Gu Qiao waited for Luo Peiyin to give her an answer, but Luo Peiyin offered no suggestions about the gift whatsoever.

“I’m sorry — I can’t give you any advice. I don’t think he helped you at all. If there’s a possibility of future professional collaboration, it won’t be because he wants to help you. Investment, at its core, is simply the pursuit of profit.”

Knowing Gu Qiao as well as he did, he understood that given the nature of their current relationship, she wouldn’t be so lacking in judgment as to ask him what gift to get for another man. When she posed that question, the gift could only be for him. But Gu Qiao’s description of this person having “helped her enormously” was simply something he couldn’t accept — he had never felt that he had helped her in any way.

Gu Qiao stood still. Luo Peiyin’s words circled through her mind several times before she finally grasped their meaning. He had guessed that the gift was for him. But his reaction was entirely not what she had wanted.

Luo Peiyin had seen through her question without fully exposing it. So Gu Qiao likewise refrained from directly naming the “him” in question. “But I believe he helped me greatly.”

“If it’s a professional matter, it’s nothing more than mutual benefit. As for anything else — that’s even less worth mentioning.”

Mutual benefit? Gu Qiao fell silent. Then she heard Luo Peiyin continue: “And if you feel you may have a future working relationship with this person, it’s best not to ask him what large, open-ended gift he’d like with no budget limit. Other people hearing that might think you’re implying he should solicit a bribe from you.”

A bribe? Gu Qiao was thoroughly aggrieved and almost laughed. “I want to give you a gift — it has absolutely nothing to do with any business or any investment. Do you think I’m giving you a gift because you’re from LC? Because you might invest in me in the future? You and Peter are colleagues — I only found that out recently. It never once occurred to me to find investors through you. Not once!”

Under the neon lights, Luo Peiyin’s clothes seemed to blend into the background. Gu Qiao fixed her eyes on his face. She hated his gaze. She hated that all-business composure of his, as if the most important relationship between them was the potential professional one they might have in the future.

“Then what is it for?”

Bathed in the glow of the neon lights, Gu Qiao met Luo Peiyin’s gaze and didn’t answer directly. “When you used to give me gifts — what were those for?”

What had they been for? Because he felt like it. What else could they have been for? He had always resented people who, after a breakup, made a show of tallying up everything they had given. Weren’t you the one who wanted to do it? You couldn’t get what you wanted, so you wrapped yourself up as the great wronged party — as though you were three or four years old, incapable of taking any responsibility for yourself.

Luo Peiyin didn’t dwell on the question. His voice remained controlled. “I am genuinely interested in your project.” He had been through her store — the potential for mass replication was strong, and there was no question that software manufacturers needed a gathering space of this kind. “If you’re considering future collaboration with LC, I think it’s best that we keep things clean between us. Don’t bring up our relationship with Peter voluntarily — it would only work against you, not in your favor.” A female cousin with no blood relation didn’t technically constitute a conflict of interest, and he wouldn’t need to recuse himself from that.

He was giving her an opportunity. If she was simply his cousin with no blood connection, then any future investment he made in her project would involve no conflict of interest whatsoever. But if their relationship was something more than what it currently was, then it would constitute a related-party transaction. For projects involving a relative or a girlfriend, the compliance handbook required disclosure and recusal. He had always kept work and personal matters strictly separate and would never allow this kind of ambiguity to create controversy.

Hearing the word “clean,” Gu Qiao felt a slight daze. Clean? Listening to his words now, her mind was full of question marks. Was that the nature of their future relationship? Did he think things between them right now were somehow murky? The air here wasn’t like the dry air of the north — even in winter, it held a certain closeness.

In the thick stacks of materials Luo Peiyin had given her, Gu Qiao had learned that venture capital firms maintained strict limitations on investments involving relatives or other conflicted parties. She was merely his unrelated cousin — as long as she didn’t go out of her way to address him warmly as “Cousin” left and right, it was a tenuous connection, barely a connection at all, hardly constituting any conflict of interest.

From Luo Peiyin’s words, Gu Qiao extracted one piece of good news: Luo Peiyin was interested in her project. He was with LC, and his authority there might be no less than Peter’s.

The other piece of news was that right now — and perhaps going forward — the most important relationship between them would be a professional one. If she met with him in the future, their conversations would essentially revolve around work.

Luo Peiyin watched Gu Qiao’s reaction. Exactly as he had expected, Gu Qiao chose silence. A casual, unhurried smile spread across his face.

She didn’t like that smile of his.

Just then, a taxi passed by with its light on. Luo Peiyin hailed it. Once Gu Qiao was settled in the back seat, he got into the front passenger seat.

Gu Qiao leaned against the back seat, turning over in her mind the phrase Luo Peiyin had just used — “a clean relationship.” A clean relationship. She watched the back of Luo Peiyin’s head, the curve of his ear, the line of his jaw, and continued to think about “a clean relationship.”

But right now, she was wrapped in his overcoat, still feeling the warmth it had absorbed from his body. Was this what a clean relationship felt like? In Singapore, he might not have been able to drape his coat over a girlfriend’s shoulders — but he would have had ways to make a person feel his warmth. More direct. More intimate. That kind of relationship would be anything but clean.

Her imagination did not stop itself the way it had before.

When he kissed his last girlfriend, did his ears turn red? Did his last girlfriend run her fingers along his jawline? When that girl’s fingertips touched his lips, would he catch them between his teeth and hold them there — and would his gaze make a person go weak all over?

In her imagination, the girl’s face was blurred and indistinct; but his expression was vividly clear in her mind.

Gu Qiao’s thoughts ran unchecked. Rationally speaking, she was the one who’d called off the relationship — so she couldn’t demand from him what he had once promised her. She couldn’t grab him by the tie and say: “Didn’t you once tell me you only liked me?” She reined in that question with reason, because voicing it was clearly unjustifiable. But feelings were another matter entirely. That fire in her chest was building, with nowhere to go.

And now he had offered a new kind of possibility for what lay between them.

Her mind was consumed with the phrase Luo Peiyin had used — “a clean relationship” — and at first she hadn’t recognized the driver as the one who had driven her through the rain. She had given him a hundred yuan. It was only when the driver began talking about a passenger he had picked up before that she realized.

Having driven too many passengers, the driver hadn’t immediately recognized Gu Qiao — only felt a very strong sense of familiarity, as if she reminded him of someone he couldn’t quite name. When he was young, every pretty girl had stirred that feeling; now that he was older, it had completely faded. Strange that it was happening today. He had an urge to talk in the evenings, and he brought up the passenger from the rainy night: “Last time I picked up a young girl — same destination as you two.” He left out the part about Gu Qiao tipping him extra, not wanting to give anyone the wrong idea. “She was in a terrible hurry at first. I could see she was anxious, and I felt for her, so I drove as fast as I could. But just as we were about to arrive, she suddenly said she didn’t want to go anymore — told me to stop. I told her to keep her word; how could you just change your mind halfway through? But she insisted on getting out, and I couldn’t exactly stop her. So she got out, and the moment she was on the pavement she went half-mad — didn’t know what had come over her. She walked off laughing and crying without even taking her umbrella. I was shocked. Out of the goodness of my heart I went back to bring her the umbrella, asked her where she wanted to go…”

Gu Qiao cut off what the driver was about to say next. “You’re very kind-hearted.” She had no idea how many times he had told this half-true story that it had become this polished. And it had managed to find its way to her ears. She didn’t want to hear him go on — at the rate this good-hearted story was going, if he reached the part where he drove her to the small inn, Luo Peiyin would probably figure out it was her.

Gone half-mad? How was that possible? The driver just liked to exaggerate.

The driver recognized Gu Qiao by her voice — she had a very distinctive way of speaking, and most importantly, someone this generous with money who also stayed in a run-down little inn was not the sort of person you encountered every day. So the driver decisively swallowed the words that had been about to escape him and laughed awkwardly a few times.

The same destination as that rainy evening. The driver speculated about the relationship between the man in the front seat and the girl in the back. One in front, one in the back… that hardly counted as intimate, and yet…

While the driver was turning this over in his mind, he heard the young man in the passenger seat say: “That story you were telling just now — why did you stop?” As if he had found the story rather interesting.

The driver remembered that the person in question was sitting right behind him and laughed awkwardly again. “Not much left to tell.”

The driver didn’t say another word, and the man and woman in the car didn’t exchange a word either. The atmosphere inside settled into something the driver very much wanted to break open with small talk. Young people like this, staying in a hotel this expensive — what could they possibly have to be unhappy about? That was purely a case of creating problems for themselves.

The driver’s story had forced Gu Qiao to revisit that night. At the time, she had only felt sorry for being late. Now she felt differently.

This time, Gu Qiao was once again generous. With the hotel still two or three hundred meters away, she had already taken a bill from her wallet — six yuan more than the meter. “Here — no need for change.”

She didn’t like Luo Peiyin getting to the bill before she did and then telling her to wait for next time. She didn’t want to wait even once.

At the hotel entrance, the driver good-naturedly returned some change to Gu Qiao: “I already overcharged you last time. This time I’ll charge exactly what the meter says.”

The driver felt rather proud of this moment of integrity — refusing to be ruled by money — but he saw no admiration in Gu Qiao’s eyes. He sighed inwardly: no good deed goes rewarded.

Gu Qiao thought: he kept his tongue for half the journey, but in the end still gave her away. Not that it had been obvious — Luo Peiyin probably couldn’t have figured it out from that.

Gu Qiao stepped out of the car, wrapped in Luo Peiyin’s overcoat. The air was cold and damp, but the coat kept her thoroughly warm.

“Cousin, Peter suddenly stood me up that time — that had something to do with you, didn’t it.” She had long suspected it. This was the first time she had said it out loud. She already knew the answer in her heart, so without waiting for Luo Peiyin to reply she pressed on, fixing her eyes on his, bearing down on his gaze exactly as he had once done to her: “Cousin, even without LC, I can find other investors. Don’t underestimate me.”

He was not the only option for her professionally — so to hell with his clean relationship!

—