Aha! The mystery note writer is none other than Mei, herself. She did not, she insists, kill her father. She even sent Emerson the first fortune cookie note -- she wanted Emerson to show up and run into her mother so that her mom could hire him without tipping off Shrimpboy. He watches her every move, she says, because she knows all his secrets. In fact, he's most afraid that Mei will reveal what she knows about the bet Bao lost that precipitated his death. The facts, as y'all should have guessed, were these: Bao gambled away his life savings at the dim sum poker table trying to increase his cash to buy his own restaurant. He begged the other gamblers to let him play on credit, which Shrimpboy agreed to on one condition: if Bao lost the next hand, Mei would be forced to marry Shrimboy's "socially handicapped" cousin, Rubbie Wu. "Twenty minutes later," Jim Dale says sadly, "Mei was engaged."

The thing is, Emerson, Chuck and Ned can't figure out how this bet is the bet Bao was talking about. Mei's kept her end of the bargain -- she's under Shrimpboy's thumb. "We gotta prove that Shrimpboy killed Bao," Emerson says, "and to do that, we gotta question Shrimpboy." Problem is, there are bodyguards involved and they can't get to him. Ned suggests that maybe Simone can help, since she's a frequenter of the game. "Simone can't help," Emerson says quickly. Ned raises one of his exquisite eyebrows. "I thought you talked," he says knowingly. "Or did you... more than talk?" Emerson sighs. "We decided to cool things off as a mutual agreement amicably reached by two highly mature adults," he snaps. Ned sends up both brows and grins while Chuck makes smoochy noises at Emerson. I love it. Emerson does not, and tries to rage off at which point he engages in yet another this-way-that-way with Olive, who has come to join Chuck in an apology to Ned about sneakily finding the brothers.

Ned is still a little mad, he says, but he lets them off the hook. "It was wrong to be sneaky, but I was trying not to be pushy," Chuck admits, "and replacing sneaky with pushy was a big mistake." Olive agrees. Chuck says she knows Ned, though, and that even if he says he doesn't need the connection to his brothers, everyone needs family. "You're my family," Ned says so sweetly I almost get diabetes. He adds that Olive is, too, to a slightly lesser degree. "Thanks, to a slightly lesser degree," she replies. Ned says he's spent his life not having anything in common with his dad, which is a good thing. But, he says, if he reaches out to his brothers, it will probably make his dad feel good, wherever he is, and he doesn't want that. "If that seems petty and vindictive and small," he concludes, "think of it as an homage to my father and the tiny part of us that is the same." Aw, snap. Vicious.