Qin Ya refused to believe that someone would take their child along in their suicide attempt.
Meanwhile, Su Zhan’s office was swarmed by the other lawyers in the firm the moment he announced that he was taking over the case.
“Mr. Su, there’s no way we can win this!”
“That’s right! The best we could do is get the Lu family to compensate for the losses. Besides, the death of the boy would make this even more complicated. We can’t get carried away by our fantasies! We have to deal with the reality!”
“What reality?” Su Zhan asked.
“There are things that we have to acknowledge, Mr. Su,” Mr. Chen said. “Not everything will turn out fair and square, especially marriages. Is cheating on one’s spouse is considered a crime or not? Obviously not! What’s the point of fighting for this? The woman’s dead and no amount of money will ever be enough to console the family.”
“The best we can do is to fight for some form of compensation to the woman’s family since there’s no way we can throw the man in jail without offending his family. Don’t you think that it’s pointless?”
Mr. Chen tried his best to discourage Su Zhan from taking on the case.
“So you’re saying that we shouldn’t take on the case?” Qin Ya asked, knowing full well that Mr. Chen was not in favor of it.
Mr. Chen had a point. The man had cheated on his wife, but nothing in the constitution dictated that it was a crime. The woman died from suicide, not from homicide, which would only make it harder for Su Zhan to come up with charges against the man.
The best they could do was to get a small amount of compensation to console the family of the woman.
Even so, Qin Ya was not satisfied.
Why would he marry someone he didn’t love?
Does the smell of trash outside his house actually seem more enticing than his wife’s cooking?
That sounds crude, but it’s not entirely false.
“That’s right. We can’t take it,” Mr. Chen said. The other lawyers nodded in agreement.
“What if I take it anyway?” Su Zhan said defiantly. He knew the implications perfectly well, but he was enraged to see that the man’s family had the audacity to push over the woman’s urn at her wake.
Even if the best he could do was to squeeze some cash out of the man, he wanted nothing more but to warn the man and everyone else that cheating on one’s wife was not the way to go.
“Why?” a lawyer asked.
“Yeah… why?” Mr. Chen asked, sighing. “There’s no point. Why do it if there’s nothing we could accomplish? Weren’t you the one who told us that being stubbornly righteous won’t get us far in this profession? Why aren’t you heeding your own advice?”
“That’s a long time ago,” Su Zhan whispered indignantly.
He used to be a lawyer that only wanted the credentials and reputation, and in the process of achieving that, he had acted against his conscience several times over.
Sometimes, he would know that his defendants were in the wrong, but he would still try his best to argue for them in court. He would dismiss the guilt as part of the journey to becoming a good lawyer.
As long as there was profit and recognition to be reaped, he would defend anyone, no matter how morally questionable it was.
That was the advice he gave to his junior lawyers as well until he received that woman’s case.
At that moment, he felt as though his conscience had slapped him in the face.
He figured that karma had finally caught up with him and made his life miserable, and it was about time he made up for all the sins he had committed over the course of his career.
“Don’t you know how much effort we’ve put in to get this firm to where it is today?” Mr. Chen asked, exasperated. What happened to him? Why is he being so stubborn all of a sudden?
Su Zhan lowered his gaze. “There’s punishment for every sin we commit.”
He wanted to act in the best interests of everyone for the sake of himself and his loved ones.
The other lawyers filed out of the room upon realizing that he was not going to change his mind.
Qin Ya stood by the window and stared at him. “What are you thinking of?”
Su Zhan stood up and walked over to her. He pulled her into his embrace and whispered, “I was the one who killed our child.”
That was the last thing Qin Ya wanted to hear. “Let bygones be bygones. I forgave you precisely because I’ve moved on from the past, though I still have the scars from those wounds. Please don’t pick at them. It hurts.”
Something resembling a water droplet sparkled at the corners of Su Zhan’s eyes. He lowered his head and his voice as he said, “I promise I won’t bring it up again.”
Qin Ya was hurt by it, and so was he.
“Let’s go home now,” he said. Qin Ya nodded in response.
As they walked out of the office, Su Zhan’s phone rang all of a sudden. It was a call from his grandmother’s house, but he could not tell if it was his grandmother or a helper that had called. He rejected the call immediately, knowing full well what would happen to Qin Ya if he had accepted it.
