It wasn’t an impulsive decision.
I’d thought it through deeply, hesitating and hemming and hawing. Ever since I learned that Gan Ling was chasing the traces of Zheng Chenggang, I’d been trailing behind her, dragging along a flimsy, transparent plastic bag called the truth.
I contacted that police officer and spilled everything that had happened to me during this time.
It was like wading through the sea with a bundle of cotton on my back—the further I went, the heavier it weighed on me, until finally, I found someone who could listen to it all. She even remembered the incident from seven years ago; she even remembered Zheng Ningning.
In the chat I wanted to show Gan Ling, there were records from seven years ago, the whole story. There was also how I’d tracked her down recently, how I’d laid bare my struggles and choices during this time, and how I viewed Gan Ling—I’d wanted to tell her the killer’s identity early on. All of this was just for revenge, but it felt so heavy; I couldn’t carry it anymore.
I could even explain it to Gan Ling from the side, pointing out which lines didn’t flow logically because that’s when we’d done or said something face-to-face.
I’d prepared myself to lay the truth bare before Gan Ling and confess everything, hoping we could have an open and honest talk about it all—about revenge killing, about next January, about seven years ago. I was ready to drag out everything from that warehouse back then and air it in the sun!
But Gan Ling just smiled lightly and opened the TV drama, watching it with gusto on double speed. The female lead shook her head back and forth at an insanely fast pace, the voice actor’s lines spilling out in a rapid-fire blur that was almost impossible to make out.
My phone grew hot in my hand. I froze in place, suddenly realizing—maybe Gan Ling already knew who the killer was. She didn’t want to drag me into it.
Once I knew, I’d be an accomplice, and her actions in killing would be held back.
All along, Gan Ling, Zheng Chenggang, and Zheng Ningning had been playing this tacit game. Starting with Zheng Ningning, they vanished one by one, then reemerged in sequence. I was the only witness to the game. The parents appeared one after another; after the father showed up, he stayed in the house, like an invisible elephant that both audience and actors ignored.
I grabbed Gan Ling’s arm, but the words wouldn’t come out. Gan Ling turned her head, reached out with her arm, and pulled me into her embrace. “Watch TV.”
“Gan Ling, you… I—”
“Didn’t you say next January? It’s vacation time—why bring this up out of nowhere?” Gan Ling switched tactics. I didn’t buy a single word, staring her down hard. My position was like lying on her lap and glaring up at her. Gan Ling lowered her eyes with a smile, tapped the screen twice, then opened my WeChat and played dumb. “Fine, let’s watch. Watch what? Let me check your Moments…”
“Gan Ling!”
When I wasn’t close to Gan Ling, she’d barrel ahead stubbornly with whatever she wanted, and I couldn’t stop her—like a blade honed sharp and dipped in poison, charging straight through. Now that we were close, she’d softened, but when she was dead set on something I didn’t know about, she turned sly, gently deflecting the topic with a laugh and steering it elsewhere.
This woman’s core never changed, whether her expression was smiling or resentful. She was a wolf who only smiled—a she-wolf who wouldn’t let go once she had her prey in sight.
I just straight-up asked, “I’m telling you who the killer is. I told you ahead of time—why won’t you look?”
“Teacher Xiao Jiang—”
Gan Ling pressed one hand over my eyes, blocking my view. I pried it away, and her expression was inscrutable. “It’s not time yet. You haven’t figured it out, and neither have I. Don’t say it.”
“Hah?”
“If you’re dead set on telling me, have you prepared for what comes next?”
What comes next… what did that mean?
I was about to demand an explanation when it hit me like a jolt of electricity.
The truth was a chain reaction, like triggering a mechanism—click, and the little ball rolls down a predetermined path. One or two paths, depending on who set it up. Between me and Gan Ling, one person or both of us had rigged a mechanism. She knew the route; I didn’t—or maybe she didn’t either.
Speaking the truth wasn’t some light thing that ended once it left my mouth.
I’d hoped everything could come to a close, but maybe revealing the truth was just the beginning. Before this, even if Gan Ling and I both had our suspicions and were tracking separately, we were still just simulating the paths in our heads. No one knew the real situation.
I fell silent for a long time. Gan Ling stretched out her arm, handed me the phone, turned my shoulders, and checked my back. “The pimples are almost gone.”
And just like that, the topic ended.
In the afternoon, while packing up to catch the bus, I even asked the front desk girl when that so-called hot spring pool would open. She said probably not until a year from now, then added that it was good I hadn’t gone out all day—some bratty kid had caused a ruckus at the swimming pool today, and tons of people complained. Good thing I had the foresight.
Gan Ling picked up the bag. “Let’s go.” The front desk girl waved, her apple cheeks blooming with a plump smile, all cheerful and festive. I caught the vibe and grinned too, jogging a couple steps happily to catch up with Gan Ling and take my bag from her hands, slinging it over my shoulder.
The bus rolled all the way back to Neng County. Gan Ling and I barely spoke on the road; my little smile couldn’t sustain forced grinning the whole way.
As we passed roadside lights and billboards, with two streets left until the bus stop, Gan Ling suddenly nudged me with her elbow out of nowhere. “You heading to the city again next week?”
“Yeah.”
“If anything comes up, call me.”
Gan Ling held out her hand for my phone offering. She opened the contacts and directly inputted her number.
“If anything comes up, just call.” The woman emphasized it, as if I was bound to run into trouble.
The bus had turned the corner onto the last street, nearing the stop. I didn’t mention that she was in the county while I was in the city—if something really happened, by the time I called and she rushed over, she’d end up as a witness.
Those words “witness” weighed on my mind. I didn’t respond, just forced a smile and gathered my bits and pieces, hugging the bag to my chest.
“Jiang Xiaohui!” This woman wouldn’t let it go. “Did you hear me?”
“Got it.”
It felt a bit like a rebellious teen talking to her mom. I figured if Zheng Ningning were still alive, her dynamic with her mom would’ve been just like this. Maybe at Gan Ling’s age, she just needed to scold some angsty kid—I was the stand-in.
Gan Ling was thirty-three this year. She’d had Zheng Ningning not long after turning adult, jumping straight from independent youth to burdened mom without a pause. Even if she wasn’t a good mom, it was understandable—plenty of college kids still had to be home by 9:30 p.m. to beg their parents for living expenses…
The bus shuddered to a heavy stop near the old civil affairs bureau. The aroma of jianbing seeped through the window cracks. Lift it a bit, and the scents of fried chicken frames and grilled lamb skewers would come rushing in.
Gan Ling grabbed me, and I had no intention of leaving anyway.
I said pancake; she said fried chicken frames.
We eyed each other. Gan Ling insisted on buying both. I said it was getting late and I couldn’t eat that much. We ended up playing tug-of-war on the street, the two stalls as our battlegrounds. Finally, rock-paper-scissors—I won. One jianbing guozi each. We strolled along the roadside, eating as we went.
“That night when I first eloped here with Zheng Chenggang, crammed in a cheap motel, I said I was hungry. There was a jianbing stall downstairs. Back then, they tasted better than now, so flavorful. I ate more than half, drank some water, and was so stuffed I couldn’t move.”
I picked at the crispy bits in my pancake, not daring to chime in.
“He took the remaining half, didn’t mind it at all, and just ate it.”
I stopped in my tracks, but Gan Ling seemed to have eyes in the back of her head. She freed up a hand and tugged me along to keep following her.
“I know people change… I just don’t get how Zheng Chenggang turned out like that. I don’t believe I’m blind. I eloped with him, gave him a kid—but later, things changed.”
I’d finally pinched out a piece of crispy, but it twitched and jumped out, splattering onto the road and instantly crushed by a passing car.
“He drove trucks, then went solo hauling goods and running business. Hard work, suffering—never sure if a run would make money. Haul a lot for profit, get caught and fined… Even when times were tough, he hit me. I don’t forgive it, but in Neng County, most guys are like that, right? Drink a bit and beat the wife—it’s common… I wasn’t surprised. But Ningning—he was good to Ningning. She looked like him too. I thought, people don’t usually—no way, at least he used to be good. No way he’d… be bad to the kid.”
“What if… I mean, hypothetically… he hasn’t changed? What if he’s just good at pretending? Like, they say physiognomy reflects the heart. He looks decent, so maybe people give him extra credit right off the bat?”
Gan Ling turned back, eyes twinkling with amusement. “No need to beat around the bush so cautiously.”
I licked my oily lips. “It’s your business, after all.”
The woman turned away, glancing around, and finally spotted a quiet alley. Inside, there was a little shop selling spicy hot pot, fried chicken, and burgers, plus a tutoring center with a few lights on but no sign.
We finished our jianbing in focused silence. Gan Ling brought it up again. “People really are hard to predict when it comes to change.”
“Mm.”
I’d changed a lot myself.
From devout to rebellious, from faithful to faithless.
From conservative views on relationships to heading off to hang out with a guy seven years younger who I neither liked nor disliked.
I’ll continue to change. I broke into a sprint, clutching my plastic bag tightly, measuring my life in seven-year cycles. With every step, I became profoundly different. Zheng Ningning’s death had stalled my previous seven years, but Gan Ling’s arrival had set time flowing once more. I wouldn’t forget Zheng Ningning’s death, but I wouldn’t let this secret weigh solely on me anymore, hindering my every step.
Gan Ling wolfed down the pancake in her hand in just a couple bites, crumpled the plastic bag casually, and tossed it into the trash bin. “Teacher Xiao Jiang, will you change?”
Why did she suddenly ask me that?
I looked up, recalling my agreement with Gan Ling for next January. After laying bare the matter of the murderer, Gan Ling and I would drift off in different directions. Two lines briefly intersecting, tangling briefly before flowing apart. Change was a dimension of the long term, and I figured Gan Ling wouldn’t be around to witness any of my changes beyond my hairstyle.
I could only reply with a cheesy pun: “I won’t do the Seventy-Two Transformations…”
Gan Ling laughed, and I answered seriously: “I will change. Everyone changes. I… I’m just an ordinary person too.”
“For example, at first you wouldn’t tell me, then suddenly you want to show me some chat records. I caught a rough glimpse—it was a cop?”
“Yeah, back then… uh… she’s retired now. I… I told her about things after you showed up. She said our not telling you before was out of… sigh—but you want to know, you have the right to know. The choice is yours…”
“Out of what? Pity?” Gan Ling crossed her arms again. I lowered my head to eat my pancake. Gan Ling waited until I finished before pressing the question once more.
I said: “It was out of protection.”
“She thought you were trafficked. So she… wanted you free.”
“She protected me back then, so that’s why you believed Ningning Grandma when she said I was dead?”
“Yeah.”
Back then, she hadn’t let me tell anyone about the murderer.
Mentioning father inevitably meant mentioning mother, and mother was even easier to bring up than father.
I’d thought Gan Ling was dead; that old cop had kept the lie going all along.
She wouldn’t let me speak, and I had my own reasons for staying silent too. And so, seven years passed.
Only after I brought it up seven years later did she explain all those oddities. When speaking of a child’s death, who wouldn’t go after the mother? Yet Gan Ling had drifted alone in some far-off place for seven years, with scarcely any gossip swirling, all because she “died.” Someone had slammed the coffin shut on “the mother died,” turning the lie into truth—
I crumpled the greasy plastic bag in my hand and tossed it into the trash bin.
Gan Ling leaned against the wall, hands hanging limply at her sides. After a moment, she casually brushed back the hair on her forehead. Her shoe toyed with a fragile little pebble, rolling it back and forth. I hooked a finger into my bag, pulled out a tissue, and wiped my hands and mouth.
In the shadows, the woman kept her head down, stepping on the stone, silent for a long while.
I walked over and hugged her waist, fulfilling my duty as a good doll by nestling into the crook of her arm.
The woman’s breathing was uneven, her chest heaving like ocean waves, yet her expression remained as calmly composed as ever, hair veiling her eyes, lips pressed into a thin line.
“Do you pity me, Teacher Xiao Jiang?”
Gan Ling’s hand came to rest on my back, sliding down slowly, as if I were the one whose breath came in ragged waves.
I shook my head.
It was because Gan Ling had appeared that I felt a kind of forgiveness from the family, allowing me to lift my head from the snapping sound of bamboo being chopped and hear other noises.
I was grateful to her. I was glad that Gan Ling still existed in this world.
