After opening the door, Bai Huizhang saw him lying quietly in bed, his brows tightly furrowed. He did look rather unwell.
Bai Huizhang's anger vanished at once. He sighed, tucked the covers around him, then felt his forehead. Only after making sure he didn't have a fever did he leave the room.
"How's my brother?"
Bai Huizhang gestured for her to keep her voice down. "Let him sleep. He really has been too tired lately."
Bai Yin said, "Oh," then glanced at him again and muttered, "Dad, you do care about my brother, so why do you always fight with him?"
Bai Huizhang glared at her and scolded her, looking a little uncomfortable. "Why are you meddling in these things? Mind your own business."
Bai Yin made a face at him, then skipped downstairs.
Bai Huizhang sighed. Of his two children, one was getting married, and he was a little reluctant to see her go.
A little after two in the morning, Bai Le was woken by his alarm. He got up, turned it off, and began changing his clothes.
There wasn't much in the suitcase, just money. As long as he had money, he could buy whatever he needed once he got there.
He left a note in a conspicuous spot on the table, weighted it down with something, then took the SIM card out of his phone and threw it in the trash. He planned to buy another one later.
Before leaving, he looked around again and again, then lifted his pillow, took the two books out from under it, and put them in his suitcase. He would be finished if they were discovered. It had to be said that Bai Le was very cautious.
He slipped carefully out the door. The cold night wind stung his face, and it was inconvenient to get around dragging a suitcase, so Bai Le called a taxi and went to the bus station in the eastern suburbs.
After quite a struggle, he finally boarded a bus to the small county town as dawn began to break. The air on the bus was full of nauseating smells.
The smell of gasoline, steamed buns, and the cheap perfume on the person sitting beside him made him dizzy and left his face pale.
Someone up ahead was also playing a video out loud, making so much noise that he couldn't close his eyes.
Bai Le let out a long sigh and looked down at his belly.
He thought he had it rough. When had he ever fallen on such hard times? And all of it was for the little brat in his belly.
Once the child was born, he would make sure to recite everything he had done for him a hundred times. If the child dared to defy him, he'd be in for it.
At that thought, he froze. Wait, how could he be sure it was a boy? What if it was a girl?
To be honest, he wasn't very good with girls. If a boy was naughty and did something wrong, he could beat him, but if a girl cried, he wouldn't know what to do.
As soon as the thought occurred to him, he realized with a start that he was settling into the role far too quickly. He was already thinking about whether it was a boy or a girl. He stared out the window with a troubled expression. Who would have thought that just a few days ago, he had still been wavering over whether to abort the child?
His thoughts wandered, and before he knew it, he fell asleep. With his head tilted against the window and his arms folded across his chest, he drifted off to the grating laughter playing out loud up ahead.
The bus rocked and swayed all the way out of the city.
Meanwhile, the atmosphere in the Bai family home was tense. Bai Huizhang stared fixedly at the note on the table, his face livid.
Chen Suqiu concealed her schadenfreude and put on a concerned expression. Looking worried, she urged him, "Don't be angry. It won't do any good. He's always had a mind of his own."
Her words were like oil on a fire. Bai Huizhang slammed the table, gasping with anger. "His mother spoiled him rotten! He just up and left! What does he take this family for?!"
Chen Suqiu said with feigned concern, "Oh, don't think like that. He was just acting on impulse. He'll be back in a few days."
Bai Huizhang couldn't be bothered to say any more to her and paced angrily around the room. Just then, Bai Yin was passing through the hallway. Seeing her brother's bedroom door wide open and both her parents inside, she couldn't help peering in curiously.
"What are you doing?"
Chen Suqiu said, "Yin, come see what your brother left."
Bai Yin rubbed her eyes as she walked in and took the note Chen Suqiu handed her. She looked closely at it, and her expression changed at once.
"This is..."
"Your brother said he was under a lot of pressure and wasn't feeling well, so he wanted to go out and clear his head. He told us not to worry."
Bai Yin shook her head. "My brother would never do this."
Chen Suqiu said reproachfully, "Why wouldn't he?"
Bai Yin didn't believe for a second that her brother would run away from home for no reason. There had to be a reason. She carefully tried to recall whether he had been acting strangely lately, her brows drawing tighter and tighter together. There had to have been some sign.
Chen Suqiu was still chattering away to Bai Huizhang, complaining about Bai Le, and Bai Huizhang's expression grew uglier and uglier.
Bai Yin, meanwhile, began searching her brother's room, hoping to find some clue.
The bed and the space under the pillow were completely clear, and there was nothing on the desk either. Her brother had never been in the habit of writing things down. No wonder he had asked to borrow a pen from her that day.
There was even less to say about the wardrobe. He hadn't taken any clothes with him.
A little discouraged, Bai Yin sat down on the bed. At the thought of her brother, she couldn't help pounding the bedsheet. He was already so old, yet he was still running away from home.
As she grumbled inwardly, her gaze happened to pass over the trash can, and she paused.
Her brother's trash can was quite clean. Since he spent comparatively little time in his room, there were only a few snack wrappers inside. But what caught her attention was a number of scraps of paper.
Her brother wasn't the type to enjoy writing at all, much less reading. Apart from work, he hardly ever touched anything made of paper, so it was suspicious to find something like this in his room, especially torn to pieces.
Bai Yin crouched down, picked up a few scraps, and tried to piece them back together.
"Oh, Yin, why are you rummaging through the trash? It's filthy."
Bai Yin ignored Chen Suqiu, her expression turning grim. She could clearly see the small print on one of the scraps.
It was unmistakably a prenatal examination report.
But how could it have ended up in her brother's room? At the thought, Bai Yin's heart began pounding in fright, and she hurriedly told herself not to read too much into it.