Alice Grant felt grateful for the first time since her transmigration. Fortunately, it had only been forty years. Fortunately, Brian Carter and Jenny Parker were both still here. She still had a chance to see them in this lifetime. If she had traveled even further into the future, she couldn’t imagine what it would be like if everyone she knew had already become a handful of earth, forever carrying regrets, and she couldn’t even see them one last time.

“We’re going somewhere first.” Brian Carter drove the car away from the airport.

“Where to?” Alice Grant looked at him suspiciously. Surely he wasn’t going to take her around reminiscing about their youth like Jenny Parker did?

As it turned out, Brian Carter wasn’t that sentimental. He first went to a flower shop and bought white chrysanthemums. Alice Grant understood, and fell silent.

He didn’t go to a cemetery, but to the Heroes’ Memorial in Haishi. Since it wasn’t a special day, there were few people near the monument. Standing in front of it, Brian Carter handed the white chrysanthemums to her and said, “Your father didn’t have a tombstone. His ashes are buried behind here.”

Alice Grant stared expressionlessly at the massive monument, hesitating to place the chrysanthemums in her hand.

“You disappeared for seven years. In the seventh year, he died during a joint operation to apprehend a criminal. His colleagues brought me his final words.”

“‘I have never done a single evil deed in my life. I have devoted my whole life to ideals and justice. Everyone says I am a good police officer, but I do not feel proud of it. Instead, I feel deeply guilty, because in order to be such a good police officer, I failed to be a good husband and a good father. So in this life, my family was torn apart—this is retribution. After I die, do not bury me with my wife and daughter. They probably wouldn’t want to see me.’ These were his last words,” Brian Carter said.

Alice Grant moved her lips. She wanted to make a sarcastic remark about how self-aware this man was, but looking at the cold stone, she couldn’t bring herself to say it.

She still remembered that when she was little, she had a good relationship with her father. When she was in kindergarten, she would proudly tell all her little friends that her dad was a great hero. Even though he wasn’t home often and sometimes missed her parent-teacher meetings and birthdays, her mother told her that her dad was like Superman, out there saving people in trouble. So she forgave her dad for always being so busy.

Later, as she grew up, she realized her father wasn’t some amazing superhero. Most of what he did outside was trivial and not worth boasting about—settling disputes between neighbors, helping when someone lost something. He had to take care of it all. Even when he took off his police uniform and came home, he still couldn’t be the pillar of their family. Whenever the neighbors needed anything, he was always eager to help, leaving his own family behind.

The first time Alice Grant felt dissatisfied with her father was in elementary school. She watched him help a neighbor, who had nothing to do with them, carry a gas cylinder, while their own family also needed a new one. It was her frail mother who, sweating profusely, carried it upstairs bit by bit. She wondered then, couldn’t her father see that they needed him too?

It was just a small thing, but as the small things piled up, they eventually exploded. The breaking point was her mother’s death.

When Alice Grant had just started middle school, her mother became pregnant with a second child. Her father was very happy and spent more time at home. Alice Grant boarded at school and could only come home once a week. Every time she came back, she would sit by her mother’s side and look at her belly, eagerly awaiting the birth of her little brother.

As her mother’s due date approached, Alice Grant grew anxious, but her father said he would take a few days off to stay home and take care of her mother. But what happened? When Alice Grant came home for the weekend, happily opened the door, the first thing she saw was her mother’s corpse.

She had been dead for a day. Blood had soaked half her body, and a long red trail stretched from the bathroom to the living room. Alice Grant could almost imagine how her mother had accidentally fallen in the bathroom, struggled to crawl out in pain, and tried to call for help from the living room. But her health wasn’t good, and maybe the fall was too severe. After exhausting her strength, she never managed to make that call for help, and died there in silence.

Alice Grant dropped her backpack and keys to the floor, rushed over, and touched her mother’s cold body, her unmoving, swollen belly. She screamed for her, but her mother would never respond again, would never smile gently, would never call her “my precious daughter.” With red eyes, she found her mother’s phone in the sofa cushions and dialed her father’s number.

No one answered. She called three times, crying, before he finally picked up and she heard his voice.

“Where are you?” Alice Grant asked through gritted teeth.

Her father’s voice was tired, with a noisy background. He said, “What’s wrong? You’re home? There’s an emergency here, I have to go out on a call, I’ll be back tonight…”

Alice Grant cut him off, almost screaming, “Didn’t you say you’d stay home to take care of Mom? Didn’t you say you’d be here?!”

Only then did her father realize something was wrong and asked, “What’s happened? What about your mom? Is she in labor? Call your grandma first, I’ll be there right away, I’ll…”

Alice Grant hung up. She never wanted to hear another word from this man again. This liar! This liar who killed her mother and brother!