Wen Xiujuan screamed in despair, her voice hoarse, and ran frantically out of the woods. Along the way, she brushed past classmates who were arriving for the gathering, one after another, each casting a look of astonishment at her.

It’s over. Everything is over.

She had staked everything, and all hope of turning things around rested on tonight. But she had messed it up.

The once seemingly clever correspondence between two murderers had been cracked with ease. It was like a resounding slap across her own face. It wouldn’t be long before the whole class knew what she had said here tonight, and of course, the poisoner would know as well.

She was going to be poisoned to death. There was no hope left.

Susan Wright staggered out of the pine forest. She heard someone call her name, and in her haste, glanced back—it was Fiona Bennett. Susan Wright didn’t stop, her sparse hair disheveled, using every ounce of strength to run forward, with no direction, no destination, disappearing into the vast night.

10

Daphne Morgan, hello. It’s been a long time since we last contacted each other.

I received several letters from you before, but because I was in a bad state, I just couldn’t bring myself to write back. Life has its ups and downs, and setbacks are inevitable, but I truly didn’t expect myself to fall apart so completely when faced with a blow. Maybe it was just too overwhelming.

And far too unexpected.

Time heals everything, and I’m much better now than I was then. We all have to face reality, face life. Over these months, I’ve come to terms with many things at home, and many friends have shown concern for me, helping me gradually pull myself together. Christmas and New Year are just around the corner. In 1998, everything will have a new beginning, right? So I think it’s time for us to meet.

I bet I look nothing like what you’ve imagined. And I have a long story I want to tell you in person.

I hope you’ll agree. It’s very important to me, and I believe it will be to you as well.

The letter slowly turned to ashes in the brazier.

Susan Wright received this letter from the dorm supervisor when she ran back to the dormitory. The recipient was “No. 23.” Although it had been months since she’d received such a letter, the dorm supervisor still remembered it was for Susan Wright. The handwriting was a bit different from before, but Susan Wright didn’t have the strength to figure out what that meant. Her world was collapsing in large chunks, she had nowhere left to go, was falling into an endless abyss, and had no time to care about such things. In fact, she only opened the letter before burning it, her gaze vacant as she read, the Chinese characters rising and falling before her eyes, the letter like an ocean, the words slowly sinking.

That night, Susan Wright made her final struggle. She hid in bed and wrote many letters—some only a paragraph, some just a single sentence, not a single one finished.

This was a letter she wrote to that person. How could she explain her actions tonight? How could she explain the threats she uttered? How could she cover up the claim that she wasn’t Susan Wright? How could she keep the correspondence between the two murderers going?

She had no way out. She was at a dead end.

A little after three in the morning, Susan Wright got out of bed with a stack of discarded letters, took her usual enamel washbasin outside, and burned the pale, powerless, struggle-filled letters one by one. She watched the paper twist in the fire, turn gray, curl into black fragments, and break into tiny pieces that danced in the flames.

Next was the letter from Bella Collins, followed by a thick stack—all the correspondence with Bella Collins over the years. She had no interest in what Bella Collins had suffered—could it possibly be worse than her own?

As for meeting, she didn’t even know how many more times she’d see herself in the mirror.

As each letter to Bella Collins was consumed by the fire, Susan Wright seemed to see her former self, struggling forward step by step, the source of her all-or-nothing gamble, the yellowed pages of a photo album flipping forward in the flames, until that small figure standing by her mother’s bedside. It turned out, even as a child, she had already been in the flames of hell.

Now, everything was to be lost, all to be reduced to ashes.

After burning these letters, all that remained was her correspondence with the murderer. She read through them one by one. At the end of every letter she had written, there was a curse upon herself. Looking at them now, it was truly pathetic.

Burning them all would mean admitting total defeat.

Susan Wright stopped.

You always have to leave yourself a way out, she thought. Give these letters another destination, maybe even leave a little note for Adrian Wright just in case.

Having thought it through, Susan Wright actually broke free from her original despair.

Since she had already lost everything, since she was already beyond redemption, since she was prepared to die—if she still wanted to survive in such a world, was there really anything left that must be cherished and could not be broken?

When Susan Wright returned to the dorm, the Christmas dawn had not yet arrived. She climbed back into bed and began to write a new letter.

I lost. You won.

The winner takes all, though I always thought the winner would be me.

I am twenty years old, 1.68 meters tall, weigh 48.5 kilograms, my measurements are 85C, 66, 88, and I am skilled at playing the xiao flute. I have always taken care of others since I was young, am good at housework, and my cooking is delicious—much better than the school cafeteria. I am thoughtful, good at dealing with people, value maintaining relationships, and am quite good at earning and saving money. My academic performance is good, and my future career prospects are promising. I am confident about my chances for promotion—I don’t want to be a frontline clinician forever, but want to move into hospital management. My career is just beginning, and my charm will gradually reveal itself in the future. But now, everything I have, and everything I will have, I have lost to you. Take your time to think about how you want to use me. However you want, I accept it. Even if it’s as your personal slave.

To put your mind at ease, let me introduce myself to you again. This is a Susan Wright that no one has ever known. Once I tell you, my life and death will be entirely in your hands.

The place where I was born and raised was not the French Concession in the upper part of the city, but an old street shantytown. My father was a taxi driver, my mother was in a vegetative state. I once had an older sister, Shirley Wright, one year older than me. When I was ten, my sister and I agreed to pull out our mother’s feeding tube while our father was away. We thought if our mother died, life would be much better. My sister chickened out at the last minute and told our father, so I pulled out the tube by myself. You know that wouldn’t kill anyone, but from then on, I bore original sin, and my life changed. After that, in my father’s eyes, he had only one daughter—my sister. I worked hard for years, but at home I was still like an inferior person, even invisible. My grades were better than my sister’s, but my father would only pay for her to go to college. I saw no future. Later, I did something terrible. I injected parasite eggs into my sister’s body. The eggs crossed the blood-brain barrier and entered her brain. The hospital thought it was a brain tumor, and she died in her senior year of high school. That’s why, even though I knew about you, I didn’t call the police, and didn’t dare tell the truth to the police Fiona Bennett brought. I have killed someone.

This is my biggest secret. By telling you this, I am completely naked before you, inside and out.

How much could it benefit you to have someone die for you? And how much more to have complete control over someone’s fate?

I await your decision about me.

Yours, Susan Wright.

After finishing the letter, a sliver of light appeared outside the window. On Christmas night, few people stayed in the dorm, so there were still two bottles of hot water left. Susan Wright took her washbasin and hot water bottle to the bathroom, stripped off her clothes, and washed herself thoroughly from head to toe. The poisoner must be a man, she thought. Last night’s trap couldn’t have been set by any of the women in her dorm. The hot bath made Susan Wright’s face look a bit more rosy, but after a sleepless night and a bath on this cold morning, her head throbbed with pain. She suspected she had a low fever, maybe even up to thirty-eight degrees. No one else was up yet. She sat at the long table, looking at her face in a small round mirror, feeling something was still missing, so she dug out a tube of Clinique lipstick from her trunk.

After breakfast, around eight o’clock, Susan Wright mailed the letter. She was much calmer, no longer glancing around, not even on guard while eating or drinking. She had completely let go. She wanted the other party to know that Susan Wright was at their disposal.

She seemed more at ease, always wearing a faint smile, a subtle trace of lip color, her posture upright again, her hair tied up with a pretty ribbon, making it look less sparse.

After dinner on the 25th, she checked the mailbox—the letter had been taken.

On the morning of the 26th, Susan Wright collapsed during anatomy class.

When she fell to the ground, her eyes were still half open and dazed, then slowly closed, a long breath escaping from between her lips and teeth. The sound was so shocking, as if everything inside her—her essence, energy, spirit, and a horde of howling little demons—were all rushing out of her body at once.

In the early hours of the 27th, the doctor pronounced Susan Wright dead.

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Part Three

I. The Person Beside the Pillow

1