"Are you joking? Whether he's my husband or not, I'd know better than you!" Huang Ling was driving, completely dismissive.
"I checked his phone. He called you seven times tonight." Chen Ge kept his head down, his hand rummaging through his backpack.
"Doesn't that just prove he loves me?" Huang Ling found Chen Ge strange—in every sense of the word.
"But none of those seven calls went through. The call you received on the Route 104 bus came from someone else."
"Someone else?" Huang Ling was so startled she turned her head straight toward Chen Ge. "Impossible!"
"Keep your eyes on the road." Chen Ge pointed at the road ahead, his tone flat. "I have no reason to lie to you. I'm only telling you this out of goodwill. Believe it or not—that's up to you."
After Chen Ge finished speaking, the taxi fell silent. Neither of them said a word.
Huang Ling pressed her lips together and focused on driving, though her grip on the steering wheel grew tighter and tighter. After a few minutes, she slammed on the brakes without warning.
The taxi came to a stop in the downpour, the atmosphere inside the car turning eerie.
Huang Ling stared at the steering wheel for a long time, then slowly turned to look at Chen Ge. "Jia Ming really has been different since before. Ever since the car accident, he's become withdrawn and shut-in. He barely talks to me anymore. He can't sleep through the night. The doctor says he's probably developed depression."
"So the timing of your husband's change lines up with that car accident, correct?" Chen Ge didn't look at Huang Ling. He kept his head down.
"Are you even listening to what I'm saying? Jia Ming got depression because of that accident. He's sick." Huang Ling gripped the steering wheel and forced a smile. "He knew our family was in a tough spot, so he voluntarily gave up therapy. He stopped taking medication after a while too, because the four or five hundred yuan a month for medicine was a real burden for us. I was the only one bringing in money at the time. I knew he felt terrible about it, so I can understand all these changes he's gone through."
"Think more carefully. Besides the low moods, did he do anything unusual? I mean specific behaviors unrelated to the illness." Chen Ge rattled off a few examples casually. "For instance, you waking up in the middle of the night to find him standing by the bed staring at you with his eyes open; a completely different voice suddenly coming out of his mouth; secretly killing small animals and hiding the bodies in the room—that sort of thing."
After hearing Chen Ge's words, Huang Ling struggled to twist around and glance at Xiao Gu sitting in the back seat. She was starting to feel afraid of Chen Ge. "No. None of those things you described have happened."
"You can check the call log on your own phone, and think about it more carefully. This could be a matter of life and death for you." Chen Ge had no interest in the man in Huang Ling's home. What had truly caught his attention was the person who'd called her on the bus.
"Call log?" Huang Ling pulled out her phone and checked. The call log showed only seven missed calls—there was no record of the calls between her and her husband while she'd been on the hearse.
"You can suspect me of lying, but your own phone wouldn't." Chen Ge gazed out the window at the torrential rain. "I'd advise you not to hold anything back. The one in your house may already have caught on. The next time you're alone with him, who knows what he might do to you."
Huang Ling clutched her phone. A long time passed before she spoke. "After the accident, Jia Ming started hating children. And things like stuffed dolls."
"Tell me more." A flicker of light passed through Chen Ge's eyes.
"A long time ago, he gave me some stuffed dolls. I know I'm not young anymore, but those things were still memories between the two of us, so I never threw them away. I put them in a closet and would take them out once in a while to look at."
"I can't remember exactly when it started, but I noticed one of the dolls in the closet had gone missing."