Read Chapter 25: — EVERY GOODBYE IS A PROMISE TO MEET AGAIN

Months later, the GTP5 laboratory was operating again.

It hid behind layers of security and bureaucracy, but inside it looked almost disappointingly ordinary: white walls, screens, prototypes, coffee cups and researchers arguing over data.

Professor Zou Shiming stood before a display marked GTP5 — ORTHOPAEDIC AI.

Earlier generations of the programme had focused on patient-specific implants and advanced reconstruction. Later work explored better biological integration, regenerative strategies and decision-support systems. Some ideas remained closer to ambition than certainty.

Zou spoke about them as if the distance between those two states were merely a technical problem.

He closed his laptop.

“Let’s see if we can make it real.”

Outside the laboratory, Jingzhou moved on.

Nuclear Medicine kept reading scans.

Tang kept arguing about markets.

Wang kept teaching.

Qin kept turning difficult cases into lessons.

Xu and Qiancheng kept the practical machinery of the department moving.

The Mystery Team still gathered at lunch, though every story seemed to contain an invisible chair where Old Zhao belonged.

Chenxi continued forensic work and her music teaching. Some evenings she played the song she had written from words her father once wrote to her mother. She no longer played it only as grief.

On the first anniversary of Zhao’s death, she wore his scratched watch.

Li noticed but said nothing.

He had learned there were forms of silence that were not avoidance.

He continued moving between medicine and investigation, still too blunt, still too curious, still unable to walk past a problem simply because it belonged to another department.

He had begun the story believing Professor Zou was dead.

He had once believed Zou was his enemy.

Both beliefs had been wrong.

That was perhaps the most durable lesson medicine and detective work shared: the first picture was rarely the whole picture.

A scan required more than one plane.

A crime required more than one theory.

A person required more than one memory.

They did not receive perfect closure.

Patients still died.

Investigations still produced uncertainty.

New technology created new questions as quickly as it answered old ones.

Susan continued rebuilding a relationship with her father without erasing the past.

Haiyang returned to school healthier and considerably less impressed by paternal authority.

Zhou Xifu reopened the café after treatment and permanently refused to charge Li for coffee. Li permanently objected. Neither side won.

And Old Zhao remained absent in the way certain people remain present: in jokes, habits, unfinished sentences and decisions someone else makes because they can still hear what the dead would have said.

One evening, Li and Chenxi walked past Blue Sea Café after work.

Rain had started again, light and cold.

“You have an umbrella?” Chenxi asked.

“No.”

“Of course not.”

She opened hers.

They walked beneath it together.

Across the road, Hongda Hospital glowed against the wet city.

Li thought of the flowers from that November morning.

He had mourned the wrong man under the right name.

He had hated the right man for things partly done by another.

He had learned that truth could arrive late and still matter.

Chenxi looked at him.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“That’s suspicious.”

He smiled.

“Every goodbye is supposed to be for a better reunion, isn’t it?”

She considered the sentence.

“Too sentimental.”

“Your father would have liked it.”

“That is unfortunately true.”

The light changed.

They crossed the street.

Behind them, rain erased their reflections from the pavement almost as quickly as they appeared.

Ahead, the hospital doors opened.

— END —