Gu Yanting's Last Words
When Ah Yu pushed open the glass door of the law firm, raindrops were slanting across the sycamore leaves. Water droplets hung from the pothos behind the reception desk, much like the condenser tube of the ventilator in Zhong Hua's ICU—he stared at that thing for seven whole days, until Zhong Hua's eyelashes trembled at the sentence "the person I want to thank the most."
"Attorney Chen." He tugged at the collar of his soaked shirt, the cuffs still carrying the smell of yak butter he had brought back from Tibet. Three days ago, when he came down from the snow-capped mountains, the red rope of Zhong Hua's prayer wheel had wrapped around his wrist, and the faint red mark was still imprinted on his skin.
The rosewood box that Attorney Chen pushed forward gleamed coldly. "Mr. Gu passed away in prison last week." The lawyer's gold pen paused on the document. "He had late-stage liver cancer and refused treatment. These are his belongings that he specifically requested to be handed over."
Ah Yu's fingertips had just touched the clasp of the wooden box when she recalled the last time she saw Gu Yanting. It was at the courthouse entrance; the man was wearing prison clothes, his eyes behind his silver-rimmed glasses like a frozen lake. "The chain of evidence in the arson case was too perfect," he smiled then, his gold-rimmed glasses sliding down to the tip of his nose, "perfect like a carefully crafted set of building blocks."
Inside the wooden box was only a gold-embossed notebook. When opened, half a photograph fell out—a picture of Gu Yanting and a strange woman, with the rooftop terrace of the Gu Group building in the background. The woman was wearing a wide-brimmed hat, and only the silver-gray ends of her hair were visible above the brim. The woman's back was strikingly similar to the figure in the Paris street photos sent by Lin Wanqing, where she was handing blankets to refugees.
"The suicide note is on the last page." Attorney Chen got up and poured a glass of hot water. "Mr. Gu requests that you read it alone."
Ah Yu turned to the last page of the notebook. Gu Yanting's handwriting was much more illegible than in the court transcripts, and the ink had seeped through the paper.
"By the time you read this letter, I will probably already be on the path of atonement. Three years ago, on that rainy night, I saw someone I shouldn't have seen at the scene of the arson. Zhong Hua's father's death was not an accident—he discovered the Gu family's secret of building low-rent housing with substandard materials."
The pen suddenly slipped from her fingers. Ah Yu remembered Zhong Hua in the ICU, wearing an oxygen mask, weakly saying, "My dad always said before he died that Gu Yanting looked at him like he was looking at a corpse."
"The video was hidden in a fold of the notebook." The last line of the suicide note was darkened with ink, as if it had been repeatedly traced: "Protect Zhong Hua. In some darkness, someone always has to hold up the light and walk to the very end."
Ah Yu's fingers, gripping the notebook, began to tremble. He remembered the police report saying that the surveillance cameras at the arson scene were completely destroyed in the fire; he remembered that when Gu Yanting pleaded guilty in court, Zhong Hua suddenly rushed out of the gallery and was pinned to the cold marble floor by bailiffs; he remembered that when he was waiting for Lin Wanqing outside the detention center, she slipped him a handkerchief through the iron bars, embroidered with three intertwined ginkgo leaves.
Sure enough, a miniature USB drive was hidden in the compartment, its metal casing polished to a shine. Ah Yu rushed to the law firm's computer, and the moment he inserted the USB drive, the screen's light reflected in his pupils—the image was shaky, clearly a stolen photograph.
The surveillance footage showed November 17th, three years ago, the night Zhong Hua's father's office caught fire. The camera first captured Gu Yanting standing at the end of the corridor, clutching a document, his tie fluttering in the wind. Suddenly, a woman in a black trench coat rushed out of the fire, her hat pulled low, a gasoline can still dripping from her hand.
"Why did President Gu come in person?" The woman's voice was processed, but it sent a chill down Ah Yu's spine—he had heard this voice in countless promotional videos for the Gu Group; it belonged to Gu Yanting's nominal assistant, but actually his distant cousin, Gu Manrou.
"You shouldn't have killed him." Gu Yanting's voice trembled. "I've already got the test results he had."
"So what if we got it?" The woman chuckled, stuffing something into Gu Yanting's pocket. "Now, this packet of gasoline, your fingerprints. And the hallway security camera footage shows you went into the office—cousin, who do you think the police will believe?"
The screen suddenly shook violently, then went completely black. The last sounds were Gu Yanting's muffled groan and the woman's footsteps as she walked away through the broken glass.
Ah Yu abruptly pressed the pause button and zoomed in on the bottom right corner of the screen—as the woman turned around, the hem of her trench coat billowed in the wind, revealing a tattoo on her ankle: a half-open white rose. He had seen this tattoo in a group photo of Lin Wanqing at a charity event; she was wearing shorts and tying shoelaces for African children.
Her phone suddenly vibrated in her pocket; it was a hospital number. Ah Yu practically lunged to answer it: "How's Zhong Hua?"
"The patient is very agitated," the nurse said apologetically. "She just saw the news about Gu Yanting's death, pulled out her IV, and said she had to go to the press conference..."
Ah Yu grabbed the USB drive and ran outside, and the rain intensified. As he rushed into the hospital elevator, he saw his reflection in the glass—his eyes were red-rimmed, and his stubble on his chin was wet with rain, just like the early morning three years ago when he was stopped by the police outside the fire scene.
Zhong Hua was sitting on her hospital bed tying her shoelaces, the sleeves of her hospital gown hanging empty—her left arm had been fractured by rocks while protecting her notebook during the mudslide. "I have to go to a press conference," she said. When she looked up, Ah Yu noticed her eyes were bloodshot. "The cause of my father's death can't just be left like this."
"I have evidence." Ah Yu shoved the USB drive into her hand; the metal casing was as hot as fire. "Gu Yanting isn't the real culprit."
The moment Zhong Hua's fingertips touched the USB drive, they suddenly trembled violently. She remembered waking up in the ICU yesterday; Ah Yu was asleep beside her bed, her phone screen lit up with a message from Lin Wanqing: "The ginkgo leaves in Paris are yellow, just like the specimen you dropped at that party that year."
The rain pounded against the glass outside the window, sounding just like the explosions at the fire scene three years ago. Zhong Hua suddenly grabbed Ah Yu's wrist, his fingertips tracing the old scar on his wrist from the glass cut—a mark he left when he rushed into the fire to save her.
"Help me prepare the live streaming equipment." She suddenly smiled, but tears welled up in her eyes. "Some truths need to be revealed."
Ah Yu watched as she pulled a voice recorder from under her pillow—the very one left behind at the last press conference. "This is the one my father used for interviews," she said, pressing play. The voice of Zhong Hua's father, crackling with static, came through: "The Gu family's building materials testing report, I put it..."
The recording was suddenly interrupted by a loud crash. Ah Yu remembered the words in Gu Yanting's suicide note and suddenly understood—in this conspiracy spanning three years, everyone was holding up their own glimmer of light, trying to illuminate the path beneath each other's feet.
He took out his phone and sent a message to Lin Wanqing. He edited the text box repeatedly, and finally sent only a photo: a profile of Zhong Hua adjusting the live streaming equipment, with a faint rainbow visible in the rain outside the window.
The moment the message was successfully sent, Ah Yu heard Zhong Hua whisper, "Look, the rain is about to stop."
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