Chapter 27: Zhou Lan's Desperate Scheme That Costs Everything

They finished the cake in silence, the two plates side by side on the coffee table, neither of them in a hurry to move.

Outside, the night was deep and still. The scattered lights of the development floated in the dark like buoys, wide-spaced and unhurried — the kind of quiet that belongs to places that haven't yet been fully inhabited, that are still more possibility than presence. It felt, in its particular way, like an island.

Xia Chan set her plate down first and crossed to the window, leaning against the sill to look out at nothing specific. The night air came in cold and immediate, and her thin t-shirt was not a match for it — goosebumps moved up her arms within the first minute.

After a while, He Huaisheng came and stood beside her, closed the window, and pulled her into his arms without particular ceremony.

He was warm. Xia Chan lowered her eyes and let herself lean against him for a moment. Then she looked up. "I have a question. That red Lamborghini you drove the last time — was that Cheng Zijin's?"

He Huaisheng nodded.

The confirmation landed with a quality she hadn't quite anticipated — a dry, slightly absurd irony that produced a soft, involuntary laugh from somewhere in her chest.

He Huaisheng looked at her.

She didn't want to explain.

She had used to think, somewhat privately and with a measure of satisfaction, that she and Chen Aijia and Fu Ruyu were operating at a more rational and realistic register than most people. That they were clear-eyed about what they were doing and why. But from any honest outside vantage point, the three of them were probably just the same as everyone else — people who wanted to work with a certain kind of dignity while chasing the same things everyone chased, telling themselves their version was somehow more principled. None of them was more noble than the others. They were just doing it with better vocabulary.

She had made her peace with this tonight, or something close enough to peace.

She wasn't stupid enough to want the title of Mrs. He. She wanted what he had promised — that one percent of equity, taken back on its own terms, arrived at properly. After that, they could go their separate ways without damage on either side. She had named this to herself clearly, and the naming had settled something.

With food in her and the anxiety of the evening mostly metabolized, she looked at He Huaisheng properly again. He was tall, his features clean and sharp, and the more she looked at him, the more she found the looking worthwhile. She didn't deliberate. She stood on her toes and kissed him.

The sweet residue of mousse was still faint on her tongue, and Xia Chan found herself thinking, with some detachment, of her last birthday — He Huaisheng finding her downstairs, the kiss then. Different context, same shape of something.

The night moved through its own rhythms. He held her waist, moved in the way that was sometimes fast and sometimes deliberately slow — gentler than the first time, though no less present. She lay back against the armrest and looked up at him, and in the particular patience of this pace, something opened in her that she hadn't been expecting.

Her heart felt hollow in a specific way — not emptied of anything bad but simply open, like a window that had been shut for too long and had finally been pushed wide, letting the cold air through.

Her first time had not been with Xie Xingzhou. Looking back at it now — the person whose face had gone entirely vague in her memory, the winter break of her second year of high school, the howl of the wind outside a hotel window, lying there trying to look calmer than she felt — she remembered only the pain. Uncomplicated, definitive pain, from beginning to end. Afterward, he had looked at her in disbelief: You were a virgin? She had broken up with him the same week without a second thought.

The second had been Xie Xingzhou.

She started to follow that thought somewhere and was interrupted, rather decisively, by a jolt that scattered everything.

She surfaced, looked up, and found He Huaisheng looking at her.

His gaze was very direct. "Were you... spacing out?"

Guilt arrived before she could manage her expression. "No, absolutely not. I was just reminiscing—"

She didn't get to finish the sentence.

"Try that again," she said, once she had her voice back, "I dare you."

He had, it turned out, both the willingness and the capacity.

She lost track of the ceiling for a while. By the time her thoughts reassembled themselves into anything coherent, she had the general sense of having been thoroughly rearranged, and she lay flat and considered whether any of her limbs were still operational.

He Huaisheng lay beside her for a while, then sat up and lit a cigarette.

Xia Chan sat up immediately and took it out of his mouth.

He turned and looked at her.

She put the filter between her lips, drew once, and released the smoke slowly. It unfolded in a ring and drifted, and the light in the room caught the edges of it, and whatever it did to the angles of her face made something in the quality of He Huaisheng's attention change in a way that was not casual.

"Here." She held the cigarette out.

He Huaisheng didn't take it. He took hold of her chin and kissed her instead — she inhaled smoke that wasn't hers and shoved him away, coughing.

He retrieved the cigarette from her hand. "Don't want it anymore?"

"I quit. Properly. I'm not relapsing over this."

He hummed in acknowledgment, stubbed it out, and asked if she was tired.

"Not especially."

"Go to sleep anyway."

She thought about it and nodded.

They washed up and took their respective sides of the bed. Xia Chan settled close against him, his arm coming around her waist with an ease that had ceased to require either of them to negotiate it, and lay on her back staring at the ceiling.

Sleep was not close.

There was something about this particular quality of quiet — the dark, the stillness, the strange permission that late hours give to honesty — that made it easier to say what she couldn't say in daylight.

"He Huaisheng." Her voice was barely above a breath. "I really want to talk to you."

The room held the silence. She didn't know if he was awake.

She let it go.

---

She woke to the sound of rain.

The room was grey with it. She pushed back the curtain and found the temperature had dropped several degrees overnight — the kind of autumn rain that arrives as an announcement. The bed beside her was empty.

She found He Huaisheng in the living room on the sofa, phone in hand, texting someone. He looked up when she appeared.

"Morning." She yawned and went to wash her face.

When she came out, he had already changed.

Only then did she realize her clothes from the night before were still crumpled by the entrance where they'd been discarded, unwashed, unwearable. She stood in his oversized t-shirt and considered her options.

He Huaisheng bent down and lifted two shopping bags from beside the sofa and held them out.

Xia Chan looked at them with surprise. Then at him. This man operated at a level of forethought that made her faintly suspicious of how he had developed it.

She checked the bags. Each item was from a label she recognized — the kind of label that, when worn, would account for several weeks of her income. She accepted this with a sigh that she allowed to be audible.

Inside: a knitted sweater, tailored pencil pants, a light beige trench coat. All of it fitting exactly the way clothes fit when someone who knows what they're doing has chosen them.

She changed and came out. "Did you pick these yourself?"

He nodded.

She smiled at him across the room. "Good eye. How many women did it take you to develop this?"

Something moved briefly in He Huaisheng's expression.

She hadn't meant anything by it — it had come out of the same register as most things she said, quick and slightly careless. She wasn't genuinely interested in the answer. She picked up her phone and checked messages.

When she looked up again, he was standing at the open window. The rain was drifting in with the wind, and he was simply there in it, his back to the room, his attention somewhere she couldn't see or reach.

She watched him for a while without speaking.

When he was fully inside his own world like that, it felt almost impossible to find the door. She recognized this about him without being sure what to do with the recognition.

After a while, she opened a chat and sent him a message from across the room, asking if there was anything worth doing in Pengcheng.

His phone buzzed in his hand. He glanced at it and turned.

She asked: "Are you free today?"

He Huaisheng paused.

She read it immediately. "Birthday party. Of course — don't worry about it, I need to go back to the hotel anyway. I have two days of exhibition materials to organize."

He looked at her for a moment, then typed: Let's have breakfast first. I'll take you back.

---

There was a breakfast shop just outside the residential complex. They ordered a basket of soup dumplings and two bowls of congee and sat across from each other at a small table. The sound of rain and street noise provided everything the silence needed. They ate without filling it.

The driver arrived not long after.

In the car, Xia Chan cracked the window open just enough to let a thread of cool air in. The rain fell across the windshield and spread into soft grey across the city — Pengcheng dissolving at the edges, the whole of it wrapped in mist.

She turned to look at him. "How long to get back to Yangcheng?"

"Three hours."

"Good. I'll be in time for lunch." She turned back to the window for a moment, then: "When are you — when do I leave?"

"My flight is tomorrow morning." She frowned at the logistics she was already working through. "This whole situation is going to be hard to explain. There's going to be a report, and I have to account for where the substitute goods came from."

He Huaisheng was quiet for a beat. "Write the truth."

She looked at him.

She thought about the bidding situation — how He Huaisheng had known about He Qihua's interference and had let it happen anyway, operating within the constraints of his own longer strategy and not wanting to alert the wrong people. This was different. If she wrote He Huaisheng's name in a report, He Qihua would receive it. He Qihua was not an uncritical reader.

He Huaisheng seemed to follow this without needing it explained. He didn't elaborate. "Trust me. Write the truth."

"Writing it isn't the problem. I can't promise how He Qihua will read it."

He nodded once and said nothing further.

The car stopped in a quiet corner near her hotel. Xia Chan held the door and looked down at him, and there were several things she considered saying. She settled on the only one that felt right-sized for the moment. "Happy birthday. Hope the rest of the day is good."

He Huaisheng nodded. "Be careful on the way back."

She looked away, closed the door, and walked toward the hotel without turning around.

She hadn't been able to bring herself to ask when he was coming back to Chongcheng. The question had formed and dissolved several times on the way to the car. She let it go.

---

Back in Chongcheng, the rain had followed her. The temperature was several degrees lower than in the south, and Xia Chan, who had a constitutionally poor relationship with cold weather, kept a thin down jacket in her car and changed into it at the company gate every time she stepped out.

For the exhibition report, she wrote the incident in full and documented the solution clearly. She noted that the Yangcheng branch was geographically close to Pengcheng and that the decision to source substitute goods from there had been made in the interest of timeline.

Thirty minutes after submission, He Qihua called her in.

He opened with criticism: the exhibition team's handling of the initial situation had been inadequate. He followed with measured acknowledgment: her crisis management had been competent. Then he shifted. How had she made contact with the branch?

Xia Chan kept her tone level. "I wonder if Mr. He recalls Assistant Fu, who represented Consultant He at the last product seminar? We worked together previously at Kaize."

He Qihua was quiet for a moment. Then, without apparent connection: "Do you play golf?"

She paused. "No."

He opened his drawer and slid a card across the desk. "Can you learn in three months?"

"Yes," she said immediately, took the card, and didn't examine it closely enough to read more than the words Golf Club before she left the office.

The year-end was coming and the company had entered the relentless upward pressure of its final quarter. Xia Chan took golf lessons on days when the weather cooperated and squeezed everything else into the remaining hours. She was moving fast enough that she didn't have time to feel tired.

And then Zhou Lan called.

Zhou Lan had run out of money and had made a decision so poorly thought through that even by the standards of Zhou Lan's relationship with consequences, it was remarkable: she had paid someone to produce counterfeit jewelry replicating the designs of existing shops, and then used the replicas to switch out genuine pieces.

She had started with small independent shops. Two attempts had gone without immediate consequence. The third had not.

Xia Chan drove to the police station. She apologized to the shop owner with the focused sincerity of someone who is both genuinely sorry and desperately trying to contain a situation before it becomes permanent. She bargained and she pleaded and she wore down the owner's understandable resistance until a private settlement had been reached.

The cost was two months of her salary, clean out of her account.

She walked out of the station and stood on the pavement and looked at Zhou Lan and said, in full and at volume, everything she had been too kind or too tired to say across the preceding years.

Zhou Lan didn't argue. She knew the ledger too well to pretend otherwise. She stood with her head down and her eyes on the ground and let all of it arrive.

When Xia Chan finally stopped, Zhou Lan's voice came out roughened and very small. "I really want him to come out."

Xia Chan stared at her. The anger that had been filling her chest hit something else and deflated into something worse than anger. "You gave him everything. Every last thing you had. And for ten years he didn't want to see you. Now he hears there might be a way out early and suddenly he remembers your name. What did he give you, Zhou Lan? What was it worth all of this?"

She got to the end of the sentence and found she had nothing left. The words stopped on their own. She looked at Zhou Lan — the way she was standing, the precise texture of her desperation — and felt the grief of it move through her, heavy and entirely useless.

She stood on the pavement in the rain and said nothing more, because there was nothing more that would help.