Lu Yixin’s study was actually just a partitioned section of the master bedroom, with a desk and two chairs inside.
It was Fang Yongnian’s first time entering this space. He looked around.
It was small, and books were piled everywhere.
Liu Miqing wasn’t home, and it looked like no one had cleaned for a while. After Lu Boyuan went in, he casually used his foot to push aside some books by the desk, making space for him.
“Sit.” Lu Boyuan seemed a bit nervous.
Fang Yongnian fixed his gaze on him for a while, then sat down on that chair—it was the same kind as the ones in his own home. He remembered Liu Miqing had bought them in a group purchase—ten in total.
He might really be a pervert.
Even though he suspected Lu Boyuan, he still kept circling around his family, not even knowing what he was trying to achieve himself.
“Yixin told me you think that car accident wasn’t an accident?” Lu Boyuan took a sip of strong tea.
His wording was cautious, so cautious that it made Fang Yongnian find it laughable.
So he did laugh, the corner of his lips lifting in mockery.
Lu Boyuan: “……”
Normally, seeing Fang Yongnian act this sarcastically would have made him explode.
But today was different.
From the moment Fang Yongnian entered the house and changed his shoes, he had already been unable to look his junior in the eye.
He was missing a leg. Though Fang Yongnian usually walked and moved about as if nothing was wrong, when he took off his shoes, Lu Boyuan saw his prosthetic limb. No matter how realistic it looked, it was still fake.
He didn’t actually have any solid evidence—just deduction and the speculations of others—yet he had placed Fang Yongnian on the side of the guilty, nailed him there beyond doubt.
Fang Yongnian had never shown anything in front of him, so he had never really felt it—that Fang Yongnian was indeed disabled, that he, compared to himself, was missing a right leg.
“This line of work is tough. It’s possible we’ll never develop a reliable original drug in our lifetime.”
“But we’re a group of like-minded people with the same goal.”
“Once we join a project, we’re brothers.”
“With so many of us together, there’s no obstacle we can’t overcome.”
Those were his own words.
He had said them when the project was established, when they ate together, even when their experiments failed and morale was low.
When he said them, he meant them sincerely. He never thought they would one day face something like this—some brothers dead, others crippled—and he, the only one completely unharmed, had cut off ties with most of the project team, including Fang Yongnian, who had been closest to him.
“The driver was indeed from my hometown, but I only learned that after handling Ge Wenyao and the others’ funerals.” Lu Boyuan lifted the teacup and downed another mouthful. “I kept in contact with his wife for the first two years, but after she remarried, the connection faded.”
“You can’t just suspect I had anything to do with that car accident based on this alone.” When Lu Boyuan said this, he didn’t even dare look Fang Yongnian in the eye.
But hadn’t he done the same thing, suspected Fang Yongnian for four years based on nothing but conjecture?
Fang Yongnian glanced at Lu Boyuan.
He hated drinking tea at Lu Boyuan’s house the most. The tea leaves were bad, the brew was strong, and with one sip there wasn’t even a trace of tea fragrance left—only bitterness.
So he didn’t even look at the teacup. Instead, he took a few sheets of paper from the pocket of his trench coat and handed them to Lu Boyuan.
Photocopies, seemingly taken from some file at the last minute, folded carelessly.
“The autopsy report from back then.” Fang Yongnian spoke briefly.
Lu Boyuan took it. “I know this.”
The car accident had been caused by the driver having an excessive amount of antihistamine drugs in his system. He fell asleep at the wheel, lost control, and crashed through the guardrail. Lu Boyuan had been involved throughout the entire handling of the case, so he knew it well.
“His wife left two statements. The first one was made on the day of the accident—in that one, she emphasized that her husband hadn’t taken any medication before leaving.”
“The second statement was the following afternoon. She changed her words, saying her husband had indeed caught a cold and taken cold medicine before departure.”
“I know that too.” Lu Boyuan remembered. “Later she even explained it to me privately—said the insurance company had called her earlier that day, and she got scared, didn’t know what to say, so she instinctively denied everything.”
Fang Yongnian paused.
“She contacted you privately?” He hadn’t found that out.
“She made a call.” It was the first time Lu Boyuan had mentioned it. “Called me in the middle of the night, and it wasn’t even from her own phone. I wasn’t familiar with her, so it left a deep impression.”
“She wasn’t well-educated, and when something happened, she easily lost her head. She cried through most of that call.”
“There wasn’t much concrete content, just kept asking me over and over if changing her statement would cause her trouble. I was already overwhelmed myself at that time, so I just said a few words to comfort her and left it at that.”
Fang Yongnian said nothing.
“So… why do you think that car accident wasn’t an accident?” Lu Boyuan flipped through the autopsy report again, seeing nothing unusual.
“When I was in the hospital…” Fang Yongnian rubbed his temples. “I also received a call. The number was unfamiliar. The caller was the driver’s wife.”
“Same as with you, she was crying through the whole call.”
“Before she hung up, she asked me whether I had received any money.”
Lu Boyuan froze. “What money?”
“That’s what I asked too.” For the first time that evening, Fang Yongnian showed an expression—a bitter smile. “But she hung up.”
“My condition back then wasn’t good. I had just come out of the ICU, spent more time unconscious than awake. When I finally had the energy to call back and ask, the person who answered was a man.”
“A security guard from the hospital’s inpatient department.”
“She’d borrowed someone else’s phone to make that call to me.”
“Why didn’t you tell me at the time!” Lu Boyuan’s voice rose.
Fang Yongnian gave him a sidelong glance and asked coolly, “Did you come to see me?”
Lu Boyuan: “……”
Right. He hadn’t.
Lu Yixin and Liu Miqing had visited often, but at that time, with the project funding withdrawn and the document leak incident, Lu Boyuan had been wishing he could strangle Fang Yongnian himself.
He looked embarrassed.
“That call, and his wife’s two different statements, were only what made me want to investigate the cause of all this.” Fang Yongnian skipped over the previous topic and suddenly changed the subject. “Why do you want me in your project?”
“I left the institute four years ago. You never once came looking for me in those four years. Why come to me now, suddenly asking me to join this project?”
Lu Boyuan opened his mouth, and after overhearing the professor’s call, that faint unease in his heart began to surface again.
“It wasn’t me who brought it up at first.” The later part of what Lu Boyuan said started to come out unevenly.
It was clearly a proper and open matter, yet suddenly he didn’t know how to say it.
“I know that after you resigned from the institute, many companies came to you. I thought that since you felt you couldn’t stay there any longer, going elsewhere might be a good thing.” Lu Boyuan’s voice grew softer and softer.
He was the one who had said they were all brothers.
And in the end, what had he actually done?
“Later, when you started your own company and decided to make generic drugs, I thought our paths had diverged, so I didn’t contact you again.”
That was putting it mildly. In truth, when he found out Fang Yongnian intended to go into generics, he had flown into a rage.
Fang Yongnian gave a low chuckle but didn’t expose him.
“When the project’s funding started showing promise, the old professor called me and asked whether you’d be interested in joining.”
Fang Yongnian froze.
“After the accident, the old professor was sick for more than half a year. His health is nowhere near what it used to be.” Lu Boyuan’s voice faltered; it sounded like he was trying to convince himself. “At first, he mentioned you often. Whenever someone said you were the one who leaked the project documents, he would flare up instantly. I always felt that he was waiting for you to come back.”
“But you never did, and the professor gradually stopped mentioning you. So when he suddenly brought you up this time, I was really surprised.”
“The elders who came to my pharmacy to ask me to join the project, were all of them sent by the old professor?” Fang Yongnian frowned.
“Half and half,” Lu Boyuan said after a moment’s hesitation. “Since the professor mentioned you, of course I also wanted you in the project. Everyone knows your ability. Honestly, I really think it’s a waste for you to be working on generics.”
Fang Yongnian gave him a cold look.
Lu Boyuan stopped talking and took a sip of his strong tea to cover it.
“Last month, I found a list.” Fang Yongnian sat in the chair, lightly shifting his left foot.
“There were seventy-four formally registered personnel in Phase I of our project. Among them, twenty-six had close financial dealings with other companies during the project.”
“I’d just gotten hold of that list, and then you came inviting me to join the project.”
Using the same method of constant pressure, as if everyone had suddenly forgotten his so-called dark history. Now everyone was feeling sorry for him; whether he joined or not had almost become the key to whether the project would succeed.
Lu Boyuan’s mind buzzed. The professor had mentioned the list on the phone.
Fang Yongnian gave a faint, amused smile.
The father and daughter’s dumbstruck expressions were exactly the same.
“I… don’t know.” Lu Boyuan almost lost his breath.
He didn’t dare say more about something that hadn’t been fully investigated yet.
But the amount of information from these past two days was too much, he felt as if his entire life had been turned upside down.
“Don’t you think there’s something wrong with the project?” Fang Yongnian smiled faintly.
“That was an air-dropped project with nearly three hundred million yuan in investment. Before the project even began, I didn’t know we’d already found the target.” Fang Yongnian looked at Lu Boyuan. “You really don’t think there’s something wrong with how that project was approved?”
The day the accident happened just so happened to be the day they made a major breakthrough. After that day, they were supposed to continue approaching potential investors.
Lu Boyuan was still gaping wordlessly.
“That car accident wasn’t an accident.” Fang Yongnian stood up.
“The driver wasn’t driving fatigued. He’d been on the highway for nearly two hours and hadn’t stopped at any rest area in between.”
“Ordinary cold medicine would have taken effect within two hours, but it didn’t—he kept driving on the highway for two full hours, and then, at that stretch of road, he broke through the guardrail and crashed straight into us.”
“I was in the car. He came straight at us.”
“Lu Boyuan, during that accident, the driver never fell asleep.”
He stood there, looking at his senior brother.
Expressionless, chest only faintly rising and falling.
That car accident was not an accident.
He was the only survivor in the car, so he knew.
He had seen with his own eyes that car charge directly toward them, even adjusting its direction slightly to hit them more squarely.
But he had no evidence.
Everything else told him it was an accident.
Only he knew—it was murder.
