Lu Cheny an, a powerful figure in Beijing’s elite circles, believed I was responsible for my sister’s death.
On the three-hundredth day of my imprisonment, he stood before my sister’s memorial portrait and gripped my chin. “Shi Jinyue, your face only deserves to live so you can atone for her.” Late at night, he tore open my pajamas, yet his eyes looked through me at someone else. The night I saw two lines on the pregnancy test, he laughed and crushed abortion pills into my red wine. “You think you deserve to carry my child?”
I knelt among the shards of glass and begged him. “The baby will look like my sister.”
When he hung up on the call telling him my mother was critically ill, agony tore through my womb.
The day the baby stopped moving at seven months, my sister, missing for three years, pushed open the delivery room door, her shoes stained with my blood.
When his doctor friend brought him the death certificate, Lu Cheny an was hosting a welcome-home party for her.
Three years later, we met again in a small-town supermarket. He grabbed my hand, the one holding a white cane, trembling. “Lele...”
I pulled away and smiled faintly. “Mr. Lu, am I really worth chasing for two years, when I’m only a substitute?”
Only when my sister doused the tunnel in gasoline did his roar ring out over the explosion: “Shi Jinyue, you win! I’ll give you my life!”
Before the flames swallowed everything, I saw only the piece of umbilical cord tied around his ring finger, the remnant from three years ago.
The values in this work do not represent the author’s own. Please go easy on the author. If you have to curse someone, curse Lu Cheny an…
