Chapter 18: The Eightieth Birthday

The Xie house had four courtyards, two hundred red lanterns, and a banquet hall with a ceiling painted in gold.

Lin Zhi pushed a wheelchair through all of it in a black suit that Pei Wen had rented.

The man in the chair wore a dark coat with a blanket over his knees, and his head lay slightly to one side.

He was breathing slowly, as a sleeping man does.

He was also, under the blanket, holding Lin Zhi's phone.

"Wait for it," Lin Zhi had whispered, in the car. "You wait until your grandmother says. Not one second before."

"I can walk in."

"You will walk out. First you have to let him talk."

Three hundred guests turned to stare as the chair came through the doors.

Lin Zhi kept his chin up and counted lanterns.

Madam Xie sat at the head table in a red silk jacket and a jade pin.

Her cane lay across her knees.

She gave them one nod.

Then she rose, took her cane, and announced to the hall that her grandson was tired and would rest in the study until the toasts.

An hour later Lin Zhi stood in the empty corridor outside the study, with an earbud in his ear.

It was the end of the third course.

Xie Guangping had left the table ten minutes earlier.

He had done it exactly as Madam Xie had said he would.

There had been a quiet word to the lawyer and a hand on someone's shoulder.

The study door had been left a hand's width open.

In Lin Zhi's ear, a chair scraped, and a soft voice began.

"Well, Zhaoran. Look at the two of us."

Lin Zhi's hands went cold.

He pressed the button on the phone in his pocket, and the red dot began to move.

"I'll be brief. A few more hours, and it's all over."

"The board meets on Monday. Your little husband goes to prison tonight, and you will be at the lake house by the weekend."

A pause, and a long, satisfied breath.

"I never wanted to hurt you. But a man can't build a company on a boy's pity."

"I told my driver to see to the car, and he did. You'd have died in it if you were any less stubborn."

Lin Zhi shut his eyes.

"He cut the line himself, you know. He still dreams about it."

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