They two had been talking until noon when at long last, the man stood up and left. But Steven did not move. He remained glued to the same spot, looking out the window, the same way he had done while waiting for the man. He did not look away from the window, even after seeing the man drive off.
Mist enshrouded the glass, making it difficult to see through what he was thinking. He switched his eyes back to the cup of coffee on the opposite side of the table, where the man had sat. He stared at it intently, as if it gave him secret clues to what preoccupied his mind.
"What I was owed... will be taken back!" He gritted his teeth, a cold haze looming in his eyes.
It took him quite a while to calm down his nerves. He took out his cellphone and called Molly. The call was rejected almost immediately, about the second or third rings. While he was wondering, a short text message came through,"It's not convenient to talk. Dad, what's up?"
Composing a short message, Steven replied,"Do you have time to came back?"
As she tried to guess why Steven wanted to see her, Molly frowned, but she instinctively thought there was something important, so she replied to his short message saying yes.
With exaggerated politeness, Brian was cutting steak genteelly. He only stole a furtive glance at Molly, without taking too much notice of what she was doing. Even after Molly was done with texting and put back the cellphone, Brian did not ask anything. He was waiting for her to tell him.
But for quite a while, Molly hesitated before she pulled out the cellphone again and typed something that she passed to Brian,"My father told me to go back home. At once!"
"No!" Brian refused without thinking.
Molly frowned and typed in a hurry,"Why?"
"No reason!" Brian did not want to explain at all,"Just take my word for it. If I say no, then that's it!"
Hearing that, Molly glared at Brian in anger. She had not been feeling good because of the loss of her voice. As soon as she saw the short message from her father, she wanted to fly back home out of a kind of instinctive dependence. Although the home could not always comfort her, she still wanted to go back.
Seeing that Molly was angry, Brian put down the knife and fork in his hands, picked up the napkin and wiped his mouth elegantly before he said indifferently,"Edgar will find it out if you go back home!"
Slightly astonished Molly was about to say something. But when she opened her mouth, a sharp pain shot through her vocal cords, harshly reminding her of the problem with her voice. So taking out her cellphone once more, she hastily composed a response to Brian,"I won't go to meet him! I will keep the promise I made on that day. I will try to do my part well."
After glancing at what she had typed, Brian rather said curtly,"This has nothing to do with that!" He then picked up the fork before asking,"Do you know that Edgar has placed informers in your neighborhood?"
Obviously, Molly did not understand what Brian was talking about. The blank look on her face said it all.
However, Brian was not planning to offer any further explanations. He just said coldly,"Your dear Edgar is not at all that simple. In my opinion, he is not as innocent as you think."
Molly was shell shocked. For a moment, she couldn't even find a response to Brian. Instead, her first instinct told her there was something about to happen. She did not know what and why exactly, but she had no ifs, ands or buts about the pre-apprehension.
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