Chapter 12

Chapter 12

Six months later, I returned to the archives.

My colleagues all seemed to share the same tacit understanding. No one asked about the wedding that had caused such an uproar across the city. The director simply placed a newly delivered batch of old deeds on my desk and said, “If you’ve rested enough, take your time with these. There’s no rush.”

I opened the first volume. Tucked inside was a Marriage Contract from the Republican era.

The paper had yellowed with age, the gold dust flaking away, and the words blessing the union were beautifully written. In the past, I would have found it romantic. Looking at it now, I only felt that no matter how lovely the words on paper sounded, what mattered was the kind of person standing behind them.

A Marriage Contract could be a promise. It could also be a shackle.

The key was not the paper, but the person who set brush to it.

The Shen Family case was still on trial.

After Xu Lingyi’s arrest was approved, she never confessed. She insisted she had not killed anyone, that she had merely followed the old rites passed down by her ancestors. But the drugs, the evidence of unlawful detention, and the chain of forged documents uncovered by the police were all clear. Shen Group was also investigated because of the scandal, and several collateral branches of the family, eager to distance themselves, once tried to contact me for a private settlement.

Zhou Yan blocked them on my behalf.

He said, “What they want to buy isn’t reconciliation. It’s your silence.”

I did not stay silent.

I organized the parts of Grandmother’s Notes that could be made public, cooperated with the police by providing additional testimony, and wrote a long article about what had happened to my mother, Lin Tang, all those years ago. Before posting it, I stared at the title for a long time. In the end, I didn’t use some attention-grabbing phrase like “the wealthy family’s life-extension ritual.”

What I wrote was:

“My Mother Was Not a Fate Chart. She Was a Person.”

After the article was published, many people left comments.

Some said it chilled them to the bone. Some said they had never realized that so-called tradition could also become a blade that hurt people. Others asked whether I still believed in love.

I did not reply.

The question was too big, and I had only just walked out of a conspiracy packaged as love. For the time being, I had no right to offer some pretty answer.

All I knew was that if I ever loved someone again, I would not hand over my own judgment. The other person could have secrets. They could have a past. They could have weaknesses. But they could not make my fate the price of their long-delayed confession.

As spring neared its end, Shen Jianwei asked Zhou Yan to pass me a box.

There was no ring inside, no letter. Only a photocopy of the Ancient Marriage Contract, now that evidence collection had been completed, and a pearl hairpin that had been wiped clean.

It was the same hairpin I had used to prick myself awake on the eve of the wedding.

Zhou Yan said, “He didn’t ask you to respond.”

I nodded, kept the hairpin, and placed the photocopy of the Ancient Marriage Contract into my grandmother’s wooden chest.

Not to commemorate Shen Jianwei.

But to remember that some seemingly absurd old stories truly could grow teeth in reality. Just because the world believed in science, one should not underestimate any pretext people were willing to borrow when they chose to do evil.

In May, I went to sweep my mother’s and grandmother’s graves.

The cemetery was on a mountain, where the wind blew hard. In my mother’s photograph, she was still young, a blue ribbon tied in her hair, her eyes curving when she smiled. My grandmother’s grave was beside hers. Pressed in front of the headstone was a piece of restoration paper, something I had mischievously put there when I was little. While she was alive, she had never had the heart to throw it away.

I set down the fresh white flowers, then buried the pearl hairpin in the soil before the grave.

“Grandma, I didn’t sign it.”

The wind passed through the pine branches with a soft rustle.

Suddenly, I remembered her eyes before she died, clouded yet clear. All her life, she had mended damaged paper, and she had also tried to mend her daughter’s torn-apart fate. In the end, she had not handed me hatred. She had only handed me a warning and a key.

I crouched before the grave and said slowly, “Mom, I wrote your name back in.”

The headstone was silent.

But I knew that some belated things still had meaning. The truth might come late, justice might come late, and farewell might come late as well, but as long as they were not buried completely, then one day, someone would be able to lift them out of the dust and spread them beneath the light again.

On my way down the mountain, I received a call from the archives.

The director said that a batch of old Shen Family files had been transferred through judicial procedures and that I needed to participate in the appraisal. Among them were genealogies, account books, and several burned fragments of marriage contracts from before and after the West Building fire eighteen years ago.

I stood by the mountain path, looking at the distant outline of the city, and suddenly smiled.

Old paper was still willing to live.

So could that man.

Later, many people asked me whether I had been afraid when I pressed down that blood seal on the wedding day.

I was.

Of course I was.

I was afraid Xu Lingyi really had a way to make me disappear. I was afraid Shen Jianwei would defect at the last moment. I was afraid the hidden marks my grandmother had left behind were nothing more than a desperate misreading on my part. I was also afraid that the so-called backlash was only a coincidence and could not save anyone at all.

But what I feared even more was living my entire life inside a Marriage Contract someone else had written for me.

The Marriage Contract of the Shen Family said that two surnames were joined in marriage, their blessed union eternal.

My Marriage Contract contained only one line.

The fate of Lin Zhaomian belongs to Lin Zhaomian herself.