Tang Chen’s Casebook 3

The hardest case he ever solved was admitting that he had fallen in love with her.

Tang Chen has always lived by one ironclad rule: emotions are the enemy of logic, and intimacy poisons judgment. In his three years as a criminal investigator, he turned himself into an island, until Li Xiaohuan came along like an unreasonable sea breeze. From being “forced onto the team” in the first season to standing “together through life and death” in the second, she filled every crack in his island with sunlight, little by little.

He grew used to her chatter, to her squatting at crime scenes and drawing cartoon figures to lighten the mood, and to the milk tea she handed him during late-night overtime, along with a “Come on, boss, give me a smile.” Then one day, he realized he had picked up an extremely dangerous “bad habit”: whenever he saw her smile, the corners of his own mouth would lift without him noticing. This habit could kill him more surely than any murder weapon.