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The phone screen lights up and Li Cu only glances at it before flipping it face-down on the desk. It’s the latest model of iPhone with all the bells and whistles, another guilty-conscience gift from Wu Xie. Every time Li Cu feels the least bit bad about accepting the clothes and the phone and the car and the college education, he takes his shirt off and looks in the mirror at the scars littering his torso and feels a little better about it.

Beside him, Su Wan makes a distressed noise. “What if he’s calling to ask you about—”

Li Cu claps him on the shoulder and gives Su Wan what he hopes is a reassuring smile. “He’s not.”

“But—”

“I’m sure if Erye found out I switched my major from pre-law to geology, he wouldn’t just call.”

Su Wan side-eyes him. “That is not as reassuring as you think it is.”

Unlike everything else, the college tuition wasn’t a gift from Wu Xie. It turned out that for some reason Wu Xie’s grandmother set aside money for his education shortly after they met at Wushanju. Although he still has mixed feelings about the entire Wu family, he has to admit that he’d liked her. When she passed away just before school started, Li Cu had even attended her funeral. 

There had been enough money in the account to not only pay for college but also an off-campus apartment for him and Su Wan. Explaining to his dad where the money had come from had been easier than he expected. They’ve never talked about what happened or where he was all those months, and Li Cu doesn’t really want to know what Wu Xie said to him, but their relationship has been a lot better since Li Cu got back.

He looks over at Su Wan poring over his accounting notes and smiles. Sometimes it’s hard to believe they actually made it here. Not just alive, but better off for it. 

Li Cu flips the textbook to the next chapter and skims his notes. He really had tried to follow the plan Wu Erbai laid out for him, but the pre-law classes had nearly made his eyes bleed. At first, Li Cu hadn’t known what to do, but when Hei Xiazi showed up to check on them, he’d taken Li Cu aside and given him pointers on majors that would be helpful in the tomb raiding business. 

Not that Li Cu plans to ever go into a tomb again… but it’s better to be prepared.

He picks up the phone to check the time and realizes that he didn’t just miss a call. There is also a string of missed messages. 

               Tell your father to answer his phone when I call.

               Ignoring my messages is childish.

               If he doesn’t answer me, I’m going over there.

What the hell? The entire Wu family is crazy. Li Cu snorts and types up a response, ignoring the confused look Su Wan shoots him.

You know he’s not really my father, right?               

He goes back to studying until the phone lights up again with another string of messages one right after another.

               What?

               Are you two fighting again? 

               What did he do now?

               He’s not doing something stupid again, is he?

Li Cu closes the textbook and picks up the phone.

I have no idea. I haven’t talked to Wu Xie in weeks.                

But he’s still not my father.                

               But

The dots showing that he is typing appear and then disappear, appear and then disappear, and then a third time. Finally, Li Cu can’t take it anymore.

BUT WHAT?                  

The dots appear and disappear another two times before the next message comes through.

               I believe you should speak to Wu Xie about this. 

A sour feeling erupts in Li Cu’s stomach. He types a half dozen responses and discards them before opening the phone app. 

Su Wan closes his notebook and mouths to Li Cu, “What is happening?” The sick feeling in Li Cu’s stomach intensifies, but he shakes his head.

The phone rings four times before Wu Erbai picks up, immediately saying “You should really speak to Wu Xie,” before Li Cu can say anything.

“Sir, I’m not trying to be rude, but I’m really confused. Why do you seem to think Wu Xie is my father?”

At that, Su Wan’s confused expression morphs into bafflement.

Silence stretches out, and then Wu Erbai clears his throat. “I thought you knew.”

The sick feeling explodes into a full-out panic. “Thought I knew? What are you saying?”

“Li Cu, this is really a conversation you need to have with Wu Xie.”

“Tell me what is going on!’ His shout echoes around the small room. He knows he should be mortified that he yelled at Wu Erbai, but he can’t focus through the ringing in his ears. 

Su Wan rolls his chair across the room so he’s sitting beside Li Cu. He reaches out and presses the speakerphone button on the screen.

Wu Erbai coughs and then says in an extremely measured voice, “My mother was suspicious after you were at Wushanju. She had a test done.”

The ringing in Li Cu’s ears intensifies. He can feel Su Wan staring at the side of his head, but he can’t bring himself to look at him. “And the test showed that Wu Xie is my father.” It’s not a question.

“Yes,” Wu Erbai says in a tired voice. 

“And Wu Xie knows?”

“Yes. Apparently, he knew before Mother confronted him.” 

“I see.” The panic settles into a numbing chill that sweeps through his body. He recognizes it as the same feeling that got him through his time at the Wang compound.

“Li Cu, I really—”

“I’m sorry I yelled, sir.”

“You should—”

“Thank you for telling me.” He hangs up without giving Wu Erbai another chance to respond.

Su Wan stares at him in silence until Li Cu raises his hand to hurl the phone across the room. He neatly slips it out of Li Cu’s hand and slides it into the pocket of his oversized hoodie without saying a word.

It takes quite a bit longer before Li Cu can formulate enough of a thought to say, “This is fucking bullshit.”

“I don’t understand,” Su Wan says, rolling his chair back across the room to his desk. He takes out the phone and slides it into the top drawer. “How can Wu Xie be your father? Your dad—”

“Raised me? So my mom knew Wu Xie? Did my dad know? Did she? Why did she leave me with him if he wasn’t my real father?” His volume rises with each question until he’s almost screaming. “Why didn’t Wu Xie tell me? Was he ever going—”

“Stop!” Su Wan holds up one hand. “Erye is right. You need to talk to Wu Xie.”

It’s Li Cu’s turn to stare. “You need to give me my phone so I can call him.”

Su Wan shakes his head. “It’s a little more than three hours to Hangzhou and there are no classes until Monday. I could go with—”

“No.” Li Cu knows this is something he needs to do for himself. “You have a test on Monday you need to ace or your mom will kill you. Stay here and study.”

“Yali, are you sure? I don’t think you should do this alone,” Su Wan says with a frown.

Li Cu crosses the room and squeezes his shoulder. “Thanks, but I’m sure. I’ll be back by tomorrow night.”

The drive to Hangzhou takes forever. At first, Li Cu turns on the radio to try to drown out the chaos in his head, but after a while, it just gives him a headache. In the silence after he turns it off, Li Cu replays the conversation with Wu Erbai over and over and practices what he’s going to say to Wu Xie. 

It’s nearly midnight when Li Cu pulls up in front of Wushanju. The front gate is locked, but he has all the skills he needs to scale the wall in a fraction of the time it took him the first time. He crosses the front courtyard and then veers off to slip in through an unlocked side door. It isn’t hard to follow the sound of billiard balls clacking together through the darkened rooms until he finds Wu Xie at the back of the house. 

Though they message and even occasionally talk on the phone, he hasn’t seen Wu Xie in almost nine months. Not since the day Wu Xie finally introduced Li Cu to the mysterious Xiaoge. Li Cu won’t deny that he was curious about the man Wu Xie spoke about in such reverent tones, but he wasn’t expecting someone who looked like he was the same age as Li Cu. Finding out Xiaoge is actually over a hundred years old came as a bit of a shock.

Wu Xie doesn’t look up from the shot he’s lining up when Li Cu stops in the doorway and stares.

Li Cu isn’t sure what’s been going on since then, but Wu Xie seems to be a little worse off for it. His hair is quite a bit longer than the last time Li Cu saw him, trimmed into a hideous blunt bowl-cut, and he’s sporting a thin mustache. Possibly worse than his unfortunate haircut and even more unfortunate facial hair, he’s wearing a pair of blue-striped pajamas and a threadbare bathrobe that looks like it might be as old as Li Cu. How is this the man who almost single-handedly took down the entire Wang family?

“What the hell happened to you?” Li Cu says, leaning against the door frame. He’s still angry, but the edge is tamped by curiosity at the way Wu Xie has obviously let himself go.

Wu Xie glances up before dropping his eyes again to sight along the cue. “Nothing happened other than some brat breaking into my house in the middle of the night.” The white ball neatly splits two striped ones, sinking both in opposite corners before he straightens and turns to lean against the pool table. “Aren’t you supposed to be in Nanjing?”

The anger that Li Cu has been nurturing for the last four hours ignites again at Wu Xie’s tone. “Were you ever going to tell me you’re my father?”

Wu Xie sighs and runs one hand down over his face, but his gaze is steady when he meets Li Cu’s eyes. “No.”

“Fuck you.”

Wu Xie’s laugh is bitter. “Look, kid. I was 18 years old when I met your mom—my first time away from my family—and I never saw her again after that night. Not until she tracked me down six months later to tell me she was pregnant.” He lays the cue stick on the table and takes a step toward Li Cu but stops when Li Cu tenses. “I could barely take care of myself back then. I was in no place to be a good father."

"You know that's bullshit, right?" Li Cu clenches his fists to keep himself from lashing out. 

"You were better off."

"Sure," Li Cu scoffs. "I was better off when my mom ran off with another man and my dad—who I guess isn't even my dad—was beating the shit out of me and locking me in the closet. No wonder he hated me so much."

Wu Xie flinches. "I doubt he knew. She told me she had a boyfriend and was planning to tell him the baby was his, but she wanted me to know." His tone is the same resigned one he’d used every time he told Li Cu he couldn’t go home. "I gave her a lot of money to take care of you. I didn't know—"

Li Cu sees red. "Oh, fuck you. You knew. Maybe not when I was little, but once you decided to use me to bring down the Wangs, you fucking knew. You knew everything about me. You just didn’t care.”

The color drains from Wu Xie’s face, but at least he has the decency to stay quiet.

“Every time I asked you why—why me, why did I get caught up in your fight against the Wangs, what did I do wrong—you could have told me. A thousand times. You let me walk away thinking the whole thing was just a coincidence. That I was nothing to you.” Li Cu takes a deep breath to keep his voice from cracking, and he hates himself for the way his throat tightens. 

“It wouldn’t have helped you to know,” Wu Xie snaps, his voice finally rising from that careful, even tone. “Do you think I liked ripping your life out from under you? Knowing that it might kill you just like it did every other person I’d gotten involved before you?” He takes the step forward that he abandoned before and puts himself within Li Cu’s reach before he enunciates very clearly. “You were my last hope to keep everything we’d all sacrificed for from going to shit. I didn’t have a choice.”

“Maybe not,” Li Cu says, ice in his voice. “But you had a choice when you kept it from me. Even if you thought it might make things harder during the fight, you could have told me when it was over, once we’d won. But you soothed your guilty conscience with money—just like you’ve apparently been doing my entire life—and walked away again.” Li Cu wants to scream at the way his voice wavers when he says, “I guess I’m easy to walk away from.”

Wu Xie flinches and reaches for him, but Li Cu pushes himself away from the doorframe and crosses to the other side of the room, putting the pool table safely between them. “Li Cu—”

“I deserved to know.”

“I wanted you to have a normal life!’ Wu Xie’s voice echoes in the small room before he continues in a more even tone. “Being involved with me was only ever going to hurt you.”

Li Cu shakes his head and closes his eyes for a few moments to stop them from stinging. When he opens them, he glares at Wu Xie. “I lost any chance I had at a normal life the moment you decided to find me.”

“You’re right.” Wu Xie’s throat works before he continues, “I ruined your life, so why would you want to have anything to do with me?”

The sick anger in Li Cu’s gut gives way to every hurt feeling he’s been pushing down for the last year and he yells, “Because I fucking missed you!”

Wu Xie's eyes go wide, and he takes a deep breath. “You shouldn’t. I can’t give you what you need.”

Li Cu remembers the way Wu Xie had looked at him in that first tomb when he’d admitted he was afraid of the dark. The way he’d closed Li Cu’s eyes, took his hand, and told him not to be afraid. He thinks about the two of them sitting on the bank of the lake, talking about the way Li Cu reminded Wu Xie of himself when he was younger. He recalls leaving Wu Xie in Gutongjing and the fear and guilt he’d tried to ignore when he thought he’d left Wu Xie to die. 

He tries to remember having even one interaction with the man he thought was his father that was half as meaningful and fails.

“Your uncle said he thought I knew,” Li Cu says because he can’t say any of that. “It may come as a shock to you, but there are other people in the world who matter besides you, you know. Wu Nainai was my great-grandmother. I’ve never had one of those, and she’s dead and I’m never going to get to have a relationship with her because of you. She knew and you kept her from telling me, didn’t you?”

Wu Xie’s jaw works. “She gave me a year to figure out how to tell you, or she said she’d tell you herself.”

“You’re a selfish bastard, you know that?”

“I know.”

Li Cu turns away because he’s afraid if he looks at Wu Xie for one second more, the pool table won’t be enough to keep Li Cu from punching him. Once he has himself under control, he turns back. Wu Xie leans against the wall by the windows, watching him with an expression Li Cu can’t read. Once the anger subsides a little, he asks, “Who else knows?” 

Wu Xie shrugs. “Xiaoge is the only person I’ve told. Pretty sure Pangzi figured it out, but we’ve never talked about it. Hei Xiazi isn’t stupid and if he knows, Xiao Hua knows. I doubt Wang Meng figured it out, but I can’t be sure.”

“Great,” Li Cu says, his tone bitter. “Almost everyone in your life knows and I’m just the clueless kid.”

“Li Cu—”

Li Cu waves him away and takes a deep breath. “So now what?”

Another shrug. “I guess that depends on you.”

“You are such an asshole,” Li Cu says, shaking his head. He walks around the pool table and stops in front of Wu Xie. “So you want me to go back to school and pretend I don’t know? Forget this happened? I guess that would make it easier for you.”

Wu Xie’s jaw clenches and his gaze drifts around the room until Li Cu makes an impatient noise. 

“Just say it. Tell me to my face that you don’t give a shit about me.”

Wu Xie closes his eyes and when he opens them again, they’re wet. “I can’t.”

“I really hate you.” Li Cu bites back a sob.

“You should.”

“Fuck you. You’re the worst fucking father on the face of the earth, and given the father I grew up with, that’s saying something.” 

Wu Xie raises one eyebrow.

“But,” Li Cu says, swallowing hard past the lump in his throat, “you don’t get to opt out this time. I let you walk away because I didn’t think I had a choice, but you’re not doing it again. If you’re really my father, you’re going to start fucking acting like one.”

“I have no idea how to do that,” Wu Xie says with a huff of laughter that has a slightly manic edge to it.

Li Cu shrugs. “Me either. Guess we’re going to have to figure it out together.”