The outdoor stall rang with noise and chatter, yet somehow the racket only made the man standing beneath the streetlight in his service uniform look sharper by contrast — the lines of his face clean and precise, each contour exactly as it should be and no more. His collar was fastened to the last button, his tie equally immaculate, his whole bearing precise and cool.

He really did look best in that uniform.

The early summer night carried a sea breeze, light and constant — but as it reached Yu Hao, it was cool as deep water, sinking straight through to her core.

She tipped her head back and looked at the pale amber moon above, and heard the footsteps behind her approach at an unhurried pace. Those heavy boots, turning the wheels of fate, bore down on her — and then *crunch*, one small plastic cap was crushed underfoot. Yu Hao flinched as if it hadn’t been the bottle cap that was crushed, but her own trembling heart.

He came and stood beside her.

Lu Huaizheng pulled out the chair next to her and sat down with easy comfort, then turned his head to look at her. She was leaning her cheek on the top of an upended beer bottle, half her face tipped sideways against it. She waved at him with a bright smile, eyes crinkled. “You look awfully familiar, handsome.”

Lu Huaizheng removed his cap, letting the full severity of his expression show. He gave her a sidelong look, unhurried and cold. “Is that right? You look awfully familiar yourself.”

“Isn’t this just my boyfriend?” She put on a carefully constructed expression of bashful guilt, and reached out to touch his face.

He sidestepped it smoothly, fixing her with a flat stare. “What’s that in your hand.”

Yu Hao held up the bottle and tilted it toward him. “This? Oh, this?” She flashed a perfectly innocent smile and slid the bottle directly in front of Zhao Dailin with a single decisive motion, washing her hands of it entirely. “I opened it for my senior. I wasn’t drinking.”

Zhao Dailin, across the table, had just been working a bottle open with her teeth. At those words, she froze. She sat there, bottle cap still clenched between her teeth, staring blankly at Yu Hao for two seconds — then watched Yu Hao give her a frantic look.

She ignored it completely and bit the cap off her own bottle without further ceremony.

These two both had mild cleanliness compulsions. Neither would ever drink from a bottle opened by someone else’s mouth.

Zhao Dailin leaned over and offered the bottle to Lu Huaizheng. He shook his head — not drinking. She thought about it for three seconds and then, in the end, put in one word for Yu Hao anyway.

“I pulled her out here. Don’t be angry with her.”

Lu Huaizheng crossed one leg over the other, arms folded on the table, body settling into a loose, unhurried posture. His expression had softened from where it was a moment ago. He turned to Zhao Dailin and offered, with apparent sincerity, “There are plenty of ways to deal with a low mood. Drinking doesn’t have to be one of them. Exercise works well as a release…”

Zhao Dailin rolled her eyes, raised one hand, and put a stop to that. “I promise I will never, ever pull your girlfriend out for drinks again. Is that good enough?”

Yu Hao groaned internally. Don’t do that, Senior Zhao. She was *craving* one.

Lu Huaizheng nodded, satisfied.

“In that case — I’ll give you something in return.”

Zhao Dailin had no particular interest, and tipped another lazy mouthful of beer down her throat.

“Sun Kai was injured. He was transferred into the Air Force Hospital today. If you want to go, mention my name to the night nurse. She’ll let you in.”

*Bang.* The bottle hit the table.

Zhao Dailin went still.

That evening at the stall, the two of them had their drinking contest while Sun Kai slept on, and neither of them could have said with any clarity what, exactly, they were fighting for. Zhao Dailin’s intentions toward Sun Kai were absolute and deliberate.

Xu Yanluo’s were not. There was a careless amusement in her eyes, a sense of playing at something without real stakes.

In the beginning, she’d felt nothing in particular about Sun Kai — he was a variable, not a goal. But then, inexplicably, some stranger had appeared and triggered something in her — a sudden, uncharacteristic urge to compete.

Yet when she looked across at Zhao Dailin that night, Xu Yanluo understood. Zhao Dailin was the better fit for Sun Kai. The certainty in Zhao Dailin’s eyes — the way a woman in love throws herself in without reservation, without calculation — those were things Xu Yanluo didn’t have. And Zhao Dailin, in the same moment she looked at Xu Yanluo, also understood: she had already won.

Because Xu Yanluo’s eyes drifted. She was only playing.

Zhao Dailin, clearly, cared more.

Zhao Dailin’s life had been mapped out in precise, deliberate strokes from the moment of her birth — her career, her future partner, every choice made with intention. She could approach any relationship with easy openness, she would never waste her years — but once she had found a person she wanted to share a life with, she was equally absolute about it.

From the time she returned from Yunnan.

She had known that person had appeared. But Sun Kai was then engaged, and she found the idea of wanting someone else’s fiancé unconscionable — so she buried that feeling, something she was not comfortable speaking of aloud.

She returned and began doing as her parents wished — going on dates, looking for someone suitable.

And then, on the very night of one of those arranged meetings, in the restaurant where she sat, she saw Sun Kai and his fiancée across the room — both of them stiff, their conversation clearly painful — until the woman finally stood to leave and Sun Kai caught her wrist and held on, his face rigid, unable even with all his pride to say the one word he needed. In the end, she heard him say between his teeth, “The man out there — is that your ex? Is that why? You want to break up with me for him?”

Fang Yan cried with her whole body, gasping through tears, “I don’t know how to explain it. We didn’t do what you’re thinking, I promise — I was drunk that night and he walked me home, I swear I didn’t know — Sun Kai, I’m so confused right now, do you understand? He didn’t try to intervene between us — I only just found out by accident that he’s been waiting for me for years, his friend told me — he never stopped waiting—”

Sun Kai’s laugh was flat and cold. “So you’re having second thoughts.”

Fang Yan covered her eyes, overwhelmed. “I don’t know. I genuinely don’t know. He said he’ll wait for me as long as it takes. I’m so confused right now — can you give me a little time to think?”

Zhao Dailin had studied human behavior long enough to genuinely understand what Fang Yan was going through in that moment — and it didn’t stop her from finding the whole thing contemptible.

What a woman ultimately chooses often comes down to which man loves her more — because, she had once thought privately, women are creatures of need. She’d never actually said that aloud, of course. Even in philosophy, it had always been contested.

She’d also understood, quite clearly, what Fang Yan’s tears and theatrics were really saying. Fang Yan didn’t necessarily want out of the engagement. What she wanted was for Sun Kai to see — *see* that someone else loved her even more. Had Sun Kai responded in that moment with the words *I love you more than he does*, Fang Yan would have crumpled into his arms and walked with him into a happy marriage.

But what Sun Kai said was: “No need. Let’s end this.”

One sentence sent Fang Yan into free fall.

And one sentence lit a fire back up in Zhao Dailin’s chest.

After that day, Sun Kai fell into a deep silence. Zhao Dailin understood it completely — men who have been betrayed by a woman tend to begin doubting everything: their own worth, their own attractiveness, the meaning of things around them. They go quiet, disengaged, numb to everything except work. And in the early days after the wound is fresh, they close themselves off to every woman who comes near. Sun Kai was different from the younger, more impressionable men she had helped through this — he was an adult, a seasoned one, and that made him harder to reach. Zhao Dailin tried every approach she knew and still couldn’t get him to open up. He was particularly resistant where she was concerned.

Even so, she told herself: it was a matter of time.

Given enough patience, something new would eventually take root in that barren ground. Then the day finally came when they had a meal together — the closest they’d come to real progress. Halfway through, he took a call. His expression shifted immediately. Zhao Dailin thought he might hold it together.

He didn’t. He stood up and said Fang Yan had called him.

At least he was honest about it, she had to give him that. If he’d lied, she might have knocked him over the head.

Zhao Dailin told herself she would nod and wave him off graciously — and almost managed it. But something small and stubborn in her refused to cooperate. “Do you have to go?” she asked.

He considered it. “I should, just in case something’s come up. You go ahead and eat.”

She’d taken that to mean he intended to come back. She sat there and ate slowly until eleven o’clock.

He didn’t come back.

She did understand him, all things considered. This had been one-sided from the start — Sun Kai probably still had no idea what she actually felt for him. Zhao Dailin was a person who could hold something lightly, who had the patience to wait. As a psychologist, she understood the whole world — except herself.

Lu Huaizheng and Yu Hao listened to all of it.

It was the first time she had ever told any of this to anyone.

All she wanted was a small thread of comfort — but then she thought: matters of the heart are their own kind of weather, and no one else’s warmth can really reach them. The sympathy of others comes in small measures, and she should not expect too much. By most measures, she was exactly the kind of woman who should have known better — wanting someone who belonged to someone else. In older times, the judgment would have been swift and merciless.

Yu Hao listened, and her heart ached.

Without thinking, she reached for the nearest beer bottle.

The instant her hand moved, a pair of eyes beside her sharpened like blades, cutting through the air toward her.

She really did want it. She really was tempted.

She turned to Lu Huaizheng and held up her fingers — thumb touching index finger, a tiny gap between them — *this much. Just this much.*

Lu Huaizheng looked at her with complete unyielding firmness. “Not a drop.”

Fine.

Yu Hao ground her teeth and nodded.

Lu Huaizheng turned back to Zhao Dailin and said, with a careful sort of gentleness, “Don’t want to know what happened to him?”

Zhao Dailin breathed in. She lowered her eyes, tilted her head back, and poured the beer into her mouth. She did not want to know.

“It’s not a minor injury, but not critical either. Go see for yourself.” Lu Huaizheng stood, took Yu Hao with him, then paused, turned back, and rapped his knuckles lightly on the table edge. “The situation between him and Fang Yan isn’t what you might think. Sun Kai’s problem is mostly about getting past his own wall — do you know why he can’t let it go? It’s because Fang Yan kept insisting she hadn’t slept with the other man. But Sun Kai found an open condom wrapper in his own home. He can’t get past it, and a lot of that is because of what Fang Yan did to him. Sun Kai is military — he knows how to deal with this kind of thing cleanly. Going public wouldn’t do Fang Yan or the other man any good, and in the end, he still couldn’t bring himself to destroy her entirely. Yu Hao asked me to say something to you, but I think you and I are the same kind of person — anything I can come up with, you can figure out yourself.”

Zhao Dailin breathed in again, deeply. She braced one hand on the beer bottle, raised her head and looked directly at Lu Huaizheng. Her eyes were sharp. “If Yu Hao were unfaithful to you — what would you do?”

—

Lu Huaizheng was driving a military vehicle, military plates included. After putting Yu Hao in the car, he appeared to exchange a word with someone at the entrance to a dark side street — though Yu Hao looked back and saw nothing but a lightless alley where nothing moved, not even a shadow.

“Who were you talking to?”

He caught the fear in her expression — that skittish little field mouse look — and decided he wanted to have some fun with it. He’d had things to say to her anyway, and hadn’t gotten around to it. Eyes on the road, keeping a straight face, he said, “Something you can’t see.”

Yu Hao, a devout materialist who put no stock in the supernatural, immediately relaxed. She arranged her features into an expression of someone greatly startled, shrank into her seat with exaggerated alarm, and looked up at him with eyes wide and bright as copper coins. In a tone of theatrical dread: “Let me tell you a ghost story… Back when we were in school, one of the older students used to tell them to frighten us.”

Lu Huaizheng zeroed in on what mattered. “Which older student?”

“That’s not the point,” Yu Hao said, caught off guard.

The man drove with relaxed ease, one elbow on the door, one hand loose on the wheel. He didn’t look at her. He glanced out the window for a moment and remarked, unhurried, “It’s the point to me. Men who show up in your stories don’t come along often.”

Then he pulled off his tie and tossed it into the back seat, settling into his seat with the careless calm of someone perfectly comfortable in his own skin, lips curving with mild amusement. “Fine when I was younger. Getting older now — can’t keep up with how you run me around.”

Everything he did, no matter how small, carried some quality she couldn’t quite name.

“You’ve had your share of admirers too,” Yu Hao said, sitting up straighter, turning to him and wrapping her hands in her lap. “Want to compare lists? Shall we start with Hu Siqi?”

“Hu your grandmother,” Lu Huaizheng said, laughing, with mild and cheerful contempt.

—

Zhao Dailin had just stood to leave for the hospital when two men in black suits materialized from nearby — both of them towering, and both of them wearing dark sunglasses at night. Zhao Dailin, slightly blurred from the alcohol, blinked at them the way you’d blink at a blind masseur. She waved her hand vaguely in front of their faces.

The two suited men exchanged a look. Then, one on each side, they hoisted her toward the car.

Zhao Dailin kicked and struggled, but she was slight and couldn’t do much, and was bundled up like a small bird being carried off.

“I’m being kidnapped!” she shrieked.

One of the suited men explained. “Ms. Zhao, we’re from De’ante Security. Commander Lu asked us to stay behind and take you to the hospital.”

Zhao Dailin stopped fighting. “Lu Huaizheng?”

Both men nodded.

“Lu Huaizheng sent people to protect me?”

She would sooner believe pigs could fly. She opened her mouth and let out another full-throated wail, and grabbed her bag and swung it at both of them with everything she had. “Do you think I’m an idiot?”

“No, no,” the shorter of the two rushed to clarify. “You know De’an — the biggest one, De’an Group? The president of De’an Group is the one who asked us to protect Ms. Yu. Tonight Commander Lu happened to come back himself, so he asked us to stay and take you to the hospital. That’s about the whole of it.”

Zhao Dailin stared. “De’an’s president — and Lu Huaizheng?”

“That’s right!”

The men let out matching sighs of relief as she finally seemed to grasp it. “The president is Commander Lu’s uncle-in-law.”

*Yu Hao had no idea how well she’d landed.*

Zhao Dailin would remember for a long time.

What Lu Huaizheng said as he was leaving.

She had asked: “If Yu Hao were unfaithful, what would you do?”

He said: “Then I wasn’t good enough to her. I let her start imagining something better elsewhere. So I won’t let it come to that.”

That was a man’s confidence. It was also what made him remarkable.

—

When Lu Huaizheng came through the door, he dropped his keys by the entryway, unbuttoned his outer uniform jacket from the bottom up, and folded it over the back of the sofa. He sat down and pulled Yu Hao onto his lap, expecting an apology.

Yu Hao refused categorically.

“I didn’t even drink anything. Why should I apologize? I wanted to drink. That’s different from actually drinking.”

“In my book,” he said, looking at her with cool composure, “wanting to be unfaithful and being unfaithful are the same thing.”

Yu Hao thought about it and had to admit he had a point. She looped her arms around his neck — and noticed the hair at the back of his head was slightly shorter than before. Even more striking like that. She ran her hand over it. “You cut your hair.”

“Don’t change the subject,” he said, unmoved.

“How did you end up back today without any warning?” Yu Hao held onto him, kissing him — a slow trail from the top of his head all the way down to his lips, imitating the way he always pulled her in, letting her tongue touch his just barely, eyes open and watching him the whole time. All the things he liked, she’d mapped by now.

The moment her kiss landed, something in him started to crack.

That taut expression finally shifted. He sighed — patience exhausted — flipped her and pressed her down against the sofa. He kissed her properly, refusing to settle for whatever restrained thing she was offering, and caught her lower lip between his teeth, his tongue pushing in without ceremony.

“I leave for Tusiland tomorrow. Indefinite deployment. Command sent me back to settle things on the home front.”

—