A thirty-million-yuan wedding, and the groom is a cripple who has spent three years in a wheelchair. Shen Jingwan sits at the last table in her wedding dress, listening to the guests open a betting pool on when she'll run out in tears.
She was adopted. When her stepsister refused to marry, her adoptive mother pushed her into the match. Her father's estate is worth hundreds of billions, impressive on paper, but she cannot access it until she has been married for a full year. If she is divorced, the money goes to her adoptive mother.
She has one particular skill: reading traces. How a knot was tied, where a sheet of paper was torn, how many layers of dust had settled, whether the paste on a seal had dried completely: objects can speak, telling her about the habits of the person who handled them. But they cannot tell her who that person was.
At four o'clock this afternoon, the case of her mother's fall from Qinghe Bridge three years ago will be archived by the traffic bureau at ten tomorrow morning. Three years of case files, scene photos, and medical records will then be sealed away. She has less than three and a half hours to act.
And the records she needs to investigate are locked away in the Gu family's accounting office.
