Chapter 8: The Lobby

The lobby of the Xie hospital had a marble floor, a glass roof, and a fountain nobody had ever seen working.

Lin Zhi's father stood in the middle of it in a stained coat, with a bottle in one hand.

He was fifty-six, unshaven, and louder than the water would have been.

"There he is!" he shouted, when the elevator opened. "My boy! The big husband!"

Forty people turned to look.

On the stairs, the cousin held up his phone to film, with a face of sorrowful concern.

Lin Zhi walked across the marble with the lunchbox in both hands.

"Dad," said Lin Zhi.

"Don't Dad me. I raised you."

"You sold my mother's wedding ring."

"He married a corpse for three million yuan," his father told the crowd, "and he won't give his own father a coin."

Somebody gasped.

Lin Zhi felt the old heat climb his neck, the one he had swallowed since he was fifteen.

He was tired of swallowing it.

"Who told you where I was?" he asked.

"A nice man. In a grey suit. He gave me a lift in a black car."

Lin Zhi turned his head.

At the edge of the crowd, beside a pillar, the tall lawyer stood with his phone to his ear, looking at the ceiling.

"Excuse me," Lin Zhi said to the girl at the information desk. "Is there a visitor log?"

"Yes, sir."

"Could you read the escort on the entry for the man in the brown coat? He'd have signed in at about ten past eight."

She looked at her screen, and then at the lawyer, and the color left her face.

"Escorted by Counsel Shen Mo, sir," she said. "Of the Xie Group."

Forty heads went from the desk to the pillar.

"Mr. Shen," said Lin Zhi, pleasantly. "Yesterday you called a rider on page nine a formality. Is my father also a formality?"

"I was assisting the family," said the lawyer, stiffly.

"Then assist him out."

"I don't take instructions from you."

"No. You take them from the man who pays you to slip riders into contracts," said Lin Zhi.

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