◎Broken up◎

Like every other table in the restaurant, theirs had a candle — a red flame swaying softly, casting a shadow across Gu Qiao’s face, making the fake rubies at her ears look very red. Beyond the window, neon lights shimmered and pulsed.

Gu Qiao liked meeting like this, rather than at the Hujiang Grand Hotel. Gu Qiao ordered quite a lot — abalone, fresh oysters — and the server looked mildly startled that two people could want so much.

She didn’t want Luo Peiyin to conclude from the Hujiang Grand Hotel episode that she was not doing well. That wasn’t the truth — even if the misunderstanding might have given them more reason to stay in contact, and even though he had always felt a sense of responsibility toward her that went beyond what their relationship technically warranted.

She wasn’t ordering this much only to show him she was doing well. She had also just realised, as it occurred to her now, that the time they would have together in the future would only grow rarer. When they had broken up, it had happened so abruptly that it had never felt like a proper ending. After today, who knew when they would next sit at a meal together. So she decided to order more. She liked trying new things, and trying them with another person made each item worth more.

Luo Peiyin knew this about Gu Qiao very well. Ordering this much, with no regard for what her stomach could hold — she was obviously planning to pay the bill herself. When he paid, she always ordered with restraint. His gaze fixed on her: “Tell me about these two years of your easy life.”

He placed no special emphasis on the word “easy.” It came out in the same level tone as every other word.

But hearing that word, Gu Qiao felt her heart give a sharp lurch. She had always assumed that when she ended things, whatever Luo Peiyin resented about her — if he resented anything — it would be the repeated broken promises, the “next times” she had never delivered. She hadn’t imagined the word he had been carrying all this time was “easy.” Back then, she had genuinely believed breaking up would make things easier for both of them. And things had been easier for a time.

Gu Qiao couldn’t bear Luo Peiyin’s gaze, but she held it and smiled and began talking about the past two years. She told herself inwardly there was nothing to flinch from.

She told him everything except the bank draft lawsuit. Starting with the counterfeit-virus cards, then moving to the software — leveraging promotional work for various software companies to secure distribution agreements on reasonable terms, though Long You Software hadn’t been one of those. Long You’s sales came mainly through OEM channels and systems integrators; a retail software distributor like her wasn’t a priority for them. Which was why, when she and Luo Peiyin met again, she had been a small distributor who couldn’t get through the door of a banquet.

That was not a true picture of her life.

Luo Peiyin was too curious about her easy life. He didn’t seem satisfied with a general overview — he kept pressing for specifics, for exact timings: when exactly had she started with the counterfeit-virus cards, and when had she moved to software.

She had said so much, and yet he had zeroed in precisely on the part she had glossed over.

“What made you give up leather jackets and start selling software?”

Back then, Gu Qiao had thrown herself into selling leather jackets with everything she had — on the phone at all hours talking about nothing but leather jackets. Leather jackets had consumed every hour she had. He had assumed that the next time he met Gu Qiao, she would still be selling her leather jackets. The pivot had been so sharp it had thrown him — for a moment he’d thought this must be someone else entirely with the same name.

Gu Qiao paused for just a beat, then smiled: “After so long dealing in leather jackets, I wanted to try something new. And at the time I thought anti-virus cards seemed more profitable.”

“Is that all? Just that?”

The reason didn’t convince him. Taking the risk of trying something new was enormous, and the leather jacket business was established and working. Luo Peiyin didn’t believe simple curiosity could overpower Gu Qiao’s desire to make money. He knew what money had meant to her then — it had outweighed everything else. She wasn’t someone who went into business on a whim. And even if she had decided to walk away, she wouldn’t have given up something she’d been running for under a year unless something had intervened and forced a stop.

His gaze hooked into her, as if trying to bite through to the truth.

“That bank draft you had frozen — how did it resolve in the end?”

“I took it to court. The court ruled in my favour, and the bank paid me interest as well.” Not a single word of that was untrue. Only she had never mentioned back then that the amount had been sixty thousand yuan — and there was no need to bring it up now.

Gu Qiao took a sip from her water glass. She couldn’t understand why, after all this time, he was still asking about this.

Gu Qiao smiled at the glass: “The smell of leather jackets got to me after a while — I really couldn’t take it anymore, and a chance to change direction came along, so I took it.” That was genuinely why she had made the switch. What had come before it was unnecessary to explain.

She hadn’t forgotten that their last real moment of closeness had taken place in a room thick with leather jackets, with her hair carrying the smell of tanning oil. But the longing they had felt for each other’s bodies had made them both forget the scent of the leather.

“Though that leather jacket business was genuinely making good money. Walking away from it was hard.”

She had walked away from the leather jackets; naturally someone else had picked them up. She had walked away from a boyfriend; naturally a boyfriend would find someone new. So there was nothing to regret.

Gu Qiao was grateful for the view of the city beyond the window, which gave her a reason not to look him directly in the eye. “Cousin-brother — why didn’t you continue with your doctorate?”

She had long wanted to ask this question but had held back, not wanting his decision to have anything to do with her — not even one percent.

His lashes half-covered his eyes; his gaze drew near, then fell away: “I spent too long in the lab. It started to feel pointless.”

That sounded as if it had nothing to do with her whatsoever.

“Are you going back to Singapore for New Year?”

“You’ve asked that more than once.”

“But you never gave me an answer then.” Asking the same question twice made her sound as if she were reaching for things to say. But she genuinely didn’t remember getting an answer from him.

“San Francisco.” Luo Peiyin said it flatly. After China connected to the internet, he had sent Robert a report directly, recommending a further push into the Chinese investment market while strategically narrowing focus to the technology and information sector. The old man at the San Francisco headquarters had asked him how long before the Chinese market could turn a profit, and he had said five years. Robert wasn’t planning to send him back to China. He’d told Luo Peiyin: you know what you’ll miss out on in five years — you should be applying your talent in a stronger investment market. Opening an office in Shanghai was no more than a gesture toward globalisation. Even Cohen, who disliked Peter most among the Asia-Pacific team, didn’t believe Peter should bear excessive responsibility for investment failures.

Compared to more mature capital markets, venture investment in China right now lacked any reasonable exit mechanism. Going public was the most common exit strategy, but most private enterprises had almost no path to listing on the Shanghai or Shenzhen exchanges. As for overseas listing, there had been exactly one example to date. Investment, at its core, was simply buy low, sell high — if you couldn’t sell, how did you make money?

Cohen might not have believed in the Chinese market, but that didn’t stop him from wanting Luo Peiyin placed there. What could be more satisfying than having someone you disliked assigned to a market you had no confidence in? Luo Peiyin suspected that Peter’s guardedness toward him was partly because Cohen had been selectively whispering things into Peter’s ear — but suspicion wasn’t the same as fact.

San Francisco. Gu Qiao didn’t ask for Luo Peiyin’s number there. What was the point of staying in touch with someone else’s boyfriend — he wasn’t even actually her cousin.

“Do you prefer the weather in San Francisco or Singapore?”

“If you’re this interested in the weather in both places, go and see for yourself.”

Luo Peiyin’s tone was even, with no perceptible mockery in it. He lowered his head to cut a slice of abalone and raised it to his mouth.

He had always been like this in restaurants — every movement was what people called composed, or elegant, as if he had dined on the finest things the world had to offer and none of this amounted to much. But when he had eaten the four-dish meals she had cooked, he had swallowed quickly, as if he’d never had anything good in his life.

Gu Qiao looked away from Luo Peiyin and bent her head to cut her own abalone. She didn’t need to press this hard, as though she had a personal grievance against the food.

Luo Peiyin thought back to the first time they had parted in 1992, after the Spring Festival. The morning after his tomato allergy, they had gone to the Meridian Gate to watch the morning clouds, then taken that slightly blurry tourist photo together, and before he left for the airport he had taken her to a Western restaurant. That day, for some reason, the kitchen was extraordinarily careless — every dish was bad, the steak that arrived tough and dry. Gu Qiao had needed to put nearly all her strength into cutting it, and the knife and fork kept sliding across the porcelain plate with sounds that were not pleasant to hear. She had been wearing red earrings that day too, and as the cutlery scraped across the plate again and again, her face grew redder and redder. She looked up at him, embarrassed and laughing, apologising for the noise she was making.

He had actually been more embarrassed than she was. Of all the last meals they might have shared before this parting, he had brought her here to eat this. He had never in his life felt angry over bad food — dissatisfied was a different matter — but that day he had been on the verge of losing his temper, of demanding to know what the proprietor thought he was serving. He glanced down at his watch and did a rapid calculation. There was still time to take her somewhere else.

But Gu Qiao had said: don’t. She said that wherever they ate together, she was happy. Trying new things meant some were good and some weren’t — but trying them with someone she cared about made every one of them worthwhile. She went back to wrestling with her dry, tough steak, speared a piece, and put it in her mouth. She chewed with real effort to get through it, her cheeks puffing slightly. Her skin was very fair, and when she exerted herself, he could see the faint blue of a vein showing briefly at her temple. She noticed him watching her. Her mouth was occupied with chewing and couldn’t spare itself to smile, so she used only her eyes to express her happiness.

Through considerable perseverance, she entirely finished the dry, tough steak in front of her. She had shown him by action alone that she was perfectly satisfied with the meal he had bought her.

Nearly three years ago. Later, eating a genuinely good steak somewhere, he had suddenly thought of Gu Qiao’s vein appearing and disappearing at her temple as she chewed through that dry meat with such determination, and felt a pang of regret on her behalf — by then they had already broken up.

Gu Qiao worked to keep herself composed, and in a composed manner put the abalone in her mouth. This was going to be a very good meal. She didn’t intend to spoil it.

“Have you made any new attempts in matters of the heart?”

Gu Qiao wondered if she had heard correctly. Was this a subject they could actually discuss between them?

Since she was the one who had ended things, and he had already moved forward — expressing any sense of lingering now would make no sense at all.

“That area… hasn’t quite worked out yet, so I’ll leave it for now.” In truth she hadn’t even tried. There was simply too much happening — not only running the shop, but attending night school on weekends. She had no time to explore a new person. In her eyes, men fell into two categories: those she could absolutely not work with, and those she might possibly cooperate with in business. Neither sort was suitable for developing any kind of emotional attachment.

Gu Qiao didn’t ask Luo Peiyin the same question in return. She had absolutely no desire to know what kind of girlfriend he had found. She didn’t want to know whether the two of them had ever gone to Death Valley to watch the stars. She didn’t want to know whether he wrapped his scarf around his girlfriend’s neck, or whether he split his overcoat or jacket open and drew her inside it, sharing warmth through layers of cloth.

Probably not, she told herself. Singapore winters were so mild. Pulling open a coat and folding another person into it — that sort of thing could only happen in the bitter cold of the north.

Future winters she would have to get through on her own. That was all right. She would simply wear more layers.

Something knocked against her leg. She pulled back instinctively. Her knife and fork struck the plate with a clear ring. The red fake-ruby earrings started to swing.

This wasn’t the first time. It was just a knock — there was no reason to react like that. She reminded herself of this. But she couldn’t control her imagination.

To rein in that imagination before it could take her any further, she heard herself ask: “Cousin-brother, is your girlfriend in Singapore?”

“We broke up.”