bloodshot and hot. “Can a single apology make up for abandoning us for twenty-eight years? My twenty-eight years don’t matter, but who’s going to make up for my mother’s twenty-eight years?”

Gu Feiquan said each word deliberately, “If it weren’t for you, she would have graduated from university as a top student. At that time, she could clearly have lived a very good life, found someone she loved who loved her back, supported each other for a lifetime, had one or two children, and lived happily ever after. You were the one who saddled her with the label of getting pregnant before marriage. You were the one who made her endure everyone’s criticism. You were the one who forced her to live forever in the shadow of being Gu Yanqiu’s mother.”

“You made me grow up being told by others that I didn’t have a father; when I was bullied, I could only endure it. When I got home, my mother would scold me, and the next day I’d go back and beat them until my head was split open.” Gu Feiquan’s throat bobbed. He let out a bitter laugh and said softly, “What are you going to pay me with?”

“With the rest of my life,” Gu Huai said.

“My mother wants that; I don’t.” Gu Feiquan grabbed the folder on the desk, a mocking smile at the corners of his mouth, and backed away step by step.

“Feiquan—”

Gu Feiquan pulled the office door shut behind him.

He walked back with a face full of frost.

“Oldest Young Master.”

“Oldest Young Master.”

“Old—”

Employees passing by greeted him, only to be scared off by Gu Feiquan’s cold stare. He returned to his own office and swept every file on the desk to the floor. Still not satisfied, he kicked hard at the side of the desk.

Fuck this dad nonsense.

After venting, Gu Feiquan crouched down and sorted the files back into order, restoring everything to how it had been before. He then sat behind the desk, covered his face with both hands, and slowly exhaled a breath of stale air.

He glanced at the time on the desk; there was still an hour until work ended, and a throbbing headache started up again.

As expected, He Songjun’s call came right on time.

“Mom.” Gu Feiquan turned on speakerphone.

“Any dinner engagements tonight?” He Songjun had an ulterior motive.

“Yes.” Gu Feiquan lied without changing his expression.

“Your dad doesn’t even have dinner engagements and still comes home every day to eat. Look at you; you’re busier than your own father. Are you the chairman or the president? What do you have to socialize about until this late?”

“Midnight.”

“You brat, what kind of socializing lasts that late?”

“Talking business, singing, drinking; how can you not play until the middle of the night?” Gu Feiquan tugged at the loosened tie he had untied after going into the office, then simply took it off and tossed it aside.

He Songjun had spent this whole stretch arranging blind dates for him and tricking him into them by every means possible. Gu Feiquan now got a headache just seeing his mother’s caller ID.

“You can drink and sing, but you’re not allowed to touch women. None of them are clean; don’t learn bad habits from those men outside.”

“Got it.”

“So that’s why you still need a girlfriend. Otherwise you can’t even solve your physical needs properly.” He Songjun circled around and around, and no matter what, always found her way back to the point. At her age, she could still speak that bluntly to her own son.

“Don’t worry about it. I’ve still got my hands. Self-reliance; plenty of food and clothing.”

“You!” He Songjun was left speechless. Gu Feiquan quickly seized the opening. “I’m hanging up. I’m busy.”

Successfully shaking off He Songjun, Gu Feiquan finally relaxed a little.

He interlaced his fingers and propped them under his chin. He Songjun’s words echoed in his ears:

—Your dad doesn’t even have dinner engagements and still comes home every day to eat. Look at you; you’re busier than your own father.

Gu Feiquan had been running around outside for a while lately to avoid blind dates, and he hadn’t been home for dinner in some time. The few times he had, Gu Huai had indeed been there, so that wasn’t a coincidence; he really did come home every day for dinner. A part of what he called compensation had already been put into practice.

As Gu Feiquan himself had said, he’d lived twenty-eight years without a father, and he didn’t care whether he had one in the future either. If He Songjun was happy, then he could play the part of a proper son and let her live out her later years carefree.

But many things couldn’t withstand close scrutiny. Gu Feiquan wasn’t stupid. Anger was anger, arguments were arguments, but the doubts in his heart were no less than Gu Yanqiu’s.

It was a fact that he had abandoned his family and child; he wasn’t trying to defend him. But was Gu Huai really such a filthy, shameless, fickle person? Based on what Gu Feiquan had observed and the little he knew, it didn’t seem so. Almost everything he knew about Gu Huai came from He Songjun’s descriptions, and how much subjective bias was hidden in those descriptions was obvious just from her day-after-day, spell-like slander of Gu Yanqiu’s mother. So what was Gu Huai really like, apart from He Songjun’s version of him?

Back in school, on that occasion when He Songjun took him to see Gu Yanqiu at her prestigious school, Gu Feiquan had seen Gu Huai once. Back then, Gu Huai was in his thirties and in the prime of his life, tall and handsome, with the face of a TV drama lead and a fairy-tale-perfect family like something out of Disney: a kind queen and a beautiful princess by his side.

If he had been a bystander, if he had not been Gu Huai’s son, he would have definitely thought this was the most wonderful family of three in the world.

There was one thing he had always kept buried in his heart. One late night, for reasons he couldn’t remember, he had come out of his room and gone downstairs to the living room, only to find a light on in the second-floor study. He tiptoed over; the study door hadn’t been fully shut. Through the crack, he saw Gu Huai holding a string of Buddhist prayer beads, staring at them motionlessly, tears brimming in his eyes.

Gu Yanqiu’s mother believed in Buddhism; Gu Feiquan knew that. He Songjun had mentioned it to him countless times, calling the other woman a hypocrite and a fraud.

What was it like to lose a beloved wife? Fairy tales never said. Many years later, what happens when the prince loses his princess? Gu Feiquan had learned it all from Gu Huai. He felt himself split into two people in a strangely contradictory way: one was proud that his father was a man of loyalty and deep feeling; the other was resentful that his father had loved someone other than his mother. His own birth felt like a joke.

Gu Huai.

Gu Feiquan stopped writing and looked at the name on the paper, its strokes linked and neat.

He drew three question marks after it.

Gu Huai was learning to be his father, to be He Songjun’s husband, yet he only dared to quietly shed tears in the dead of night over the relics left behind by Gu Yanqiu’s mother. There was no need for him to wrong himself like this.

Why had he married He Songjun and brought Gu Feiquan home with him; was it only because of guilt?

And why had he only become guilty after Gu Yanqiu’s mother died, and, more to the point, immediately remarried without pause? There had been no wedding; the two of them had only obtained a marriage certificate, giving He Songjun a real title. He also took her to banquets; one could say that apart from the wedding itself, the title and the reality of being Mrs. Gu were both there.

Given Gu Huai’s status and position, even if he hadn’t done these things, no one would have criticized him. He remarried after his ex-wife’s death and publicly admitted to a colorful past; apart from giving people more gossip and becoming an object of contempt in the eyes of those with strong moral standards, there was no benefit at all. If he wanted to make amends, he could have chosen other ways; financial or emotional, even if he had remarried later after a period of time, it wouldn’t have caused such a huge public uproar now. It was fortunate the company wasn’t listed; otherwise, pulling something like this could have caused the stock price to fluctuate.

Could He Songjun have threatened him? Gu Feiquan thought impudently. With his mother’s brain, the odds of her threatening Gu Huai were greater than the sun rising in the west.

It was Gu Huai who controlled all of this, and everything had also started because of Gu Huai. The past was tangled and impossible to disentangle; the events of thirty years ago were half truth and half falsehood. He and Gu Yanqiu were the two most innocent people in it, staring coldly at each other over the affairs of two generations.

He’d heard that Gu Yanqiu had taken leave these past two days and wasn’t coming to the company. Since the last time he had said those things to her, Gu Yanqiu had become even colder toward him. Before, she had at least still put on a show; now she was completely ignoring him.

Gu Feiquan also wrote Gu Yanqiu’s name on the paper and drew a line underneath it.

Gu Yanqiu...

Gu Feiquan tried to analyze something from it, but after thinking for a long time, he found his mind was still a blank.

***

It would still be some time before Old Lady Gao woke up. As the sky darkened, Lin Yuewei suggested going out to buy dinner, and Gu Yanqiu readily agreed. The two of them had just left the hospital when the phone in Gu Yanqiu’s bag rang.

She looked at the caller ID and let it ring.

Lin Yuewei pulled her farther away from the road. Seeing that something was off with her expression, she leaned over to glance at the screen. The name flashing on it was unmistakable: Gu Feiquan.

It rang until it was almost over before Gu Yanqiu finally answered, slowly bringing the phone to her ear and narrowing her eyes slightly.

Gu Feiquan’s lazy, casual voice came through the receiver:

“Gu Yanqiu? Let’s work together.”

Author’s note:

[Note] “Human joys and sorrows are not the same” is from Lu Xun’s The Collection of Essays.

Gu Feiquan: looks calm, actually panicking hard

Big brother is secretly inching closer to little sister...

Congratulations to the future brother-in-law for joining the deluxe dinner digging-up-the-past set menu