Chapter Three — The Quiet Door Opens
The municipal bureau office smelled like wet paper and old air-conditioning. Attorney He placed her badge on the table the way a surgeon places a scalpel—calmly, where everyone can see it. Across from them, Officer Peng smiled as if customer satisfaction were part of the uniform.
"Ms. Chen," he began, "your company reported procurement negligence leading to significant loss. We're just clarifying facts."
He didn't say investigating you. He didn't have to.
He slid copies of Wendy's purchase order across the table. The spec line—the one someone had swapped—sat there as if it had been born wrong.
Attorney He tapped the margin. "We've requested the complete system access logs, including admin events and seal-app audits. Also the workflow approvals from date of submission to the time of change."
Officer Peng's pen stopped. "That's an internal matter."
He smiled back. "Not when my client's name is on the complaint."
Wendy kept her hands folded. It steadied the tremor. Last night, she and Lin had printed the canary file Zhipeng slipped her, then redacted it, then printed it again with just enough breadcrumbs to invite a question without burning a friend. Attorney He had already sent an anonymous packet to the external audit team and cc'd the bureau tip line for good measure.
Peng's eyes flicked to his monitor. Something changed on his face; not much, a fraction. "We'll need time," he said lightly.
"We'll wait," He said, not moving.
They waited. The room hummed. Through the glass, Wendy watched a man photocopy his own resignation letter and staple it crooked. Life went on, ridiculous and exact. Fifteen minutes later, Peng cleared his throat.
"Your company is amending its statement," he said. "They're calling this a process control issue. They no longer assert criminal intent from you. They propose to handle it civilly."
"Meaning," He said, "no police record. And they want her to sign a settlement that still assigns blame."
Peng smiled without teeth. "Meaning, they are withdrawing the complaint."
He handed them a thin page stamped RETRACTED. Font size twelve, bureaucratic absolution.
Outside, the hallway felt brighter in the cheap sort of way that fluorescent light can pretend to be mercy.
"Not over," Attorney He said, already walking. "But the teeth are back in the mouth they belong to. Next: HR."
Human Resources had a plant that was either dying or faking it. Ms. Qin, HR, pushed forward a separation agreement that wanted to be gentle and was not: mutual non-disparagement, final wages, unused leave payout, no admission of fault on either side, return of property, and a line that tried to say, elegantly, please stop being our problem.
"We expect professionalism," Ms. Qin said. "For everyone's sake."
"Of course," Wendy said. She read every word. She circled two: no admission—she wanted it twice—and final—she wanted it to include unconditional withdrawal of all allegations against the employee. Attorney He insisted they add a sentence acknowledging an "internal process failure." Mr. Zhao refused by email, then agreed in a second email that forgot to cc the legal team.
They signed in silence.
"Collect your things," Ms. Qin said. "We wish you the best."
Wendy thought of the cracked mug that had arrived on her kitchen table like a joke that didn't land. "I already did," she said.
On her floor, the air had learned to make room around her. People smiled with only the top of their faces; some looked down and discovered urgent keyboards. Mei's chair sat empty, tucked too neatly. On Wendy's desk, someone had left a sticky note in familiar slanted characters:
Keep receipts. — L.
Lin. Her sister had a way of infiltrating buildings without a badge.
Mr. Zhao appeared at the end of the aisle, his tie a shade of victory blue.
"Xiao Chen," he said, using the diminutive like a leash, "you made this complicated."
"Truth rarely takes the elevator," she said, surprising herself.
His jaw moved once, like a man checking for a missing tooth. "You know how this will look."
"I do," she said. "That's why I wrote it down."
She walked past him. He did not move to block the way. To stop her, he'd have to declare the hallway a cage.
The days that followed were full of small, tidy fights.
A supplier who had threatened penalties backtracked once she forwarded the bureau's retraction and the new HR letter; the penalty clause, it turned out, hid a grace period if someone bothered to read it aloud. A colleague who used to borrow her stapler without asking posted a long WeChat paragraph about "loyalty" that somehow didn't use the words Wendy or facts. A mid-level manager sent a message with an unprofessional amount of ellipses.
She returned the office security badge. The guard scanned it with exaggerated ceremony and did not make eye contact. On impulse, she set the cracked mug on the lobby counter with a note: You forgot to keep this. Walking out, she did not look back to see who would claim it.
At home, Ma cooked too much and said too little. Lin worked the phones like a conductor, moving parts no one saw. Xia arrived with a bag of walnuts, then made a show of cracking them loudly as if noise could staple a family together.
At night, the burner-number harassment stopped. In its place came exactly nothing. No apology, no confession, no name for J-0. The silence was a shape she could fit her palm against.
One afternoon, Attorney He called. "External audit acknowledged 'irregular access' to the procurement log," she said, voice dry as a paper cut. "No names. They'll 'review controls.' They thanked our anonymous source."
"And Mei?" Wendy asked.
"Moved," He said. The word sat there, flat. "We may not see her again."
The financial damage, when the math was done, was smaller than the fear had promised: a final paycheck released on time, leave paid out, severance absent but not essential, and no penalties. Emotionally, the ledger tallied differently. Colleagues she'd taught to read spec sheets no longer met her eyes. Her boss would spend weeks telling a story in which efficiency had been victim and Wendy had committed the crime of being inconvenient.
She let them have their story. She had spent too long paying rent in other people's narratives.
Two weeks folded up like a paper crane, and the day on the e-ticket arrived.
At dawn, Lin drove her to Zhengzhou in a car that smelled like spreadsheets and white tea. The highway unspooled; trucks murmured past like heavy animals. In the backseat, Ma kept adjusting the red sweater she had insisted Wendy pack, as if exile were a draft she could tuck in against.
At the airport curb, Xia hugged her too hard and then too fast, like ripping tape. "Remember," Xia said, "if a handsome stranger offers help, say thank you and run."
"I'll say no and walk," Wendy said.
Lin handed her a zip pouch: physical copies of everything, a USB that was not the canary but looked like it, a list of Sydney Chinatown markets with the good dumpling stalls circled. "Don't be a hero," Lin said. "Be a witness."
Ma pressed a small cloth bag into her palm—walnuts and a red thread bracelet that smelled faintly of smoke. "When you land, breathe out first," she said. "Empty, then fill."
Wendy wanted to say something elegant. Instead she said, "I'll be back," and felt the truth of it settle in her bones.
Security was choreography. Shoes off, laptop out, liquids displayed like contraband beauty. A woman in front of her argued with a bottle of perfume and lost. A child waved at her with the solemnity of astronauts. In her pocket, her phone vibrated once: an unknown number, a single text—Bon voyage—and a little paper-plane emoji.
She showed it to Lin, who still stood beyond the glass.
Lin mouthed, Ignore. Then she raised her phone, took a picture of Wendy lifting her chin, and waved like a signal flag.
At the gate, Wendy sat with the calm of a person whose decisions had finally found their shape. Jack's messages pinged a steady line—screenshots of bad pies ranked by atrocity, the names of two community organizers who could introduce her to small business owners, a terrible selfie with a newspaper date circled like a hostage proof-of-life.
She wrote back: I'll be staying in a hostel near Central. We meet at the fish market. Public, noisy, smells like truth.
Equal, he sent. I'll bring coffee and pretend to like it.
Boarding was called. People stood in that collective, polite panic that looks like choreography from above. Wendy scanned her passport. The machine beeped and held her fate for exactly one half-second too long, then turned green. The agent smiled a professional smile at no one in particular. Wendy stepped onto the bridge.
For a breath she expected to wake. Not from terror; that dream had already passed. From disbelief. But no alarm waited. No hand caught her shoulder. The cabin air—a mix of fabric, plastic, and recycled destinies—wrapped around her. She found her seat, stowed her bag, buckled in with the mechanical intimacy of a seatbelt that didn't care who she had been last week.
As the plane pushed back, a tiny crack on the window's inner layer caught the light like a hair-thin river. She traced it with a fingernail, thinking of the mug she didn't glue and the part of herself she had decided not to sand smooth.
The safety video played. The engines gathered themselves. A pressure rose in her ears, that familiar ache of thresholds.
When the wheels lifted, she didn't clap like the child two rows up. She didn't cry. She breathed out first, just as Ma had ordered, emptying the lungs of the last two weeks, then let the blue sky pour in.
If this was a dream, it was a quiet one, and finally hers.