Pei Jining has been a primary school teacher for five years, and for the first time she saw her ex-husband's name on the parent contact list - in the files of students in her class. The child she thought she had lost five years ago was now lying on the bed in the emergency room, with blood oozing from his forehead, his eyebrows and eyes looked like hers, and his frown looked like Lin Hanchuan's.
The man returned from the Gobi, with two extra stars on his epaulette, and his military boots tapped a familiar rhythm on the floor of the ward. He held two things in his hands: a court summons for custody and a forged consent form for surgery.
"You owe me your life," he said.
"Then you first ask Lin Hanchuan's ex-mother-in-law," she looked at the small face on the hospital bed, her voice trembling, "who stole that life."
A marriage torn apart by lies, a reunion with children as a bargaining chip. He thought she had cruelly abandoned the child, and she thought he had cruelly abandoned the family. For five years, he raised his son alone in the desert, while she guarded the empty ring finger of her left hand in the city. When the truth surfaced like a glacier bursting, they discovered that neither of them was the perpetrator, but they had both been victims for half their lives.
But the child's five years, her five years, his five years, what should be compensated?
When the evening bell rings, do two people who have been deceived by fate still have the strength to trust each other again?
