Shen Hanzhou kept Lin Qingmo locked up for three years.
Lin Qingmo thought they were friends, but Shen Hanzhou said, “Don’t even think about leaving.”
Lin Qingmo had a girl he loved. Her name was Su Zhi, and she had a lovely smile.
Shen Hanzhou said nothing. He just visited every day, bringing him medicine, books, and plum blossoms.
I thought he still had some humanity in him.
Until the day he brought me a bloodstained hairpin and said, “She’s dead.”
He believed him.
That night, he slit his wrists with a shard of porcelain.
After he died, he never learned that the hairpin was fake. Su Zhi was alive. Shen Hanzhou’s deputy had rescued her, and the two of them later married and opened a clinic, with plum trees planted outside.
He never learned that Shen Hanzhou carried his body to a plum grove, dug a pit, and buried himself alongside Lin Qingmo.
He set the fire himself.
He said, “This time, we won’t be apart.”
