My Sister Returned After Three Years Missing, and My Family Told Me Not to Call the Police - Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Moon Harbor Care Center had closed down two years ago.

The building sat by the river, its exterior walls blackened and a sign hanging on the fence that read: “DANGEROUS BUILDING: DO NOT ENTER.” Yet, my sister led me inside through a small path overgrown with weeds at the back, moving with a familiarity that suggested she had been wandering here for the past three years.

The lobby was thick with dust. The plastic flowers at the reception desk were so brittle they crumbled at a touch. On the wall, a poster of a smiling elderly person was yellowed and curling at the edges, a sight that sent a chill down my spine.

My sister didn’t head upstairs. Instead, she led me straight to the basement.

The air grew colder the further down the stairs we went, smelling of mold mixed with something scorched. When we reached the bottom floor, I saw large patches of soot stains remaining on the corner walls. One half of the iron door hung askew, its lock long since rusted shut.

My sister stopped at the door and said softly, “This is where I died.”

She told me that three years ago, while on the night shift, she discovered that Moon Harbor was secretly moving several elderly residents with mobility issues into the basement warehouse. They were providing care at the lowest possible cost to facilitate falsifying accounts and embezzling subsidies. Worse, the warehouse was used for long-term storage of expired oxygen cylinders and low-quality space heaters-a mountain of safety hazards.

She had secretly recorded a video, intending to hand it over to a reporter the next day.

But the news leaked.

“That night, Lin Yi’an brought some people down and snatched my phone.” My sister looked at the door, her eyes gradually turning cold. “I fought back, so he told the security guards to lock the door, saying they’d open it once I’d thought things through.”

“And then there was a fire?”

“Yes. A short circuit in the old wiring. The fire started from the heaters. Besides me, there were two other caregivers and four elderly residents who couldn’t get out of bed.”

My hands and feet felt ice-cold as I listened.

“No one came to save you?”

My sister gave a soft laugh, a sound more painful than crying.

“Someone came. Dad came.”

I snapped my head toward her.

“What do you mean?”

“That night, Dad was a temporary maintenance worker hired by Moon Harbor,” my sister said. “He heard me calling for him from inside.”

It felt like a fist had slammed into my chest.

“That’s impossible.”

“He actually had the keys,” my sister’s voice was flat. “But Lin Yi’an told him that if he opened the door now, once the fire fully broke out, the responsibility would fall on him. He also said that you had just finished your second surgery for kidney failure and the family owed hundreds of thousands. As long as Dad kept his mouth shut, Moon Harbor would pay.”

My legs went weak.

Three years ago, I really had just finished surgery. The family had sold the house and borrowed from every relative we had. That was why my sister had taken the night shift at Moon Harbor in the first place.

“So Dad didn’t open the door?”

My sister nodded.

“He stood outside the door, listening to me call for him, and in the end, he walked away.”

The basement was terrifyingly silent; even the sound of my own breathing felt grating.

I leaned against the wall, unable to speak for a long time.

I had always known my father favored sons over daughters, that he was cowardly and selfish, but I never imagined he would leave his own daughter behind a burning door for the sake of money and self-preservation.

“What about the police?” I asked hoarsely. “Why did they conclude that you stole things and ran away?”

My sister reached behind a pile of collapsed cardboard boxes and pulled out a rusted metal box. It clearly hadn’t been dug out just today; it looked like something she had kept watch over time and time again.

When it was opened, it contained a memory card, a soot-blackened nurse’s badge, and half a burnt duty log.

“After I died, Mom never believed I would run away. She went to Moon Harbor to cause a scene and was thrown out. Later, one night, I came to her in a dream and told her to come here and find this box,” my sister said. “Mom got hold of this memory card, but she didn’t dare hand it over.”

“Why?”

“Because by then, Dad had already taken the money and signed a non-disclosure agreement. Lin Yi’an threatened Mom, saying that if she dared to make a fuss, they would make Dad the scapegoat and have the hospital stop your follow-up anti-rejection medication.”

I closed my eyes, my nose filled with the smell of rust.

So, for the past three years, the reason I could live well was that I was treading on my sister’s life.

My sister looked at me, her gaze softening for the first time.

“I don’t blame you, Yanxi.”

Tears surged out instantly. “But I blame myself. I even scolded you back then, saying if you really ran away, you shouldn’t come home.”

“You were only twenty-one then.” She reached out as if to wipe my tears, but her fingertips stopped before touching my face. “I didn’t come back to make you atone for anyone. I came back so you could tell the truth.”

I took a deep breath and picked up the memory card.

“Is this enough evidence?”

“It’s not enough,” my sister said. “The memory card only has the secret recordings of the basement, which can prove they were illegally housing the elderly, but it can’t prove who locked the door the night of the fire.”

“Then what do we do?”

“Find He Mingche.”

He Mingche was an investigative journalist for a local public interest channel in our city. Three years ago, he had followed the Moon Harbor story, but his draft was never published, and he was forced to resign. Now he ran his own independent media outlet, specifically focusing on local cold cases and unfinished news.

Following the address my sister gave me, I found him in a cramped office in the old city district.

He was in his early thirties, wearing a gray shirt, his eyes bloodshot from staying up late. When he heard the name “Chen Shuwan,” the hand holding his mug visibly paused.

“You’re her sister?”

I nodded and placed the memory card on the desk.

He Mingche was silent for a long time before he spoke. “I believed your sister back then. I almost got that story published.”

“What happened next?”

“Later, all the materials I obtained were deemed to be from ‘unidentified sources,’ and someone even filed an anonymous report accusing me of blackmailing the company. The key witness suddenly recanted, claiming that Chen Shuwan really had stolen things and run away.” He looked at me. “That witness was your father.”

I had expected it, but it still felt like a knife slicing through my heart.

He Mingche turned the laptop around and clicked on an unsent document.

The title was: *Investigation into the Truth of the Moon Harbor Care Center Basement*. Inside were dense records of testimonies from the elderly residents’ families, duty rosters from before and after the fire, and a blurry screenshot showing a man standing at the basement entrance.

Even though it was only a profile view, I recognized him immediately. It was my father.

“Where did this image come from?”

“Rear-door surveillance from a nearby shop,” He Mingche said. “The quality was too poor for the police to accept as evidence, and the original video file disappeared the very next day.”

“Then what can we even investigate now?”

He stared at me for two seconds, his voice dropping low. “Lin Yi’an is restarting the Moon Harbor project this Saturday, rebuilding it into a high-end retirement community on the same site. On the day of the groundbreaking ceremony, city officials will be there to show their support. What he fears most isn’t old news-it’s having his old debts settled on that specific day.”

I looked up sharply. “So the evidence needs to be made public then.”

He Mingche nodded.

Just then, my phone rang.

It was my mother.

I picked up and heard her sobbing. “Yanxi, come home quickly. Something happened to your father.”

When I rushed home, the house was a mess. The coffee table was overturned, glass shards littered the floor, and my father was sitting on the ground, his knuckles covered in blood as if he had just been in a violent brawl.

My mother was crouching beside him, wiping away tears.

“Who was here?”

My father stared fixedly at the floor, silent.

My mother’s voice trembled. “Lin Yi’an’s people. They told your father to convince you to stop investigating. They said if you keep going, not just your father, but you won’t have a moment’s peace either.”

My father suddenly roared, “Are you satisfied now? Do you have to drive the whole family to death before you’re happy?”

For the first time, I didn’t back down.

“I’m not the one who drove my sister to her death.”

My father snapped his head up, his eyes bloodshot.

“Do you think I wanted this? If I hadn’t signed back then, you wouldn’t even be alive! The hospital was demanding payment, debt collectors were at the door, and the people from Moon Harbor were forcing my thumbprint onto the agreement. What could I have done?”

“So you just listened to my sister calling for you from behind that door?”

Those words pierced him like a blade. My father froze completely.

After a long silence, he covered his face, his shoulders slowly collapsing.

“I did open the door,” he said hoarsely. “Really, I opened it for a second. But the fire was too big. I saw her… I saw the row of beds behind her all go up in flames. Lin Yi’an grabbed me and said if I went in, we’d just die together. I was scared. I was so scared.”

I suddenly understood why my father had such dark circles under his eyes since my sister returned.

It wasn’t that he felt no guilt.

It was just that through three years of silence, he had turned himself into a man who didn’t dare look in the mirror.

My mother knelt down crying and grabbed my hand. “Yanxi, stop investigating. Your sister coming back this time… she just wants our family to have closure. We’ll admit our mistakes, we’ll burn incense, we’ll build her a monument, okay?”

I pulled my hand away inch by inch.

“No.”

“Why?”

I looked at her and said, word by word, “Because my sister didn’t come back for a monument. She came back to put the living on the judgment seat.”

That night, my sister sat by my bed, watching the drizzling rain outside the window.

“Will Dad go turn himself in?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “He doesn’t have the courage, unless someone blocks off his last path of retreat.”

“Then I’ll block it.”

She turned to look at me, and for the first time, there was a glimmer of something human in her eyes.

“Chen Yanxi, you finally seem like my sister.”

“You always used to think I was a coward.”

“You weren’t a coward.” My sister smiled faintly. “You just always thought that as long as you were a ‘good girl,’ bad things wouldn’t happen to you. But many bad things in this world are aimed specifically at the best-behaved people.”

My nose felt stingy.

I opened my phone and scrolled through the things I hadn’t deleted for three years to show her. Screenshots of trending topics, missing person notices, police reports I had written and then deleted, and countless unsent social media posts.

At the very bottom was a useless sentence I had written in my notes on the seventh day of her disappearance: *If you really didn’t do anything wrong, come back and speak up for yourself.*

I stared at that line, my hands shaking.

“It turns out I wasn’t waiting for you to come home,” I whispered. “I was waiting for a chance-waiting until I was brave enough to say that sentence for you.”

My sister watched in silence for a long time before suddenly saying, “Then tomorrow, don’t just speak for me.”

“What?”

“Speak for all those people who died in there, whose names no one even remembers.”

“Sis, can you stay?”

She was silent for a moment, then said softly, “Once this is finished, it’ll be time for me to go.”

“Where?”

“To where I’m supposed to go.”

I wanted to ask if it was cold there, if it was dark, if there would be anyone to keep her company. But the words reached my lips and I swallowed them back down.

Because I knew that no matter what that place was like, she had already been walking alone for a very long time these past three years.