So Gabriel Adams continued talking about himself. With these pauses, Fiona Bennett wondered whether she should lie and say she had found a boyfriend. But she never said it; when Gabriel Adams told her to get some rest, Fiona Bennett breathed a sigh of relief. Gabriel Adams said the police academy was very strict, and he didn’t know if he’d get another chance to visit her. Fiona Bennett said it was fine.

After Gabriel Adams left, Fiona Bennett realized that he was probably the only police officer who would believe her. Of course, at this point, he could only be considered half a police officer. But when he was there, Fiona Bennett hadn’t even thought to bring it up.

Susan Wright never came again.

Three days later, Gabriel Adams skipped class again to visit Fiona Bennett, and happened to run into Frank Bishop sitting on a chair at the foot of her bed. After Gabriel Adams left, Frank Bishop peeled an apple for Fiona Bennett and sat at her bedside watching her eat. After a while, he took her hand—or maybe she put her hand in his palm. In any case, it all happened so naturally.

Fiona Bennett stayed in the hospital for two weeks. When she was discharged, she hadn’t fully recovered, but she was out of danger. Frank Bishop walked her to the dormitory door. Thinking of Selena Adams in the opposite bed, Fiona Bennett said, “You can stop here, don’t come in.” The familiar dorm room had a strange smell—a scent of Chinese medicine. Susan Wright brewed medicine every day, but she didn’t seem to be getting any better. In fact, Fiona Bennett felt quite the opposite, but she thought maybe it was because she herself was now afraid to look at Susan Wright.

Fiona Bennett’s situation in the dorm had changed. Selena Adams refused to speak to her, and the others grew distant as well. As for her relationship with Susan Wright… how to put it, they spoke almost as they always had, but that incident was never mentioned by either of them. Susan Wright kept brewing her medicine, and every time Fiona Bennett heard her drinking it, it felt like ants were gnawing at her heart.

No friends left, Fiona Bennett thought. Thank goodness for Frank Bishop.

2

Looking back, the only thing that felt strange to Fiona Bennett happened on December 24th, Wednesday, three days before Susan Wright died.

Christmas Eve dinner was at the KFC next to the Siping Cinema, because they were rushing to catch the 6:20 p.m. showing of "The Dream Factory." Tickets were in high demand; Frank Bishop went to buy them at noon, but only seats at the edges were left. The movie poster at the cinema entrance reminded Fiona Bennett of walking down Sichuan Road with Susan Wright the previous month. Back then, she thought she’d be watching this movie with Susan Wright. The movie was great, and Fiona Bennett couldn’t stop laughing. For a while, she completely forgot about Susan Wright. After the movie, Frank Bishop walked her to the school gate, then hurried home to Huangpu District to look after his feverish mother. “My mom is like a child—she makes a fuss over every little illness,” Frank Bishop said.

There were noticeably fewer people on campus than usual; everyone was out celebrating Christmas. When Fiona Bennett returned to the dorm, it was 8:30, and no one was there. She read "Pathology" for a while but couldn’t find her class notes—probably left them in the study room—so she went to get them. The classroom was empty too, and the Christmas atmosphere seemed to grow out of that emptiness.

As Fiona Bennett walked back with her notes, she thought, tonight all her classmates had somewhere to go, and she was the only one left. She laughed at herself—she’d just parted from Frank Bishop and already felt lonely. Then a thought crept up: where could Susan Wright be tonight? She was the one truly all alone now.

No sooner had the thought arisen than Fiona Bennett saw Susan Wright.

She was running out of the pine grove with her head down, her shoulder bumping into a tree, stumbling onto the path. When Fiona Bennett called her, Susan Wright turned her head. Under the streetlight, her pale face made Fiona Bennett almost not recognize her—it was truly unsettling. She didn’t respond, didn’t stop, just jogged away. In that brief glance, Fiona Bennett couldn’t make out her expression. There must have been a lot of emotion there, but she was trying hard to hold it in, so it became a stiff, complicated face. The only thing distinguishable was that the usual confidence, calm, and composure were all gone.

What happened? Fiona Bennett wondered, a wave of unease rising in her chest like a black rat. She glanced at the place where Susan Wright had run from—the dark woods. Turning back, that figure had disappeared into the vast winter night. She stood there until the shadow Susan Wright carried with her slowly moved away and faded, then continued on her way.

Back in the dorm, the upper bunk had the bed curtain drawn, with the emergency light on inside. Fiona Bennett sat cross-legged on her bed; the bed creaked louder than ever. She slowed her breathing, holding "Pathology" and her class notes, her ears unconsciously straining upward. The sound from the upper bunk slowly seeped through the bedboard and curtain—shhh, shhh, shhh. Writing, perhaps, Fiona Bennett thought.

The sound lasted a long time. Even when Fiona Bennett woke in the night, it seemed to still be there. But it’s hard to say for sure, because after Susan Wright died, looking back, these details seemed to grow like living vines, spreading everywhere on their own.

When Susan Wright collapsed, her hand was still inside the open chest cavity.

At the time, she was examining the vagus nerve behind the lung root, or maybe trying to find the thoracic duct between the aorta and the azygos vein. The forceps in her left hand fell onto the dissection table with a harsh, brittle sound; her right hand slowly slid over the organs in the chest cavity. Her last conscious thought might have been to grab onto something to keep from falling, but her legs had already given out. Her upper body slumped onto the table, her head pressing against the corpse’s left forearm. She struggled to steady herself, and in that effort, her right hand hooked onto the broken ends of the left ribs for two or three seconds before letting go. The corpse swayed gently, and she fell, fingernails digging into bits of viscera, pulling down the sternum cover at the edge of the table.

She lay curled on the floor beside the dissection table, the fallen bone cover resting on her waist. Everyone rushed toward her.

Where exactly Fiona Bennett was standing at that moment, she could no longer remember. Some nights, looking back, she felt as if she were floating in the air, like a wandering soul, overlooking it all. The body on the ground slowly receded, classmates gathering around like ants swarming food. In that moment, Susan Wright became the center of the world, a deep, endless black hole. Both distant and near, the side of her face covered in dry hair was crystal clear in Fiona Bennett’s memory, and that clarity created a contradictory sense of confusion. She looked at her, separated by decades of distance, yet so close she could smell the stillness of death—the spots on her cheeks, the cracked lips, the fine, dry hair trembling slightly, as if trying to hold onto the last bit of life in her body. All of it, right before her eyes, under her nose, visible, tangible, even touchable—so vivid it seemed real.

That hand was curled, and looking through the gap between thumb and forefinger, you could see the fine lines in the palm, like an endless net, enveloping Fiona Bennett. In other memories, she could see her earlobe, pale and tender behind her hair, glistening like a drop of dew. Her eyelashes had long since fallen, stuck to her dry eyelids. Her neck was a dark yellow, as thin and weak as her face, with blue veins standing out. An ant crawled out from under her neck, from her jaw to her philtrum, across half her face, and into her ear.

There probably weren’t any ants in the dissection room, Fiona Bennett knew. Just as she couldn’t possibly remember so many details of Susan Wright’s collapse, because it would require different perspectives. It was as if, in her memory, at the bottom of a cold lake, there always lay a Susan Wright. Every time the water washed over her head, she would involuntarily swim toward that body, each time from a different angle.

Just like the many Susan Wrights in the formalin. She clung to this hallucination, unable to escape.

This time, Fiona Bennett saw Susan Wright sitting on the dissection table with her knees drawn up, looking as healthy as ever. She didn’t look down at the body on the floor, just hugged her knees and stared into the distance. This wasn’t her spirit, Fiona Bennett knew—it was just her own imagination. Because Susan Wright didn’t die on the spot; she had several brief moments of consciousness in the hospital. During one of them, Fiona Bennett was holding her hand when suddenly it was squeezed back. She had so much to say; Fiona Bennett leaned in to listen, but she only had the strength to say one sentence.

“Not... Frank Bishop.”

She didn’t say anything about avenging her or finding the killer.

It was as if she believed Fiona Bennett would inevitably investigate to the end, so she helped her eliminate a suspect.

Twelve hours later, Susan Wright died of multiple organ failure.

Suddenly, Fiona Bennett felt that the Susan Wright on the dissection table was looking at her. She stared into the distance, and Fiona Bennett was right there, her gaze digging straight into her heart, as if asking, “All these years, what have you found?”

I’m sorry. That was all Fiona Bennett could say.

Susan Wright’s lips curved in a gentle smile. Fiona Bennett shivered, and then all the hallucinations shattered. There was no Susan Wright in front of her, no dissection table—only an operating table. She was standing under the surgical light in scrubs, holding the great saphenous vein in one hand and a hemostat in the other.

How many times has it been now? she reminded herself. If she kept spacing out like this, something terrible would happen. It was over—it had been three years.

She glanced at the patient’s open chest cavity, all wet and red inside, the organs moving on their own, making her feel nauseous.

Steady. She glanced at the great saphenous vein in her hand, long like a duck intestine. It was indeed cleaned out; she hadn’t made any mistakes while she was lost in thought. Now, what was next? Right, inject water into the needle tube to check for leaks.