Read Chapter 24: — REUNION

The first private conversation between Li and the real Zou was painfully ordinary.

No dramatic embrace.

No orchestral forgiveness.

Two men sat in a secure medical facility with paper cups of bad tea between them.

Zou looked older.

Li probably did too.

“I owe you an apology,” Zou said.

“You owe several people one.”

A genuine laugh escaped the surgeon.

“There you are.”

“Unfortunately.”

Zou’s return could not immediately become public. There were legal questions, security concerns and an institutional scandal large enough to consume several careers.

Yet he seemed almost relieved to talk about medicine instead of identity.

“There were easier ways to avoid hospital meetings,” Li said.

Zou laughed until the laugh became a cough.

“I deserved that.”

Their reconciliation did not come as forgiveness of everything. It came as permission to speak plainly without hostility.

That was enough.

Zou asked about Old Zhao.

Li told him.

The surgeon sat silently for a long time.

“He came looking for me when he should have been protecting himself.”

“That was his profession,” Chenxi said from the doorway.

“No,” Li replied. “That was his personality.”

Chenxi almost smiled.

Zou later met Haiyang and Susan under controlled circumstances.

The reunion was not clean.

Haiyang had spent years believing one father contained two personalities.

Susan had spent years knowing two men occupied one public identity.

Both loved Shiming.

Both were angry with him.

Susan repeated what she had told Li.

“Love is not pretending you did everything right.”

Zou accepted the sentence without defence.

For the first time, the family began talking without the twin secret standing between every word.

The criminal case continued.

The hospital began the slow process of correcting the record.

Publicly, the “dead” Professor Zou would eventually return to a country that had already mourned him.

Privately, Chenxi told Li her father would have enjoyed the ending.

“He would complain it was too complicated,” Li said.

“Then he would explain it to everyone three times.”

They both smiled.

Later, walking out of the building, Chenxi reached for Li’s hand without announcing the decision.

He looked at their hands, then at her.

“Is this forensic evidence?”

“Say one more thing and I’ll release it.”

He stayed quiet.

For once.