Chapter Two: The Man Who Heard Secrets

"So you reviewed the recording and didn't dismiss me." Shen Yan leaned across the desk. "You aren't trying to learn why I broke the rule. You want to know whether I saw something." After a long silence, she removed an old photograph from a drawer. Shen Qinghe sat at the Nightingale, with two girls beside her. One was Minglan at eighteen. The other looked remarkably like Xingyao. "My sister, Mingxi," Minglan said. "Aunt Qinghe taught us piano. Twenty-one years ago, she left this family without warning and took something. My father searched for her for years." "What did she take?" "I don't know." Too smooth. Shen Yan had always heard wrong notes. He also heard the tiny interruption in a person's breath before a lie. Minglan knew.