The elevator doors slid shut, and neither of them spoke.
Inside the cramped car, there was only the groan of old machinery and the stale smell of thick, aging oil. The woman stood in one corner, looking at the man's back. For a brief moment, a wave of sadness rose in her chest. Then the unfinished fight from upstairs pulled her straight back into anger.
She picked up exactly where they had left off at home. She was already certain he would keep doing what he always did—stay silent. And to her, that silence was as good as an admission.
“So if you won’t say anything, that means you admit it?”
He gave a bitter smile. “I told you. I just accidentally turned it on at that moment.”
She pressed harder. “And once it’s turned on, does it keep running for three minutes?”
He tried to joke his way around it. “I saw it was on, so I figured I might as well brush my teeth.”
That answer triggered the sharp instinct she brought home from work.
“Brush your teeth?” she shot back. “At three in the afternoon? While I was away on a business trip? Who do you think would believe that?”
The sentences were framed as questions, but each one landed like a verdict.
Another short silence followed. He still would not turn around while defending himself, and that only convinced her more that he had something to hide. She glanced up at the floor indicator and suddenly realized something: neither of them had pressed a button when they got in. The elevator was climbing on its own.
“I can’t believe this,” she snapped. “You can’t even manage something this simple?”
She shoved past his shoulder and jabbed at the button for the first floor, each word punctuated by another hard press.
He answered with a half-smile, almost playful despite the sarcasm aimed at him. “Maybe you only ever notice the things I do badly.”
“Stop talking like that. I’m seriously discussing divorce with you right now.”
He seemed strangely unconcerned by the word. Instead, he asked, “Why are you so sure I cheated?”
“Wang Chenzhuo, can you stop being ridiculous? Do I really have to lay every piece of evidence in front of you before you’ll admit it? I was trying to leave you at least a little dignity.”
She took a deep breath. When she turned toward him, ready to confront him face to face, he had already retreated into the far corner of the elevator, head lowered, as if he had anticipated exactly what was coming.
“Fine,” she said coldly, speaking toward that dark corner. “A little after three that afternoon, you unlocked the apartment door. Before that, you covered the camera in the house. Then you activated the electric toothbrush. About an hour later, the door opened and closed again. After that, you removed whatever you used to block the camera.”
Her voice echoed inside the small elevator, flat and deliberate, as though she were reading out charges in court.
“I’m telling you now,” she added, “none of that helps you. I could make sure you walk away with nothing.”
She looked up at the indicator again.
The elevator was still going up.
At the same time, he said quietly, “What if everything I did—”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, this broken elevator!”
She went back to hammering the first-floor button. “Nothing ever works. I come home from a trip and now I have to divorce a piece of trash like you. I don’t even want this to end up in court. Just come with me and sign the papers. I’m done.”
She started striking the control panel with her hand.
He grabbed her wrist, but even as he did, he knew there was no returning to what they had been.
“Let go of me!” she screamed. “Don’t touch me. You disgust me.”
“I did all of this because I wanted to know whether you still loved me...”
“Shut up. Not that excuse again. You think I’d still believe that?”
He released her suddenly. Her hand slammed hard against the elevator doors. The whole car jolted. The lights dimmed, then the elevator shuddered to a halt between floors.
“You really can’t do anything right,” she said.
This time she did not yell. She only clutched her hand and took a slow breath.
“Get away from me.”
He stepped back obediently into the shadowed corner.
“Wang Chenzhuo, I’m truly disappointed in you.”
The elevator hung suspended in midair, as stuck as the judgment settling inside her. At last she had said the sentence she knew could crush a man’s pride. It was the only honest summary she could find for their marriage.
“Disappointed because you think I cheated,” he asked, “or disappointed in our marriage?”
As he spoke, he motioned for her to press the emergency alarm. She folded her arms instead and stared at his blurred face in the weak backup light.
“Do we really have to talk about that now? Haven’t I already been disappointed enough?”
“I’m just trying to understand what exactly you’re disappointed in.”
She finally pressed the alarm.
The buzzer spread through the confined space in a low, droning pulse—something like the organ of a church, something like a funeral hymn for their marriage.
“What difference does it make now?”
“It matters to me,” he said. “I want to know whether your anger comes from disappointment... or because you still love me.”
She stared at him as if he had gone insane.
“Have you ruined your brain staying at home writing novels?”
“Maybe that’s exactly why I need to know whether I still matter.”
“You don’t matter enough? You brought someone into our home to cheat on me. Isn’t that what destroyed this family?”
The alarm continued ringing beneath their argument until it became a kind of white noise. Neither of them seemed to care that no repair staff had responded.
“I told you, I didn’t cheat. I did all of that because I wanted to test whether you still cared.”
She crossed her arms tighter. By now she was immune to his explanations.
“You think I’m going to believe that?”
“I just wanted you to see me. Don’t you think, in this house, I’ve become like a piece of furniture?”
She inhaled sharply, then let out a dry, disbelieving laugh.
“Didn’t you turn yourself into furniture? You lock yourself in the study all day writing your novels. You don’t work, you don’t go out, you live entirely inside your own world.”
“That’s why I wanted you to see me.”
“Did I ever get to enter your world?”
They spoke almost on top of each other. Then came a silence so sudden that both of them seemed on the verge of disappearing into the dimness.
She pressed the alarm again.
The funeral music resumed.
“I’m sorry,” he said at last. “That world is the only place where I can find proof that I exist.”
He had started crying.
She did not look surprised. She seemed tired of it.
“Can you stop crying every time we talk about this? Can you act like a man for once? I know you write women in your books, but have you ever understood me at all? I’m a woman too. Do you know what I want? You’re always off in your own imagination, inventing what women want—while those women can even...”
She broke off, suddenly choked by emotion herself.
The missing hour came back to her again—the hour she believed he had used to betray her. She even thought she knew who the other woman was: his editor. The two of them talked more often, and more intimately, than she and her husband ever did.
“I wanted to understand you,” he said, “but you only ever talk about your cases. Haven’t you noticed? Even our conversations have turned into you presenting evidence and sentencing me.”
“That’s because you left behind evidence that was impossible to ignore.”
“What if I arranged all of it on purpose? What if the evidence itself was fake? Is there still any feeling left in this marriage, or for a lawyer like you is evidence enough to deliver the judgment?”
It was the first time he had spoken with that much force—not even when she first said she wanted a divorce had he sounded so hard.
His voice broke again. “Do you think I could ever enter your world?”
The alarm had just gone silent.
This time she did not press it again right away. In the brief stillness, the only sound left was his ugly, helpless sobbing.
Five minutes later, after he had calmed somewhat, she asked, “Have you become disappointed in marriage too?”
Then she hit the alarm button again, as if she could not bear silence for long.
He looked at her and asked the same question back.
“Have you? Is that what the evidence lets you conclude—that I disappointed you?”
“Isn’t cheating enough?”
“If every clue from that day was staged,” he said, “if I deliberately left those signs behind while you were away just to see whether you still cared about this marriage—then what?”
“Can you stop treating me like an idiot? I know you write fiction, but don’t drag your plot twists in here.”
He shifted tone again, suddenly cool, almost analytical.
“When someone is being convicted, which matters more—evidence, or intent? And which one is harder to prove false?”
As he asked, he moved toward the doors and began trying to pry them apart.
She was caught off guard. The question itself felt like a trap, and she automatically began analyzing it.
“Your intent isn’t exactly hard to see,” she said. “If there was no motive, why cover the camera?”
“So you’re still using evidence to infer intent. Maybe only with me. You’re a good lawyer—I doubt you’d use the same logic to presume your own client guilty.”
The doors finally gave a little. A harsh white light poured through the gap into the dim elevator. Outside was a split-level landing. The car had stopped between two floors, the opening itself looking like a trap.
“I presumed you guilty because of the long-running ambiguity between you and that editor.”
“Do you have proof?”
“You were messaging each other late at night all the time. Doesn’t that seem inappropriate to you?”
“How do you know that?”
She hesitated only a moment.
“Fine. I checked your phone while you were asleep. I admit it. I just wanted to know whether you were cheating.”
He lowered his head and smiled faintly.
“I see. I’m glad to know you looked through my phone.”
Then he gestured for her to climb out first.
“You admit it?” she asked.
The bright corridor light was flooding into the elevator, but somehow she still could not make out his expression. She searched his face, trying to determine whether this was finally a confession.
Instead, he changed the subject again.
“A few days ago, I read one of the case files you left on the dining table. It was about a couple arguing in a car. The wife grabbed the steering wheel, and it led to a crash. The husband died on the spot. How did you defend that case?”
The question was absurdly out of place, but by then she was used to it. Her husband had always inhabited a world adjacent to everyone else’s.
“The dashcam showed the husband wanted to drive them both to their deaths,” she answered. “The wife grabbed the wheel as an emergency act to avoid immediate danger, so it was treated as an accident.”
“What proved the husband intended suicide?”
“The dashcam recorded him shouting, ‘I want you to die with me.’ That established intent.”
He again motioned for her to climb out first.
Then he said, very quietly, “Go on. I agree to the divorce.”
“Okay.”
The answer seemed to lift a weight from her, and yet grief came over her just as quickly. Crying now, she dragged herself out through the opening. The white light in the hallway was so bright she could barely keep her eyes open. Still, at least it was not a trap. The elevator did not suddenly lurch and sever her body in half while she crossed the threshold.
From inside the elevator, he asked one last question.
“Did you ever listen carefully to the audio from the footage recorded after I covered the camera?”
She turned back. “What? No.”
“Nothing.”
The doors slid shut.
The alarm started ringing again.
And then, impossibly, the elevator began moving upward.
She pounded on the doors and screamed curses after him.
Someone was patting her lightly, trying to wake her.
Pain crashed through her skull the moment her eyes opened. She heard the alarm of a heart monitor somewhere nearby, as if it were coming from the next room.
She was lying in a hospital bed.
Several people who looked like police officers were standing in front of her.
“Ms. Chen Yi?” one of them asked.
“Yes...” she said weakly, struggling to push herself up.
“Do you remember how your car accident happened?”
“What...?”
Her hand moved instinctively to the bandage wrapped around her head. Time and memory were still badly disordered.
“Do you remember what your husband said before the crash?”
“Where am I?”
The officer glanced toward a doctor in the room and mouthed the word amnesia. She understood the shape of it on his lips.
“Do you recognize this footage?” he asked. “It’s from the dashcam before the accident.”
He handed her a phone.
On the screen, she saw the two of them struggling over the steering wheel.
At the end of the recording, her husband said, in a flat voice that sounded almost rehearsed, “I want you to die with me.”
Then the car door unlocked. The vehicle swerved sharply. She was thrown out through the door and into a flower bed. He drove into a ditch filled with water.
The officer asked, “Did you know your husband suffered from depression?”
Her mind flashed with broken images.
They had been arguing in the car. They really were on their way to finalize the divorce that day. He had opened and closed the door for her, but it had not shut properly. The warning chime kept sounding while they fought.
“No... I didn’t know,” she said.
Then, abruptly, she asked, “Wang Chenzhuo... no... my husband—where is he?”
The officer answered that he had drowned and could not be revived.
She cut him off before he could say more.
Outside the hospital window, the light was painfully white.
She could no longer tell what all the evidence was pointing to, or what crime, exactly, had been committed.