3. The Other Supper

Three days after the hearing, Li Wei drove to the Zhou apartment alone. He carried no case files, no evidence bags, no official notebook. He carried only a bag of oranges, because his mother had taught him that you never visit someone’s home empty-handed, even when you are visiting to tell them that justice has failed.

The stairwell had been swept recently. The concrete steps were worn smooth in the center, polished by decades of footsteps, and the walls still bore the faint ghosts of old propaganda posters that had been painted over but never quite erased. On the third-floor landing, a neighbor’s door opened a crack, and an old woman peered out at him with eyes that had seen too much to be curious about one more stranger.

Liu Fang opened the door before he could knock. She was wearing the same blue cardigan, the one with the mended elbow, and her hair had been pinned back with a clip that was missing one of its plastic teeth. She looked at Li Wei’s face, and something in her own face collapsed—not into tears, but into a deeper stillness, as if a door inside her had closed.

“You lost,” she said. It was not a question.

“The evidence was excluded. The case cannot proceed.”

Liu Fang stepped aside to let him enter. The apartment was exactly as Li Wei remembered it: clean, spare, orderly. The furniture was old but well-maintained. The walls were decorated with calligraphy scrolls that Zhou Jimo had written himself—excerpts from classical poems about integrity, about standing firm against corruption, about the duty of officials to serve the people. The ink had faded slightly, but the characters were still sharp.

Meiling was sitting at the dining table. She was not doing homework. She was not reading. She was simply sitting, her hands folded in front of her, staring at the empty chair across from her. A bowl of congee had been set before that chair, the chopsticks arranged with geometric precision. The congee had formed a skin.

“She does this every meal,” Liu Fang said quietly. “Every meal, she sets a place for him. I have tried to stop her. The school counselor says it is a coping mechanism, that she will grow out of it when she is ready. But it has been weeks.”

Li Wei set the oranges on the kitchen counter. He did not know what to say. He had delivered death notifications to seventeen families in his career. He knew the script: the formal condolences, the offer of victim services, the promise to keep them informed. But this was different. This was not a notification of death. This was a notification of impunity.

“Mrs. Zhou, the man who killed your husband—”

“I know who he is.” Liu Fang’s voice was flat, matter-of-fact. “Everyone knows who he is. The neighbors know. The colleagues know. The reporters who called me know. Knowing does not matter. Knowing is not the same as proving.”

“I am still investigating. Officially, the case is closed, but I am still looking. There may be other evidence. There may be other witnesses.”

Liu Fang turned to face him. Her eyes were dry, but they held a weight that made Li Wei want to look away. “Detective, do you have children?”

“A daughter. She is eight.”

“Then you understand that I cannot hope anymore. Hope is a luxury. Every time I hoped—when the threats began, when we reported them, when my husband said he would not be intimidated—every time I hoped, the hope turned out to be a lie. I cannot afford another lie. I have to take care of Meiling. I have to make sure she eats, that she goes to school, that she does not spend the rest of her life setting a place for a ghost. That is all the hope I have left.”

Li Wei looked at Meiling. The girl had not moved during the entire conversation. She was staring at the bowl of congee with an intensity that was almost religious, as if she believed that if she watched it long enough, her father would return to eat it.

“Meiling,” Li Wei said, sitting down across from her. “My name is Detective Li. I knew your father. He was a good man.”

Meiling did not respond. Her eyes did not move from the bowl.

“She does not speak to strangers,” Liu Fang said. “She has not spoken to anyone except me since the funeral. The counselor says it is trauma. She says we must be patient.”

Li Wei reached out and touched the bowl of congee. It was cold. The skin on top quivered slightly under his fingertip. “Your father was brave,” he said to Meiling. “He stood up to people who wanted to hurt this city. He never gave up, even when it was hard. Even when he was scared.”

Something flickered in Meiling’s eyes. A tiny movement, barely perceptible—but her gaze shifted from the bowl to Li Wei’s face for exactly one second before returning to its vigil.

“I am going to find a way,” Li Wei said. “I do not know how yet. But I am going to find a way to make this right. That is a promise.”

Meiling did not respond. But her hand moved across the table, slowly, and came to rest beside her father’s bowl. She did not touch it. She simply let her fingers rest on the wood beside it, as if she were keeping it company.

—

Wang Xiu spent the morning at his office, reviewing contracts for a client who was acquiring a chain of hotels in the southern provinces. The work was routine, lucrative, and utterly meaningless. He had drafted similar contracts a hundred times. The clauses blurred together: indemnification, force majeure, governing law. Words that existed only to protect money from other money.

At noon, his secretary buzzed him. “A Detective Li is here to see you. He does not have an appointment.”

Wang Xiu set down his pen. “Send him in.”

Li Wei entered the office like a man walking into enemy territory. He was dressed in civilian clothes—jeans, a worn leather jacket—but he carried himself with the coiled alertness of someone who expected an ambush. He did not sit down.

“I went to see the Zhou family this morning,” Li Wei said.

“I assumed you would.”

“His daughter sets a bowl of congee for him at every meal. Every single meal. She watches it grow cold and she does not eat until her mother forces her. She does not speak. She has not spoken since the funeral.”

Wang Xiu absorbed this. He thought about Xiaobo, the boy with the trembling hands, the one who had dropped a piece of vegetable and fled to his room like a beaten dog. The two children, connected by a crime that neither of them had committed, both of them imprisoned in silences that adults had built for them.

“I am sorry for her suffering,” Wang Xiu said.

“Your client’s son knows what happened. The night of the murder, he saw his father cleaning mud from his shoes. He asked about it. He was scared—you could see the fear in his face. That boy is a witness, and he is being silenced by the same man who silenced Zhou Jimo.”

“You have no proof of that.”

“I have my eyes. I have my instincts. I have seventeen years of experience telling me that Chen A is a murderer and a domestic abuser and that his family is living in terror.”

Wang Xiu stood up. He walked to the window and looked down at the street below, where cars moved in orderly lines and pedestrians crossed at designated signals and the world proceeded according to rules that everyone had agreed to follow. “What do you want from me, Li Wei?”

“I want you to look at the security footage from the Chen estate. The north garden camera. The night of the murder.”

Wang Xiu turned around. His face was carefully blank, but something in his eyes had sharpened. “How do you know about that camera?”

“I have sources. The question is whether you have the footage.”

“The footage belongs to my client. It is protected by attorney-client privilege. I cannot share it with you or anyone else.”

“Cannot, or will not?”

“Both.” Wang Xiu’s voice was steady, but his hands were not. He shoved them into his pockets. “If I breached privilege, I would be disbarred. Chen A would walk free on every charge, past and future, because no court would trust anything connected to a lawyer who violated confidentiality. I would destroy not just this case but every case I have ever touched.”

Li Wei took a step forward. “There is a fourteen-year-old boy in that house who is being beaten. I saw the bruises on his wrist—the ones his long sleeves were supposed to hide. I saw his mother’s face when her husband spoke to her. I saw the way she moved, like a woman who has learned that survival means never drawing attention to herself. You saw it too. I know you did.”

Wang Xiu said nothing.

“You told me once that the strong should protect the weak,” Li Wei continued. “That was fourth grade. We were ten years old. But you were right. You were right then, and you are wrong now, and you know you are wrong. I can see it in your face.”

“The law is not about being right. It is about being consistent.”

“The law is about people.” Li Wei’s voice rose, filling the quiet office. “The law exists to protect people from predators. When it stops doing that—when it starts protecting the predators instead—it is not law anymore. It is theater. It is a performance of justice without the substance.”

Wang Xiu felt something crack inside him. It was a small crack, hairline, barely perceptible, but he felt it. He thought about the anonymous text message. *Then breach it. Some things matter more than ethics.* He thought about Yun’s face, the resignation in her eyes. He thought about the fourth-grade classroom, the boy with holes in his shoes, the lunch they had shared.

“I cannot give you the footage,” he said. “But there may be other ways to find what you are looking for. The estate has a security firm that monitors the cameras. They keep independent backups for thirty days before overwriting. The night of the murder is still within that window.”

Li Wei stared at him. “You are telling me to subpoena the security firm.”

“I am telling you nothing. I am speculating about standard industry practices. What you do with that speculation is your own decision.”

A long silence stretched between them. Li Wei’s expression shifted—anger giving way to something more complicated, something that might have been the ghost of their old friendship stirring in its grave.

“Thank you,” Li Wei said.

“Do not thank me. I have done nothing.” Wang Xiu returned to his desk and sat down. His hands were still trembling. “Now leave. I have work to do.”

Li Wei walked to the door, then paused. “The boy, Xiaobo. If Chen A realizes that his son knows what he did—if he thinks the boy might talk—what will he do?”

Wang Xiu did not answer. He did not need to. They both knew what a man like Chen A would do to protect himself. They both knew that a man who had drowned one person would not hesitate to silence another, even if that person shared his blood.

—

That evening, Wang Xiu drove to the Chen estate without announcing his visit. He told himself he was following up on the tax documents, but the documents were already signed and filed. He told himself he was being thorough, diligent, professional. He was lying, and he knew it.

The house was quieter than usual. The servants moved through the halls with their heads down, avoiding eye contact. The classical music had been turned off. In the dining room, the long table was set for only two.

Yun was seated at her usual place, her hands in her lap, staring at the empty chair at the head of the table. Chen A was not present. His wine glass was missing.

“Mrs. Chen,” Wang Xiu said, entering the room. “I apologize for arriving unannounced. I was hoping to speak with your husband.”

“He is not here.” Yun’s voice was a whisper, barely audible. “He went to Beijing for a meeting. He will return tomorrow.”

“And your son?”

“In his room. He is not feeling well.”

Wang Xiu sat down across from her. The table was laden with food—steamed fish, stir-fried vegetables, soup—but only one place setting had been touched. Yun’s bowl of rice was full. Her chopsticks were clean.

“Mrs. Chen,” Wang Xiu said carefully, “is everything all right in your household?”

Yun’s eyes flickered toward the hallway, toward the servants’ quarters, toward the shadows that filled the corners of the room. “Everything is fine,” she said. “My husband provides for us. We want for nothing.”

“That is not what I asked.”

A long pause. Yun’s hands tightened in her lap. “You are his lawyer,” she said. “Anything I tell you, you must keep confidential. Is that correct?”

“Yes. Attorney-client privilege extends to communications with the client’s family in certain circumstances.”

“Then I will tell you something.” Yun lifted her head and met his eyes for the first time. Her gaze was steady, but it was the steadiness of someone who had passed beyond fear into a terrain where fear no longer mattered. “My husband is a dangerous man. Not just to his enemies. To everyone. The night Director Zhou died, my husband came home very late. His shoes were wet. He burned them in the garden incinerator the next morning, along with his clothes. He told me that if anyone asked, he had been at a business dinner and then came straight home. He told me that if I ever said otherwise, he would take Xiaobo and I would never see my son again.”

Wang Xiu felt his pulse quicken. This was a confession. Not from the killer, but from the killer’s wife. It was hearsay, inadmissible, useless in court. But it was also true—he knew it was true, could feel the truth of it in the marrow of his bones.

“Why are you telling me this now?”

“Because you are the first person who has asked if I am all right.” Yun’s voice cracked. “No one else has asked. Not the police. Not his business partners. Not our neighbors. Everyone sees the house, the cars, the money, and they assume everything must be fine. No one looks at the people inside.”

Wang Xiu thought about the security footage. He thought about the north garden camera, the one that would show Chen A returning home with wet shoes, carrying clothes that he would burn the next morning. He thought about the security firm that kept independent backups for thirty days.

“Mrs. Chen,” he said, “if there were a way to ensure your safety—and your son’s safety—would you be willing to testify about what you just told me?”

Yun’s face went pale. “He would kill us.”

“Not if he is in prison. Not if there is enough evidence to convict him without relying solely on your testimony.”

“There is no such evidence. The police case was dismissed. He told me. He celebrated.”

“There may be evidence that the police have not yet found.” Wang Xiu stood up. “I cannot promise you anything. But I can promise that I will do everything within my power—within the law—to make sure your husband answers for what he has done.”

Yun looked at him for a long moment. Then, slowly, she picked up her chopsticks and took a bite of rice. It was a small gesture, almost insignificant, but Wang Xiu recognized it for what it was: the first movement of a woman who had decided, after years of stillness, to begin feeding herself again.

—

Li Wei spent the next day at the city records office, digging through property transfers, business licenses, and court filings connected to Chen A’s development company. The paper trail was immense—hundreds of documents, thousands of pages—but patterns began to emerge. Shell companies that existed only on paper. Land transfers that had been approved despite negative environmental assessments. Officials who had opposed Chen A’s projects and then abruptly resigned, citing personal reasons.

One name caught his attention. Four years ago, a mid-level environmental inspector named Huang Guofeng had filed a report alleging that Chen A’s company had falsified soil contamination data for a residential development. The report had been buried. Three months later, Huang Guofeng had died in a car accident on a rural highway. The official cause was driver error—he had lost control on a wet road—but the investigating officer had noted that the brake lines appeared to have been tampered with. The note was buried in a supplemental report that no one had followed up on.

Li Wei copied the file and added it to the growing stack of documents in his trunk. He did not know yet how these pieces fit together. But he could feel a shape emerging from the fog, the outline of something larger than a single murder. Chen A had been operating with impunity for years, protected by layers of lawyers and officials and procedural barriers that turned every investigation into a maze with no exit.

That night, Li Wei drove to the Zhou apartment again. He did not go inside. He sat in his car across the street, watching the yellow light in the third-floor window, and thought about the bowl of congee growing cold on the table. He thought about Meiling’s small hand resting beside her father’s empty place. He thought about the environmental inspector who had died on a wet road, and the brake lines that had been tampered with, and the report that no one had followed up on.

The light in the window went out at 9:47 PM. Li Wei remained in his car, watching the darkness, waiting for something he could not name.

At 10:15, his phone buzzed. A message from an unknown number: *Security firm is called Sentinel Protection. Their backup server is in the basement of their office on Dongfeng Road. The footage you want is file GC-2024-1107-03. The backup is deleted in three days.*

Li Wei stared at the message. He did not know who had sent it. He suspected he would never know. But he recognized the information for what it was: a door opening, a path appearing where there had been only walls.

He started the engine and drove toward Dongfeng Road, carrying with him the weight of a promise he had made to a girl who did not speak and a widow who could not afford to hope.

In the darkness of his office, Wang Xiu sat at his desk, staring at his phone. He had sent the message from a burner device that he would destroy before morning. He had crossed a line—not the line of attorney-client privilege, not yet, but a line nonetheless. He had pointed the police toward evidence that could destroy his own client.

He thought about the boy with the trembling hands. He thought about the woman who had taken her first bite of rice in years. He thought about Li Wei, standing in the parking lot, telling him that the law was about people.

The table was set. The food was growing cold. And somewhere in the city, two men who had once been friends were moving toward each other on paths that would eventually collide, carrying with them the fragile possibility that justice might still be possible—not because the law demanded it, but because people did.