The Road Home

Chapter 13

The stifled, frustrated feeling in his heart made him irritable and restless.

Lu Yanchen roved through the service garage. The row after row of cold, white lighting shone down and elongated his shadow.

In the end, he found a car that quite appealed to him visually, and after rummaging around here and there and gathering a pile of tools, he jacked it up—and began dismantling it.

By the time it was nearly four in the morning, he had inspected quite a few minor problems not covered by insurance, and black streaks of grease covered his arms. Then, gripping the beam over the door of the service bay, he did another two hundred chin-ups. With this, he finally could be considered to have gotten through most of the night.

When he returned to the room, Qin Xiaonan had long since kicked off his quilt.

After stuffing those little arms and legs back under the covers, Lu Yanchen began to unpack Qin Xiaonan's suitcase. Underneath all the clothing were several new books. Gui Xiao had bought them. The only one removed from its packaging was the English version of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. He pulled it out, got onto the bed, and leafed through it.

Back when he first joined the military, his English skills had regressed severely. The old squadron commander of the time had often lectured them that the core team members of the Special Police who would be on duty during the Olympics would all be required to know day-to-day, conversational English, French, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, and Spanish. In particular, for any sort of large, international match, having the CET-6[1] certificate from university was a requirement for being selected for duty. While this did not have much to do with them, as ones who carried out the duty of border safety and protection, he still took the words to heart and once again picked up his English studies, which he had abandoned for a while, throwing it into the mix with Mongolian and Russian and normally just rotating through each of them to learn. He was, after all, still someone who had properly taken the National College Entrance Examinations. Although, if any chemistry or physics formulas were put in front of him, he would be no friend of them and vice versa, his foreign language skills had been honed up enough that they were not a problem to him.

He tucked Qin Xiaonan in next to the heater and then, leaning back against the head of the bed, read through more than twenty pages. Detecting that the kid had woken and was staring at him, he turned to glance at the bedside alarm clock. It was only 4:30 a.m.

"Keep sleeping." He gave this order.

"Do you want to hear some stuff about Auntie Gui Xiao?" Qin Xiaonan mind was still mostly in a bleary state and only somewhat awake and aware, but still he was constantly concerned about Lu Yanchen's marriage, that all-important thing in a person's life.

He stroked that little head, feeling resigned also. "Hurry up and go back to sleep."

Mumbling something, Qin Xiaonan rolled over. But before half a minute had passed, he cocooned himself in the quilt and shuffled off the bed. "I'm going to go draw a layout map of her home for you!"

Lu Yanchen wanted to stop him, but the kid, his feet bare, had already come back with paper and pen in arms. Shivering, he huddled himself up next to that heater, which emitted slightly-warm air, and looking proper and convincing, began to draw, even giving explanations as he sketched away.

And so, Lu Yanchen did not decline this anymore. Propping his head on one hand, he carefully pulled the boy's quilt up higher for him.

In the glow of the light, he looked at that drawing on the paper—her home.

Gui Xiao's business trip this time had an itinerary that was a dozen or so days long and passed through Guangzhou, Chengdu, Taipei, and Macau before finally arriving in Wuhan.