The investigation into Shao Junyuan took seven weeks.
I had expected this. Seven weeks was, in the particular calculus of censorate investigations involving multiple jurisdictions, moving parties, and a subject who had spent twenty years constructing careful distance between himself and his activities, an efficient timeline. It felt long from the inside. From the outside, it would be invisible — these things did not appear in public record until they were complete.
During those seven weeks, the household maintained its ordinary patterns with something close to precision. We attended what was required of us socially. Wei Zhengnan went to the ministry. I managed the household's affairs and the subsidiary matters of the investigation that fell within my sphere of management. We ate dinner together most evenings and worked in the study afterward and went to our respective rooms at the end of the night.
We did not speak of what I had promised to tell him.
