Chapter Twenty-Five: An Eye for an Eye

Chapter Twenty-Five: Tit for Tat

“Xiaoying, don’t joke about something like this!” Fang Da said sternly, fixing Xia Ying with a hard glare and warning her in a loud voice.

His booming voice startled her. Xia Ying jolted, and the paper in her hand slipped to the floor. She bent to pick it up, but Qin Ruonan stopped her and crouched down to retrieve it herself. Regardless of whether she liked the woman before her, and regardless of how deeply Xia Ying might be involved in Fang Wan’s disappearance, she was pregnant now; taking care of and protecting a pregnant woman was only right.

Qin Ruonan took the copy of the hospital certificate and put it into her own bag. She also guided Xia Ying back to the sofa and made sure she sat properly. Xia Ying already looked on the verge of tears. Qin Ruonan had seen her crying before, all tearful and pitiful, and feared she might keep wavering there on her feet and cry herself into some new problem.

Xia Ying sat down, grabbed a throw pillow from beside her, and held it in her arms. Her fingers dug into the soft fabric, leaving ten deep dents in it.

An Changpu patted Fang Da, signaling him to sit as well. Fang Da remained gloomy-faced, but after hearing Xia Ying’s words, that gloom was tinged with an undercurrent of unease.

Since Xia Ying had dropped such a bombshell and then been shouted at by Fang Da, she no longer made a sound. Clutching the pillow in both arms, she trembled faintly. With the three of them all staring at her, her curled-up figure on the sofa looked even more vulnerable, like a helpless lamb surrounded by wolves.

An Changpu had been worried Qin Ruonan would rush to question Xia Ying, and had meant to signal her to stay quiet and observe for the moment. To his surprise, Qin Ruonan was in perfect step with him this time; apart from watching Xia Ying silently, she said nothing at all.

Fang Da, however, was not nearly as focused as they were. He kept glancing at An Changpu and Qin Ruonan, then at Xia Ying. With neither side speaking, he grew more and more restless.

“What is this, some kind of face-reading session? Or what?!” he finally snapped, unable to sit still any longer. He pointed at Xia Ying and said, “Xiaoying, stop lowering your head and keeping quiet. Since the two officers are here today, make yourself clear. What exactly are you hiding from me about all this?”

Xia Ying suddenly lifted her head and looked at Fang Da with grievance written all over her face. After biting her lip for a while, she said, “What have I been hiding from you? How can this count as hiding anything from you? You never once asked me about it from start to finish. I simply didn’t take the initiative to tell you. That doesn’t count as hiding!”

“At a time like this, you’re still playing games with wording?” Fang Da said, growing anxious. “What do you expect me to ask you? You’re his stepmother! And even ‘stepmother’ still has the word ‘mother’ in it, doesn’t it? I’m a normal person! A normal person wouldn’t suddenly suspect that a woman like that would harm her own child for no reason!”

“Our own family? This is your family, your son’s family, your Fang family! What does it have to do with me, Xia Ying?” Once Xia Ying started speaking, all the grievance she had bottled up seemed to spill out at once. “I admit it, I secretly gave Fang Wan a laxative! But I swear to heaven, no, I swear on the baby in my belly, I never once intended to hurt him. I only wanted to teach him a lesson and make him suffer a little! I admit what I did, but don’t bring it up at a time like this as if it has anything to do with Fang Wan’s disappearance, all right? That would be too much injustice!”

Hearing that she dared swear on the child in her womb, Fang Da’s expression softened slightly. But not having the full truth only made him more agitated.

“How did you make Fang Wan take a large amount of laxative?” Qin Ruonan asked, seeing that Fang Da did not seem inclined to continue arguing with Xia Ying for the moment.

“I crushed it up and mixed it into his food and drinks, a little at a time,” Xia Ying said, her voice dropping lower and lower. After all, she had done something wrong, and even describing the process made her uneasy.

“Fang Wan didn’t notice anything unusual?” From the doctor’s recollection, Fang Wan’s diarrhea and dehydration had been severe; it could not have been caused by a small dose of laxative.

Xia Ying’s face stiffened for a moment, and her voice became even softer. “I divided it into many tiny portions and mixed it into his food and drinks all at once.”

“How did you make sure only Fang Wan got it, and that it didn’t affect you?”

“Ever since a long time ago, that child and I haven’t eaten at the same table anymore. When we did eat together, he would always deliberately knock the food onto the floor or kick my leg under the table and find all kinds of faults with me. So later on, I simply started dividing the food into two portions every night. One portion I brought into the room and ate myself; the other I left in the kitchen. When he got hungry, he’d go take it himself. We each ate our own, and neither bothered the other.”

“Why did you do it that way? You took the laxative from the pharmacy?”

She had not expected the source of the laxative to be guessed so easily, and Xia Ying blushed. That reaction surprised Qin Ruonan and An Changpu somewhat. The shame and embarrassment she showed were for stealing the medicine, not for drugging Fang Wan, as though drugging Fang Wan was not really such a serious matter at all—no worse than, say, secretly sticking a drawing of a turtle on someone’s back during school days. What was truly disgraceful was the theft itself.

Such a reaction turned cause and effect completely upside down.

“That child used to make trouble with me every day, whether because there was something wrong with him or because he’d been egged on by someone in his own family, I don’t know. He dug out my skin cream and threw it away, squeezed toothpaste into it, and secretly cut the heels off several pairs of my high heels! That’s why I wanted to give him a taste of his own medicine! At most, what I did was tit for tat! I never imagined that eating a little laxative would actually lead to anything dangerous! I thought at worst he’d just have to run to the bathroom, and maybe, if he was unlucky, he’d wet his pants and be laughed at!” Xia Ying defended herself indignantly.

“How many times did you take medicine home from the pharmacy?” An Changpu asked.

“I don’t remember.”

“What kinds of medicine did you usually take home?”

“Just ordinary medicines for coughs and colds, that sort of thing! Do you still think I gave Fang Wan some kind of poison this time?” Xia Ying widened her eyes, her eye rims reddening as if she might cry at any moment. “I could never possibly poison him! Even if I wanted to poison him, I’d need poison first, wouldn’t I? In our shop, anything with a certain level of toxicity or any special medicine is kept separately in a glass cabinet. The key is held by the shop manager, and none of the rest of us are allowed to open it. When customers come in with prescriptions, we even have to specially call someone over to unlock it for them! If you don’t believe me, go check!”

“You...” Fang Da listened in silence for a long time. By now his expression had become strangely unreadable, as if he were furious and wanted to lose his temper, yet also restrained by something, forcing himself to endure it. There was also a great deal of helplessness in it. “How old are you? How old is he? When he was born, you hadn’t even finished high school yet! How could you possibly stoop to the same level as a child? No matter how wrong he was, you should have told me! I’d have come back to scold him, discipline him, even hit him if necessary, but how could you give him medicine? Afterward, I never once suspected there was anything fishy about it, and you just felt completely justified and said nothing to me!”

Xia Ying pouted, still looking wronged. She seemed ready to argue back, but she knew full well that she was in the wrong, so she only looked at Fang Da with wounded eyes and stayed silent.

“Anyway... anyway, I definitely never meant to really hurt Fang Wan!” Once Fang Da had finished scolding her, Xia Ying finally looked away from her husband and turned to An Changpu and Qin Ruonan. “I’m about to become a mother myself. At a time like this, what expectant mother wouldn’t want to do more good deeds and build some merit for her unborn child? How could I possibly do something that would kill or harm a life? Besides, Fang Wan is such a big boy. Even if I had evil intentions and wanted to do something against him, as you said, I’m not even through the stable stage of pregnancy yet. I don’t even have the ability to hide him somewhere where you couldn’t find him!”

“Officer An, Officer Qin, to be honest, I believe Xia Ying in this matter,” Fang Da said after quietly listening to Xia Ying finish. “It’s not that I’ve got a young wife now and that she’s pregnant with my child, so I don’t care about Fang Wan. In my heart, I’m no less eager than anyone else for the child to be found soon and to be safe and sound. But Xia Ying truly isn’t that kind of vicious person. She doesn’t even dare kill a fish in ordinary life. Seeing a cockroach or seeing a thug scares her about the same. For such a small woman, I really cannot believe she would do anything harmful to my son. As for the laxative she gave Fang Wan before, I’m still angry about it, to be honest. But that’s a different matter. I would not, because of that, suspect that my wife would harm my son!”

Xia Ying probably had not expected Fang Da to actually stand on her side and support her. For a moment, joy and sorrow mingled, and she buried herself in his arms, sobbing.

Fang Da gently stroked her back to comfort her, while saying to An Changpu and Qin Ruonan, “I know my attitude hasn’t been very good during this period, but I hope you can understand me a little. I’ve really been carrying too much lately. I still have to keep working, my wife has only just gotten pregnant and needs to rest, my son has been missing for so long and still hasn’t been found, and now my parents have heard that their grandson is missing too, so they’ve been hit hard as well. All of this has been thrown onto me alone. If it were anyone else, I’m afraid they’d lose control too.”

An Changpu nodded, letting him know he understood.

“Also, since you previously suspected Xia Ying, and I’ve brought you here to confront the matter in person, then police work should be fair. I also suspect Qian Yuling’s boyfriend, and I hope you can investigate him just as seriously.” Fang Da’s hand on Xia Ying’s back paused, and he looked solemnly at the two detectives before him.

Chapter Twenty-Five: Tit for Tat