"And that's about it," Su Wanyan concluded.
The last of the five questions had been spent. The bargain was complete. She said it the way she closed a checkup—cleanly, without dragging the ending into something heavier than it needed to be.
Jingxue smiled and nodded, satisfied in the narrow way a man could be when the information he wanted had finally been placed in his hands. He knew more about Mo Xingxue now than he had an hour ago: the defiance, the scraped knees, the dinners, the laugh that had once lived in a child's throat without calculation. He also knew, with a clarity that refused to soften, that it was too late to have been present for any of it. Nor to be a part of it now that she had already grown.
Somewhere along that growth she had learned to call another woman mother—the wife of the man who had stood in the space Jingxue had emptied—and that knowledge sat in his mouth like something bitter and sour he could not spit out.
