The journey to the furthest reaches of the province took nearly six hours of grueling, monotonous driving. Chen Ying had explicitly declined the use of a family driver, despite Chen Shao's insistent protests.
She didn't want a witness to this trip; she needed to be away from the suffocating, gilded cage of the Chen villa and the heavy, guilty silence that followed her father whenever he entered a room. She needed the solitude of the open road to process the cracks appearing in her own history.
The village of Qingxi was a place forgotten by the rapid modernization of the capital. Nestled deep within a valley where the air was thin and perpetually scented with damp earth, woodsmoke, and pine, it was a location where time seemed to move at a glacial crawl. After navigating a series of narrow, treacherous dirt paths that threatened to swallow the tires of her SUV, Chen Ying finally pulled up in front of a modest stone cottage with a sagging thatched roof.
