3

That night, I walked into a quiet tea house.

Guo Zhenghua sat in a carved wooden chair, wearing a dark Zhongshan jacket. He had grown old and heavy, but I knew him at once.

The face. The brow bone.

The same man from the photograph I had seen all my life.

"Professor Guo."

I sat across from him.

He took a sip of tea and looked up.

"Attorney Xu, I looked into you. A child from the mountains, now a young partner at a top firm. Impressive."

His tone was slow and smooth, the tone of a man raised by power until power felt like air.

"I came from the mountains too," he said. "I know how hard that road is. Whatever concerns you have, I am confident Mingrui meets your standards. If you let this go, I can promise you will walk further in this circle."

He poured a cup of tea and pushed it toward me.

"You're young. What you lack most is opportunity."

His eyes passed over my face without stopping.

No pause. No shock.

Everyone who had known my grandmother said I looked like her.

He did not recognize me.

He did not even know I existed.

"Professor Guo," I said, "you also came from the mountains. I'm curious. On your way up, how many people did you step on?"

The smile vanished from his face.

He set the cup down with a sharp click.

"Say what you want. What are you after?"

What was I after?

The question moved through me like cold water.

I wanted the fifty years he had stolen.

I wanted the years when my grandmother, pregnant and waiting, believed his letters. The years after he took her return-to-city quota and left with another woman. The years when people called my mother a bastard and turned her away from school because her mother was "dirty."

My mother crouched outside a classroom for two years, listening through a window, until the teacher drove her off for good. At thirteen, she began sewing for other families. Needles pierced her fingers so often that the scars never left.

Two generations. Two pairs of ruined hands.

They pushed me out of the mountains and into law.

This was the moment I had waited for.

I looked at him. "Professor Guo, I only want justice."

"Before I came here, I published the internship list. Guo Mingrui is not on it."

The tea house fell silent.

He looked at me. I looked back at him across fifty years of rot.

At last he snorted.

"Young man, you don't know how to accept kindness. I met you tonight to give you a way out. Since you insist on narrowing your own road, don't blame me for what happens next."

He stood and buttoned his jacket.

"Blocking my grandson? You're not nearly powerful enough."

He left.

I watched his back disappear through the door.

The tea in front of me had gone cold.

That night, Mingde Law Firm posted an emergency statement on its homepage.

Former partner and interviewer Xu Yan maliciously interfered with standard recruitment and damaged educational fairness. The firm has terminated him.

No investigation. No video. Just a few lines and my photograph.

The comment section opened like a floodgate.

[That young and already a partner? He probably got there through connections.]

[He finally kicked an iron plate.]

[People like this ruin fair employment. How many futures has he buried?]

I read one comment after another and said nothing.

My phone kept buzzing. Insults poured in.

Two messages came from Guo Mingrui.

[Xu Yan, how does it feel to lose everything? Regretting it yet? Look in a mirror before you try to fight me.]

[Tomorrow, Mingde will hold a public press conference for me. I'll walk into this profession in the open, and you will never eat another meal in this field.]

The phone lit my face.

I turned it over on the table.

My mother sat beside me with her back turned. Her shoulders shook. Her hands, the hands that had sewn half a life away, clutched the edge of her coat until the knuckles turned white.

"Yan," she said hoarsely, "maybe we should let it go."

I took her hand.

This was the hand that had carried me out of the mountains.

It was covered in needle scars. Rougher than any woman's hand should have had to be.

"Mom," I said, "we're not the ones who did wrong."

"They have owed this debt for fifty years. It's time they paid."