The severing of ties went more smoothly than anyone had expected. Thomas signed the papers in front of the assembled witnesses without so much as a moment’s hesitation.
The way he told it, the mere sight of Liam’s face, the very image of Susan’s, was enough to turn his stomach. On top of that, Thomas had heard that Liam wanted to go to university, and university was nothing but a machine for burning money. He would never have agreed to that.
Lucas took Liam back to Oakstone village. It had earned the name from the ancient oak that stood at the village entrance, a tree so vast that it took three grown men joining hands to get their arms around it.
After a long stretch of dirt road, they came at last to a wooden house near the far end of the village.
Liam was taken aback. He knew perfectly well that the countryside could not compare with the city, but even so, most houses out here were already brick with a coat of cement render; nobody kept up the wooden style of the previous century anymore. This house, though, was built entirely of precious hardwood, and its value could not possibly be small.
Lucas caught the surprise in Liam’s eyes and said, "Don’t get the wrong idea. Your grandfather was a sentimental man, and this wooden house was the great obsession of his life. People offered more than two million dollars for it, and I wouldn’t sell. And don’t let the moss and the old bones of it fool you either. There’s nothing at all lacking inside."
Liam shook his head. "I wasn’t criticizing it, I’m just surprised. The whole house is precious hardwood. Under the laws today, something like this would be flatly banned."
"Ha, your great-grandfather put this house up back when there was no forest protection policy at all. Somebody did report it once, but the house had proper registration and approval from the Ministry of Construction, so it was never torn down. These days it’s even been listed as cultural heritage.
There are a few more houses like it in the village. Our village has turned into quite a famous tourist spot these last few years."
The wooden door swung wide. Lucas carried Liam’s suitcase in, talking as he went. "Your aunt passed away early, so it’s only me and your younger cousin in the house now. He boards at school and only comes home on weekends. I got a room ready a few days back, thinking that if you did come home with me, you’d have somewhere to sleep straight away. Looks like my hunch wasn’t wrong."
The more he thought about it, the more pleased Lucas was with this nephew of his. Liam followed him up to his room on the second floor. There were two bedrooms up there: the one on the left belonged to his cousin Justin, and the one on the right was his. Liam was a quiet person by nature, and through the whole business it was Lucas who did the talking, with Liam putting in a sentence here and there.
"That’s right, you said you wanted to go to university, didn’t you? When does enrollment start?" Lucas was helping hang Liam’s clothes in the closet when it came back to him, and he turned around to ask.
Liam set his high school commemorative trophy down on the desk. "I passed the entrance exam for Polytechnic University, but that isn’t what I want. I’ve looked into it. There’s the University of Agriculture and Forestry right here in our town, and I’m going to send my application there."
"The University of Agriculture and Forestry? That’s a decent school too, but it’ll be hard going. Are you sure you can handle it?"
"I can. I’ve loved planting and farming since I was little. It’s only that my parents... that Mr. and Mrs. Smith didn’t approve, so I never got the chance to do anything with it."
At the mention of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Liam’s heart sank a little. They had lived under one roof for eighteen years, after all; he could hardly put that down in an instant. Lucas had a real gift for lifting a mood, and seeing his nephew’s spirits sliding, he started telling him funny stories about the University of Agriculture and Forestry.
There was the student who grew cabbages for his graduation project, and then one fine day found his graduation project eaten by the graduation project of the department next door (the department next door’s graduation project, mind you, being a baby goat). Or the student couple who hid in the bushes on campus for a date, directly beneath the feet of a proctor who was up in the tree tying a bird’s nest back into place. The teacher caught them, forced the two of them to do an experimental assignment together, and half a month later they broke up.
Lucas’s stories had Liam laughing until he was breathless, and the faint sorrow in his chest melted clean away. Lucas went downstairs to get dinner started, and Liam, once he had finished putting away a few personal things, pushed open the window and looked outside.
Far end of the village though it was, the house sat in a beautiful spot. Beyond the window lay a grassy meadow, and past that a small river ran across the view. On the other bank, far off in the distance, was a field of pale pink lotuses. Their fragrance travelled to Liam on the wind and brought with it an unusual sense of peace.
Liam had no idea what his future would look like, but privately he thought himself lucky, because even in a strange place there were still people willing to take him in. Thinking back on the weight that used to press down on his shoulders, Liam felt that wealth was not always happiness. It could just as easily become a set of shackles, holding a person fast in its whirlpool.
"Liam, time to eat!"
Lucas’s voice came drifting up from downstairs and cut through Liam’s thoughts. Only then did he realize with a start that he had been standing at the window in a daze for an entire hour.
"Coming down now!"
He drew a deep breath, letting the rustic scent of the fields and the wind fill his lungs, and blew out the stifling air trapped in his chest. Then Liam smiled, wide and bright. From this day on, his life would be rewritten page by page, and by his own hand.
Twenty-two years later.
"Liam, what the hell is this share transfer document? Why are you signing your shares over to me?"
Justin, Liam’s younger cousin, knocked on the door of Liam’s office, dropped the transfer file on the desk, and put the question to him in a stunned voice. Liam set down the cup of black tea in his hand, glanced at the bright red stamp on the document reading Legally effective from xx/xx/20xx, and answered calmly:
"Ah, I want to retire, so I’m handing the company over to you."
Justin’s face twisted. He rubbed it with both hands, trying to force it back into some semblance of normal, and said, "You’re only forty years old, what kind of retirement is that? Tell me the truth, has my wife been talking nonsense again? Don’t listen to a word of the garbage she spouts, that woman has gone insane over money."
What was more, Liam had drawn this transfer document up a full twelve years ago, timed to exactly one month before Justin’s wedding. Had Liam already seen back then that there was something wrong with Justin’s wife?
Liam shook his head, rolled his shoulders, and stood up, moving to the floor-to-ceiling window to look down at the street below. His voice came out somewhat distant. "I just feel I’ve earned enough, and I want to withdraw to the pastoral life I love. You’re more than capable yourself. Handing the company to you sets my mind completely at rest."
He turned back to look at Justin. "I’m at ease about you. I am not at ease about your wife. I’ve no right to interfere in your life, but I’ll still give you one piece of advice. Sometimes the person who shares your pillow is the one you most need to guard against."
The Oakstone Agriculture, Forestry and Tourism Services Company had been founded by Liam in his third year of university, with a great deal of help from Uncle Lucas and Aunt Lucy. After Justin finished high school he passed the entrance exam for the University of Commerce, and he had begun interning at Liam’s company in his fourth year. That made it thirteen or fourteen years by now.
Justin was good at everything except reading people, at which he was frankly poor. In the end he married a woman who was both materialistic and idle, someone who cared about nothing all day but taking her husband’s money out shopping and dressing herself up. Her closet of designer bags alone must have cost Justin three or four years of hard work. Even that wasn’t enough. She was forever coveting what didn’t belong to her, always dropping hints that since Liam had no children, his assets would go to her son sooner or later.
What she didn’t know was that apart from the company Liam was signing over to Justin, every asset in Liam’s name had already been willed away. If Liam died, a portion would go to Uncle Lucas and Aunt Lucy, and the rest would be donated to three orphanages in the city.
The transfer to Justin had also been drawn up as a pre-marital gift. She needn’t hope for a single penny of it.
Justin rubbed his face and said, "Don’t worry about that, I’m getting ready to divorce her. Here I am at the company working myself to the bone to keep her fed, and she takes my money and spends it on a boy toy. Lucky little Henry really is my son, or I wouldn’t be letting her off this easily."
Liam found himself at a loss as well, with no idea how to comfort his cousin, and could only clap Justin on the shoulder.
That afternoon, just as Liam stepped out of the elevator, he ran straight into a set of uninvited guests. It was the Thomas couple. Ever since Liam’s business had begun to flourish, that family had never once given up on the idea of squeezing money out of him. The papers severing their ties had been signed, but by law Liam was still liable for support payments in Thomas’s old age.
For the sake of peace and quiet, Liam had the maintenance money transferred once every six months, but that trickle was a drop in the bucket next to the greed of these blood-sucking leeches.
"Liam, you have to save your younger brother! He’s still got two kids to raise, he can’t go to prison!"
Old Thomas had Liam by the arm and would not let go, insisting that Liam post bail for his half-brother. Liam’s voice was cold.
"I’m under no obligation to bail him out. Besides, he drove drunk and killed a man. A few decades inside instead of a life sentence or a death sentence is already the state being generous. Don’t be insatiable."
Liam wrenched his arm free of old Thomas’s grip. The building’s security guards arrived quickly, subdued Thomas and hauled him away. Liam smoothed down his rumpled sleeve and started toward the car waiting in front of the company. What he had not expected was that old Thomas was not the only one who had come this time. His stepmother and his so-called nephew were there too.
The woman and the nephew had been standing in a corner, and the instant no one was watching they came rushing out of the blind spot, swinging an iron baton at Liam. Liam threw up his arm to block, and the baton smashed into it. There was a crack, and a bone-deep pain went shooting through the limb. The guards were on the two of them at once, but in that moment Liam’s so-called nephew seized his chance and slammed his head into Liam’s.
Liam lost his balance and went over backward, his head striking the corner of the guest table in the reception area with full force. There was a ringing in his ears, his vision lurched sideways, and then everything went black.
He could still hear Justin screaming somewhere above him. The boy must have only just heard and come tearing downstairs, straight into this.
He wanted so badly to open his eyes and tell his cousin it was all right, but no matter what he did, they would not open.