'If he hadn't met Fu Tailan, Chaisi might have gone on thinking he actually liked kids.'
He had been mentally prepared, but Fu Tailan was still proving harder to kill than he'd anticipated.
The probability of successfully killing him hadn't increased, but the desire to do so had flared up like gasoline on a fire, burning even more intensely. He'd seen his share of skilled schemers and liars, but this slippery, endlessly tricky creature—a cunning rabbit with sixty-odd burrows—was in a category all its own. It was so infuriating that Chaisi wanted nothing more than to blow Fu Tailan and the entire building to smithereens.
'Take this key, for instance. Who knows if Fu Tailan simply had two made, one inscribed with "7704 days" and the other with "7703 days"?'
'He could have put on a show, taking one out only to slyly pocket it, then dropped the second one to create the illusion that a fake key was counting down.'
'That's the first possibility.'
