nightingale
Cen Yun was pinching Xia Yiru's hand, which was shaking. Chen An was still trying to persuade her, "You still have a chance, Cen Yun."
A tear suddenly fell from her eye. "Chance?" She smiled bitterly and said, "I don't have a chance. I haven't had a chance for a long time."
"Yes!" Chen An said, quietly moving her feet. Her eyesight was no longer enough to support her perception due to her illness. "If you have any demands, please tell us. The law will seek justice for you!"
Cen Yun tried hard to strangle Xia Yiru, fearing that Xia Yiru would run away. "Law? If the law really works, Meng Jia would not die! She tried hard, but there was no result for half a year, and she had to endure the attacks from the Internet. I don't want the law anymore. It's not illegal for them to kill people anyway!" As he spoke, the needle moved closer. Xia Yiru could even feel the cold needle tube. She screamed in fear.
"What do you want? I'll give you whatever you want! Money, money! Resources! I can support you! Don't you want 'Troposphere' to be popular? Let's use your name to make her popular again, okay?" Xia Yiru was about to cry, "Please don't kill me!"
Cen Yun saw someone approaching through her blurry vision, and she shouted, "Put down your gun! Now!"
Her sweat dripped onto her black shirt and disappeared in an instant. Chen An put down his gun as she said and walked over slowly.
"Cen Yun, I know you have no way out now, but do you really want your former lover to watch you fall from the sky?"
Her expression was dull.
"Meng Jia left you a letter before she committed suicide. It's in her unsent mailbox. You want to read it, right?"
Cen Yun suddenly came to his senses and said, "I don't want to watch! She and I broke up a long time ago!"
"Really?" Chen An said, "Then why did you seek revenge for her? Why did you encourage and support her after discovering she was Troposphere?"
"That's not me!" Cen Yun kept denying, "That's not me!"
Chen An turned on his phone. Cen Yun was afraid that he would do something else, so she scolded him, "What are you doing? Don't move! Otherwise, she will die immediately!"
The other party was very calm, and even she was stunned when she clicked on the account.
That ID was the one they used together, The Nightingale and The Thorn Birds!
"I've read the book 'The Nightingale and the Thorn Birds'. It tells your story, right?" Chen An recounted the contents, trying to divert her attention. "When you were fourteen, you fled to Changping County with Meng Jia. The thorn bird in the book is you, right?"
Tears filled Cen Yun's eyes and she couldn't see anything clearly. She raised her head slightly, and the dark night seemed to echo those dark yet hopeful days.
The two girls ran on the deserted track, running and running until dawn.
Xia Yiru knew that her hands were shaking, and the cold needle was just around her neck.
The next second she made up her mind, raised her hand high with hatred and was about to insert the needle into her artery. In just a few seconds, she felt a pain in her hand, and before she could react, she had been restrained by someone, and the syringe rolled so far away that she could not see clearly.
Cen Yun and Xia Yiru were both taken back to the Municipal Bureau. Chen An handcuffed her and put her in the car. Her eyes were empty, as if she was a blind person whose soul had been drained away, drifting in the world.
Xia Yiru was so scared that she burst into tears and couldn't calm down for a long time.
"I'm so scared! I'm so scared! What do you policemen do for a living?" She sat on the sofa in the Municipal Bureau and cursed without caring about her image.
Cheng Xiaoxiang was furious and rolled his eyes at her. "You think the police are your personal bodyguards! You sneaked out on your own and..." He was pulled back, and Chen An said calmly, "Come with me to interrogate Cen Yun."
The lights in the interrogation room were dim. Cen Yun's hands were handcuffed on the table. She regained her composure again, as calm as if the hostage-taking and murder had never happened.
She saw Chen An, looked up and smiled at him gently, "Officer Chen."
Cheng Xiaoxiang got goosebumps. This man was too split. He was about to suggest that Cen Yun should have a mental evaluation.
Chen An simply said "hmm". As they sat down, the other party started chatting casually, "I didn't expect you to have read that novel."
There was a hint of joy in her words, and her eyelashes flickered as she lowered her eyes, as if she were looking at someone. "Jia Jia, look, even if you're gone, your work will live on forever."
Chen An leaned back in his chair in an extremely relaxed posture, and like Cen Yun, he also abandoned the look of pushing her to the ground.
"Actually, I've only read two books, The Green Grape and The Nightingale and the Thorn Birds, but it just so happens that both of them are about you."
"You could say her first half of life was related to me." Cen Yun was a little proud, smiling as she recounted their lives. "We came from a small place on the edge of Jianan Province. She and I lived in a tube-shaped building. The first time I saw her was through a broken glass window."
In the dilapidated tube-shaped building, twenty families lived in the U-shaped corridor on the first floor. The rent here was so cheap that it only cost one or two hundred yuan. The first time young Cen Yun saw her, she was looking at her bruised and battered face. It was on the broken glass on the first floor that she stood on tiptoe and met the person she wanted to protect the most.
Meng Jia's mother, Qin Ping, was the most beautiful girl in the factory when she was young. After getting together with the college students in the factory, their life was sweet every day. Soon she found out that she was pregnant. She was very excited to tell him about it, but after hearing it, he bought a ticket and fled the small city overnight.
Qin Ping's mother was afraid that her daughter's pregnancy before marriage would be known, so she quickly found a marriage for her. Disheartened Qin Ping followed her mother's advice and married the nouveau riche Meng Guofu. At first, their life was good, but after a few years, Meng Guofu was led to become addicted to drugs, and in less than half a year, he lost all his capital. Then their family moved into a tube-shaped building.
Later, someone told Meng Guofu about Qin Ping's past. Suspicious, he went for a paternity test and found out that the daughter he had raised for five or six years was not his own child at all.
Since then, crying sounds have often been heard from the first floor.
"It was better when we were in school. I went to the same school as her, and luckily I was able to protect her," Cen Yun said. "I went to and from school with her for six years, until I was twelve."
Before her mother passed away, Cen Yun lived a good life. But not long after her mother's death, her father remarried a stepmother who had a six-year-old son. The appearance of this child destroyed her entire image of her father.
Rumors about the tube-shaped building always spread quickly, and she, like Meng Jia, became the one being pointed at.
"After school, she and I always went walking on the abandoned railway. The road stretched endlessly forward, and every day we discussed what was at the end of the road."
The road reappeared before her eyes, with overgrown weeds, rusty railways, and a silent border. She and Meng Jia walked on the narrow edge of the track.
"Xiaoyun, what do you think is on the other side of the road?"
"I don't know. It seems like there's no end in sight."
"Shall we go and take a look?" Meng Jia turned to look at her, with unconcealable expectation in her eyes.
"...It's very dangerous."
Her eyes darkened instantly, "But won't it be dangerous if we go back?"
Yes, wouldn't it be safer to go back? Being targeted by my stepmother and brutally beaten by my adoptive father—aren't they all just struggles in a sea of suffering?
Meng Jia watched the sun set slowly, and finally took her hand with a disappointed look, "Let's go back."
Cen Yun suddenly stopped moving.
"She and I agreed to leave the next evening." She was recalling a beautiful time. "We ran wildly along the rusty railroad tracks, the setting sun paved under our feet, and we fled in the endless twilight."
"We wandered for two days and two nights before finally settling in Changping County." Her bright smile turned to sadness. "We had no household registration, no ID cards, and no education. We started working in a factory at the age of fourteen. Back then, management was lax, and in a small county, no one investigated. We changed our names, got new ID cards, worked part-time, and lived frugally, renting a house in the old city."
"The house was in an average location, at the very back. We had just escaped and were afraid of all the adults, so we hardly spoke to the neighbors. The only family we had a deep impression of was a family in the alley next door."
"At that time, Meng Jia and I could hear the screams of the child and his mother every time we got home from get off work at night. Later, we ran into them at the alley entrance. The skinny boy was standing there with a bruised face and nose, just like when I saw Meng Jia."
Chen An keenly realized that the person she was talking about was Jiang Li.
"But I don't know him. Meng Jia and I are still keeping to ourselves."
"It wasn't until Meng Jia said she wanted to write something that I really felt she had talent." Cen Yun's eyes were bright, eager to tell Chen An how talented Meng Jia was. "As soon as she put pen to paper, I knew she would succeed one day. Later, I worked outside while she wrote at home. She had just turned sixteen when she wrote 'Green Grape'."
"Sixteen was such a wonderful age. She became famous and her articles were published soon. She gave me a sample copy along with her first signature."
"Later, she continued to write articles, but I found that we were becoming increasingly distant." Cen Yun lowered his head. "I'm not as talented as her, nor as studious as her. I felt that she was drifting further and further away from me. I didn't want to drag her down, so in the end, I was the one who proposed to separate."
"After she left, all I knew was that she went to the city. I started a new life, took the adult college entrance exam, went to university, and entered society, until..."
Chen An said: "Until you come across her articles again."
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