Chapter 144: WHAT GAVE YOU THE IDEA THAT YOU COULD LEAVE?
Rongquan didn’t answer.
Guiying’s gaze swept over the table where all five children sat. Yilin at six, quiet and watching. The four younger ones, still and silent, picking up on the tension even if they didn’t understand the words.
"Look at them, Mr. Song. All of them."
"Yilin’s already learned that fathers leave and that she has to keep the little ones quiet so no one gets mad. The two-year-old doesn’t even know what ’gone’ means yet, but he knows when you’re not here. The others are learning it right now, from you."
He let that sit.
"Do you know what happens to kids who grow up like this? They stop expecting adults to stay. They stop asking for help. They stop believing they’re worth staying for. And twenty years from now, when they’re sitting across from someone trying to explain why they can’t hold a job, why they can’t trust people, they won’t blame the system. They’ll blame you. Because you were there, and you chose not to be."
Rongquan’s face went tight. His hand on Yilin’s shoulder trembled slightly.
Guiying wasn’t done. "You don’t get to decide what kind of father you are in your head. You only get to decide it by what you do when no one’s making you. Right now, no one’s making you pack that apartment. No one’s making you be at that bus stop at 3pm. If you don’t, you’re not ’between jobs.’ You’re just gone. And all five of them will remember that."
He let that land.
"So you’ve got a choice. Be the man who shows up at 5pm, even if it’s awkward and you don’t know what to say. Or be the reason all five of your kids never learn to expect anything different. That’s it. There’s no middle ground left."
Rongquan swallowed hard. His eyes dropped to the children, really looked at them for the first time since he walked in. Yilin was still watching him, waiting. The two-year-old had stopped playing with the car.
Guiying looked at Arang. "Can you stay with them while he packs? Just until the truck arrives."
Arang nodded. "Yes."
Guiying turned back to Rongquan. "5pm. Sober. Present. Prove me wrong."
He left the room, the door closing quietly behind him.
****************
The past few days had been the worst yet.
Not because of one blow, but because of a thousand small tightenings — the way a rope frays strand by strand in the dark until, one morning, there is nothing left to hold.
Ren Hao had lived eight months inside that tightening. Eight months learning the shape of Shen Zihao’s will, and the price of knowing it too well.
That morning he had boarded the subway with a sentence in his mouth, clean and final:
I’m tendering my resignation, effective immediately.
He had practiced it like a prayer against ruin, repeating it to the rhythm of the tracks so it wouldn’t slip away before he reached the door.
He never finished it.
Shen Zihao heard four words and laughed — not with malice, but with the quiet amusement of a man who has never been told "no."
He rose, crossed the room, and his hand closed around Ren Hao’s wrist. Not violent. It didn’t need to be. It was the grip of inevitability, the way gravity holds you to the earth.
"Who gave you the idea that you could leave?"
It wasn’t a question.
Questions leave room for answers. This left only air.
"I’ve been patient," Shen Zihao said, smoothing his cuff as if adjusting the world itself. "Your mother. Your brother. Your sister. All of it costs money, Ren Hao. And you know where that money comes from."
He sat on the edge of the desk, a judge in a silk suit.
"So let’s not do this. It’s embarrassing for both of us."
Ren Hao stood very still, because moving felt like it would make it real. He had learned, long ago, how to step half an inch out of his own skin when the world grew too sharp.
The edge of the desk. The traffic humming far below. The light on the floor.
He clung to small, indifferent things, and let the rest happen around him.
Afterward, Shen Zihao straightened his cuffs and glanced at him.
"You wanted it," he said lightly. "Don’t make that face."
"You need the money. Nobody forced you — you choose to stay."
He was already moving on, already dismissing it, a god who had granted a small, condescending mercy.
"Go home. Clean yourself up. You look terrible."
The door closed with a cold finality.
Ren Hao stood in the corridor, letting the silence press back in. His legs felt like they belonged to someone else, so he let them move first. Thoughts would come later, if it dared.
He did not go home.
His feet carried him past the station exit, past the street he meant to take, until the hospital’s antiseptic air swallowed him. Only when the doors of Room 11 slid open did he realize where he’d been walking all along. The body knows what the mind refuses to say.
He crossed the threshold because standing outside would not stop the shaking.
His mother lay as she had for five years — breathed for by machines, absent from the current of living.
Not sleeping.
Sleeping implies return. This was a shore too far for tides to reach.
He pulled the chair closer to the bed, not gently, but because distance felt like a lie he couldn’t maintain anymore.
He lowered himself into it slowly, bracing his forearms on his knees, as if sitting too quickly might spill what he’d been holding.
And then the weight of eight months, of five years, of every unsaid enough cracked open in his chest.
He wept.
Not the quiet, respectable weeping of offices and funerals. This was ugly, animal, torn from somewhere below dignity. His shoulders shook, his breath tore, and the machines breathed on, indifferent as time.
He hated his life.
Not in a momentary flash, but as a settled, bone-deep truth.
He hated the subway doors sliding shut, the corridor outside Shen Zihao’s office, the sound of that door sealing his will away.
He hated the ghost he had become — present in body, absent in everything that made a man his own.
