Chapter 237: A Good Day

*Runze’s POV*

The house has settled back into its morning rhythm around me.

I have my arms wrapped loosely over my stomach, my feet tucked under me on the sofa, staring at nothing in particular. The sound of Bael’s car fading down the driveway has already been swallowed by the rain. Staff move through distant corridors. Something is being washed in the kitchen.

I should probably go back to the table and finish eating. Mrs. Wen will notice I didn’t.

I don’t move.

The summons keeps turning over in my mind even though I told myself to stop. Bael said it was just a move to force a public reaction. He said everything was under control. He said it the same way he says everything, steady and flat and completely certain, and I believed him when he said it. I still believe him now.

But believing him and not being scared are two different things.

I’ve spent the last few minutes trying to separate those two things and haven’t managed it yet. Every time I get close, the image of him walking out that door comes back, and the sound of his car disappearing, and the silence after.

I hear Grandmother’s footsteps before I register that she’s heading this way. I look up.

She crosses the sitting room toward the corridor that leads to her wing, unhurried. She passes the sofa.

Then she simply stops.

She doesn’t turn to face me fully. She stands just behind and to the side of where I’m sitting, her eyes toward the window and the wet garden beyond it.

"My grandson," she says, "has never done anything without a reason."

I look at her, not sure where she’s going with that.

"Ming’s timing was..." she pauses, just briefly, "...convenient."

Then she walks away down the corridor.

I hear her door close softly at the far end of the wing.

I just stay exactly where I am.

***

The word sits in the room long after she leaves.

Convenient.

The thing is, I had thought that too. Not today, not even this week, but back then, in those first still days after the headline broke. I remember sitting in Bael’s lap, reading *authorities rule death a suicide* over and over on his phone screen, and feeling that something about it didn’t quite settle right.

Ming hadn’t seemed like someone who gave up. He was too certain of himself, too calculating, too convinced he was going to find a way out. His lawyers were moving fast. He had Liu Wen taking all the blame. He believed he was going to walk.

Men who believe they are about to win don’t make that choice.

I had noticed that. And then I had set it down, because Ming was gone and we were safe and I hadn’t wanted to pull on that thread. And then the broadcast happened, and the board meetings, and the summons this morning, and I still hadn’t pulled on it.

Grandmother just pulled it for me.

I press my palms flat against my knees.

Bael had explained the original plan to me. The embezzlement charges were solid. The plan was to wait, let Ming believe his lawyers were winning, and then release the second file. The phone call from Ming’s office, Secretary Liu, the truck, all of it. Attempted murder stacked on top of embezzlement. It was supposed to be public and total and something Ming could never recover from.

That was the plan.

But Ming died the night before Bael was supposed to release it.

I had registered that timing when it happened. I remembered it clearly, the way certain things stick even when you’re not trying to hold onto them. And then everything moved so fast and I let it go. The funeral. Grandmother in her armchair with cold tea. Bael standing at the bedroom door in black, already dressed, and saying—

*Today is a good day, Runze.*

I had stood in the middle of that room for a long time after he left, turning those words over. Trying to understand how a funeral could be a good day for anyone.

I get up from the sofa and walk to the window. The garden is wet, the rose bushes dark, the gravel path shining.

Bael had been patient with Ming for years. Managed him, outmaneuvered him, kept him contained. He had a plan that would have destroyed Ming completely and publicly and permanently. There was no reason to abandon that plan.

Unless something changed the calculation.

I turn that thought over slowly, the way you turn something sharp over carefully, trying to find the angle.

The accident. The hospital. Three days where nobody knew if I was going to wake up. I know what those three days looked like on Bael, because I saw his face the morning I finally opened my eyes, and it was the only time I had ever seen him look like that. Like something had been taken out of him that he hadn’t known he was capable of losing.

What if after that, the plan wasn’t enough anymore?

I press my fingers against the cold glass.

I don’t know if that’s what happened. I genuinely don’t. Grandmother didn’t say it outright and Bael has never said anything and I have no way of knowing for certain what happened inside a prison cell in the middle of the night. Maybe it really was a suicide. Maybe Ming, facing prison with his reputation destroyed and his freedom gone, had simply decided.

But I keep coming back to the timing. The night before. And to Bael standing in that doorway calling it a good day.

What if he really did it?

I stay at the window with that question and try to figure out how I feel about it, and find that I can’t land anywhere clean. Ming had paid someone to make sure I didn’t walk away from that highway. He had wanted our baby gone before they even had a chance to breathe. I can’t make myself grieve him, I don’t think I’m capable of it.

But my husband possibly ordering a man’s death, and that being something I just... accept, and live with, and never speak of—

I don’t know what that makes me.

And then the next thought arrives before I can stop it: if Bael did do it, it was probably because of me. Ming had been an enemy long before I came into this marriage. Bael could have moved against him a dozen times and never did. The only thing that changed was the accident. The only thing that could have made Bael abandon a careful, controlled plan for something irreversible was what happened on that highway.

Which means, if it’s true, he did it for me.

I press my forehead lightly against the glass.

...Should I ask him?

The question surfaces and I sit with it for a moment. What would asking even look like? Bael comes home tonight, or tomorrow morning, and I look at him across the breakfast table and say—did you do it? And then what? He answers, and I have to decide what to do with that answer, and whatever he says changes the shape of what sits between us.

I’m not sure I want to change that shape.

Maybe that’s the wrong choice. Maybe choosing not to ask is just choosing not to know, which is its own kind of answer. But Bael is my husband, and he is currently dealing with a police summons and a media storm and whoever is still out there pulling strings, and I can’t see what asking him right now does for either of us except add one more thing to carry.

I think about Grandmother. *He was still my son.* She had said it that first morning, sitting in her armchair with her cold tea, her face composed and her eyes too distant. Not with bitterness. Just the plain exhausted weight of it.

She had known then. Maybe for longer than that.

And she had made her peace with it.

I step back from the window.

My phone buzzes on the sofa cushion behind me. I cross the room and pick it up.

A message from Bael.

*Leaving the station now. I went with the legal team and handled it. Will be home before dinner.*

I read it twice. Then I sit back down and type back.

*Okay. I’ll tell Mrs. Wen.*

I look at Bael’s message one more time, then set the phone on the cushion.

From the kitchen, I catch the smell of something cooking. Warm and savory, the kind of smell that registers in your stomach before your mind catches up. I realize I barely touched my breakfast. I’d been pushing food around my plate since the phone call, and now, sitting here with his message on the screen and the rain still coming down outside, I am suddenly, straightforwardly hungry.

I get up and go find Mrs. Wen.