The note contained a photo sent by Lin Wanqing from Africa: she was standing in front of a tent in a refugee camp, holding a wooden sign that read "Truth Knows No Borders," with a giraffe in the background peeking out as if eavesdropping.
"It looks good this way too." Ah Yu turned the note over, her fingertips accidentally brushing against her hand. Both of them flinched as if burned, the air filled with the subtle scent of lavender drifting in from outside the window.
The first call for help came at three in the morning. When Zhong Hua answered, Ah Yu had just put the freshly toasted bread onto a plate. On the other end of the line was an old woman crying, saying that her son had broken his leg at a construction site owned by Gu's Group. The company gave him some money and asked him to sign a "voluntary resignation," but now the metal plate in his leg was inflamed, and no one was taking care of him.
"Send me the address, we'll go tomorrow." Zhong Hua's voice was steady, but he only realized his hands were trembling after hanging up. Ah Yu pushed the hot milk towards her, two overlapping shadows imprinted on the cup—the shadow left from when they shared a cup of mulled wine during the first snow last year.
On the day I went to the construction site, the other party sent a man in a suit to stop me. He stood in the office doorway, speaking arrogantly: "The Gu family has gone bankrupt, and you're still clinging to this?"
Zhong Hua didn't speak, but simply opened his phone's photo album. The first photo was of the old lady's son lying in a hospital bed, his legs wrapped in blood-soaked gauze; the second was the inspection report for the construction site's safety rope, the date of which had been altered; the third was the construction log that Ah Yu had found, which recorded that "three safety inspections were skipped in order to meet the construction deadline."
The man's expression gradually changed. When Zhong Hua put away her phone, she noticed that Ah Yu was standing behind her, holding a voice recorder in his hand—the one she had left behind at the truth-revealing press conference, which he had always carried with him.
After dealing with the old lady's matter, on the train back, Zhong Hua leaned on A Yu's shoulder and dozed off. Sunlight streamed through the window, casting shadows of her eyelashes on her face. A Yu opened her phone; the latest photos were from yesterday: in front of the whiteboard in the foundation's office, several young people held up a sign that read "First Case Won," their smiles brighter than the sunflowers of Provence.
He suddenly remembered Lin Wanqing's text message. Last month, she won an award at a charity gala. When Ayu, as the award presenter, handed her the trophy, she whispered, "What you've done is more solid than the trees I planted in Africa."
Zhong Hua woke up as the train passed through a tunnel. In the darkness, she touched Ah Yu's hand and gently squeezed it: "After we're done with this, let's go see Xiao Yu."
Ah Yu hummed in agreement and gripped her hand tightly. As the light from outside the tunnel flooded in, he saw tears in the corners of her eyes—not tears of sadness, but tears like melting snow in Tibet, carrying a tenderness that was finally flowing.
The whiteboard in the foundation's office gradually filled with sticky notes. Some notes mentioned successfully recovering occupational disease compensation for miners, others helped designers whose work was plagiarized to protect their rights, and still others led to the shutdown and rectification of expired food processing plants. Every day before leaving get off work, Zhong Hua would take a photo and send it to Lin Wanqing. Sometimes she would reply with a picture of the African starry sky, sometimes a picture of smiling faces in a refugee camp, and occasionally just a sun emoji.
That evening, while organizing files, Ah Yu found Zhong Hua's interview notebook in the drawer. The latest page read: "They say the truth hurts, but I've seen people trapped by lies—they're like holding their breath underwater, and all we have to do is open a window."
The lavender field outside the window was already turning a pale purple, undulating like a sea when the wind blew. When Zhong Hua pushed open the door, he was holding a letter in his hand, the envelope stamped with a domestic postmark.
"Xiaoyu sent it." She smiled as she opened it, and a drawing fell out: three adults were holding hands with a little boy, standing in a field full of sunflowers, with a small house in the distance that had a sign that read "Truth Foundation." On the back of the drawing was written: "The teacher said that the truth will blossom."
Ah Yu took the painting, her fingertips tracing the childish lines. The setting sun cast long shadows of the two of them, overlapping on the paper, like two new seedlings added to the sunflower field.
He suddenly remembered the last words Attorney Zhang said on the day of the court verdict: "Gu Yanting never understood until his death that what he should have left behind was not an inheritance, but the possibility of preventing those mistakes from happening again."
Zhong Hua pasted the painting in the most conspicuous spot on the whiteboard, and as he turned around, he bumped into Ah Yu's arms. She looked up and saw the light in his eyes, which was just like the sunset over Montmartre when they reunited in Paris.
"Let's go buy some sunflower seeds tomorrow," she said softly.
“Okay.” Ah Yu looked down and smelled the lavender scent in her hair. “Plant it in front of the window of the fund’s office.”
As night fell into the room, the shadows of trees on the whiteboard swayed gently under the lamplight. The sticky notes filled with writing, like clusters of fruit ripening, made a soft yet firm sound in the evening breeze.
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