Epilogue

Spring came slowly that year. The mountain paths were muddy for a long time before they dried.

Fei Qiang visited the triple grave in the upper section of the White Stone Mountain cemetery on a Wednesday afternoon, when the paths were dry enough and he had the afternoon free. He had helped arrange the burials: Tang Sui in the earth beside her daughter, as the woman had apparently wanted, based on a handwritten note found in the outbuilding. Fang Wang's grave stood between them — her mother on one side, her grandmother on the other.

The headstones were simple, the dates carved plainly. Fang Chuchua's stone gave both a birth year and a death year. The death year was the same as the current one.

Fei Qiang sat on a nearby stone and unfolded a letter. He had found it in the locked box on the mountain along with all the other documents, in a sealed envelope addressed to no one — or addressed to whoever found it. He had read it twice at the mountain and once since. He read it a fourth time now.

It was a farewell letter. The tone was matter-of-fact, the handwriting neat. She described the years after the earthquake. The family in another province who had taken her in. Learning to walk again, then to work. Learning not to flinch at loud sounds. The years of planning. The surgery. The paperwork. The waiting.

She wrote about her daughter with precision and love: when she had been born, what she had been like as a child, how she had grown up knowing and not knowing, understanding gradually, never being shielded more than was necessary. She wrote that she had tried to keep Fang Wang out of the final phase. She had failed. Her daughter was her mother's child.

She had one regret, she wrote. Not the killings — she did not regret those. Her regret was that she had not been stronger, fifteen years ago. That she had been fifteen and alone and unable to survive what was done to her. She had not chosen that, she knew. But she wished she had been stronger. She wished it for the girl she had been, who had deserved better.

At the bottom of the letter, a single line for Fang Wang: You were the best thing I ever grew.

Fei Qiang folded the letter back up. He sat for a while on the stone looking at the three graves. Then he struck a match and burned the letter carefully in the gravel path, watching the ash disperse in the mountain air.

He went back down the mountain in the late afternoon light.

In the city below, at the cemetery where Gu Qing was buried — the student whose death at No. 4 had been the beginning of it, the girl who had known what she had seen and had not been safe knowing it — a young woman named Chang Di arrived and set down a bunch of yellow flowers. She stayed for a few minutes. Before she left, she placed something else on the grave: a small waterproofed envelope. Inside it was a printed transcript of a video file — a recording of Zhang Yao, made in the weeks before his death, in which he described in full what he had known and concealed as head of school discipline.

Chang Di had made the recording. She had edited it and kept copies in three places. She had also sent it, that morning, to two journalists.

She stood at Gu Qing's grave a moment longer.

Then she went home to study. The exams were in three weeks.