The salon was held at a university, hosted by the director of the research institute. Wei Qingyue had prepared a research report, analyzed the three major emerging trends in the autonomous driving sector, and then shared on-site about his vehicle-road coordination product.

He had been at Lingdong for less than three years and had risen steadily through the ranks. His ability had always matched his ambition — a textbook example of a young talent. Naturally, some people took an interest in his personal life. Wei Qingyue had gone through the hollow motions of meeting potential matches. He had encountered all kinds of young women over the years — all of them fine people, in their way. He regarded everyone favorably, regardless of gender, the way a well-mannered person regards the world at a social function.

But he knew he belonged to Jiang Du. Only in her hands did he return to where he was always meant to be.

And so, when the institute director politely suggested the two of them step aside for a private word, Wei Qingyue was, for once, freed from the need for pretense. He said he had a girlfriend, and that they would be married very soon.

The director had seen every kind of situation imaginable and was not the least bit flustered. He laughed warmly on the spot and said, “Look at me — first time in my life I thought to play matchmaker, and I’ve walked right into a closed door.”

Wei Qingyue smiled.

Zhang Xiaoqiang had come on behalf of an automotive company. They had barely exchanged two sentences about business matters before she steered the conversation toward neurology consultations. Wei Qingyue kept his irritation carefully contained. Over these past few years, this old classmate of his had been like someone possessed — relentlessly fixated on this topic. He very much wanted to say, I think you should get your head examined, but Wei Qingyue restrained himself. Zhang Xiaoqiang already had a boyfriend and was still going out of her way to look after him. Even if he didn’t need it, he couldn’t be so ungrateful.

“I won’t beat around the bush,” Zhang Xiaoqiang said with a cheerful smile, in that endlessly accommodating way of hers. She wore a pair of pearl earrings; she’d been going to the gym lately, slimming down, looking radiant. “The doctor is someone you know — Jiang Du’s old deskmate. You remember, don’t you? Zhu Yulong, from the arts-sciences track. He later transferred to the sciences-track class one. Oh, I almost forgot — he transferred into our class after you’d already gone abroad. Your poor sleep has always been a chronic problem. You should really have it looked at properly. Let an old classmate help take care of you. I’m telling you, Zhu Yulong is remarkable — brilliant doctor, top hospital, young as he is he’s already earned some title or certification, what was it again?”

Wei Qingyue’s expression was neutral. He said, “Those earrings are lovely.” Then, as though suddenly very interested in her appearance: “Your complexion is on the darker side — this color suits you very well.”

Zhang Xiaoqiang looked at him in exasperation. “You always do this.”

Her skirt had creased a little from sitting earlier. Wei Qingyue pointed at it. “You should iron that when you get home.”

Zhang Xiaoqiang was on the verge of smashing his head in. She ran a hand over her skirt, fuming. “I must have water in my brain.”

“Zhu Yulong?” Wei Qingyue said, as though drifting back from a daydream — he had abruptly picked the conversation back up again. He remembered this classmate, and, in a rare departure, gave a nod of his head. “Going to take a look isn’t out of the question.”

An unexpected concession, utterly without warning.

It had to be the name — it had to be the name Zhu Yulong working some kind of magic!

Zhang Xiaoqiang suppressed her surge of delight. She was afraid that any trace of the wrong emotion showing on her face would cause Wei Qingyue to change his mind. Not that she had anything wrong to hide — it was simply that Wei Qingyue was unpredictable, and in front of people he knew well, he was at his most cutting and most infuriating.

And yet — she had just watched him talking with the institute director looking as though a spring breeze were passing through him. Up on the podium presenting his research report, he had been so practiced, so polished. Online, his videos were perpetually flooded with comments, countless young women declaring they wanted to marry him, an entire legion of devoted admirers. Wei Qingyue was charming — at least, that was how he appeared.

“Which time works for you?” Zhang Xiaoqiang asked, keeping her tone casual.

Wei Qingyue answered calmly, and with complete seriousness: “You arrange it.”

Zhang Xiaoqiang hadn’t told him that Zhu Yulong actually had his own private psychology practice — with a very high hourly rate. The girl who had seemed so detached back then had, in the present, built herself a thriving life.

Great masses of cloud drifted across the sky like roses in full bloom.

Wei Qingyue sat in the back seat while Lao Luo drove. He had recently developed a fondness for looking at the sky when he had nothing else to do — clouds, the occasional bird cutting a swift line through the air. It gave him a comfortable sort of mild, blunted pleasure.

He remembered that many, many years ago, he had felt something similar. Only it had been interrupted for a very long time in between.

Back then, he had just started primary school. He was a boarder — couldn’t go home at night. None of the boarding students were from the city. Noisy, rowdy children; the sharp smell of shoes; a strict residential teacher. Wei Qingyue had hated the place intensely — too chaotic, too loud. Everyone was always shoving and crashing into each other, knocking over lunchboxes, stepping on toothbrushes. His money was stolen by another child; the residential teacher couldn’t recover it, scolded everyone loudly, and then turned around and said he was too much trouble. He wanted to go home — but home was in disarray: no father, and no mother.

His mother had said: You see how this home is — it’s no home at all. There’s no use staying. I’m going away for a while. You should start standing on your own two feet.

Money kept going missing. He got into fights — like a small, vicious little rooster out to prove himself. The residential teacher called Wei Zhendong and said: Your son has some issues. He’s young and he’s not cheerful enough. When he fights, he goes at other children like he’s trying to put them in the ground. Boys being rowdy is normal enough, but no other child is like yours. You should really talk to him.

Wei Zhendong came to the school once. In front of the teacher, he nearly beat him to death — kicked him far across the room. His head hit the small central flower bed in the school yard. The teachers were horrified. Wei Zhendong had communicated with him through violence from very early on.

Wei Qingyue was beaten until he vomited. He ran a high fever — delirious, aching with it, cold all over. Alone in his bed, he kept thinking: I have to grow up fast.

Before he finished primary school, during the summer holidays, Wei Qingyue was sent to a hospital in Shanghai for an emotional disorder. His mother said: I’ll come to see you. Be good, and if you’re sick, focus on getting better.

When she said this, Wei Qingyue was seized by an almost overwhelming surge of anticipation. He thought — at last, someone was actually going to pay attention to him.

But his mother never came. Not once.

When he had nothing to do, Wei Qingyue would sit by the window and watch the sky. The clouds shifted shape moment to moment; the cicadas called from the trees; summer stretched out endlessly. He would reach his hand out the window, and it felt as though he were reaching into a bottomless black void — even as the sunlight blazed.

The patient in the next room was a few years older than him — a middle school student — and always had his mother with him. They worked on emotional journals together, thick ones, filled with more careful effort than any school composition Wei Qingyue had ever written.

He thought: if his mother were willing to love him, he would love her back twice over, ten times over, without limit.

And then, day by day, his heart grew cold. Then harder. Wei Qingyue spent so long in the hospital that he was nearly going insane. He had grown exhausted of the endless treatments. All he had wanted back then was to see his mother. He had hoped for it purely, then been let down purely, and at last had arrived at pure despair.

When the holidays ended and school resumed, he told his mother over the phone that he was better, that he could go back to class as normal. It was then that he learned the woman in question was about to go abroad to continue her studies — abandoning him altogether and for good.

He didn’t cry. But the urge to cry was so intense it made him tremble.

The sky seemed unchanged. The clouds still drifted, endlessly changing form.

Wei Qingyue called Jiang Du while she was at his apartment — a surprise. He drove all the way back.

It turned out she had finished work early, taken the afternoon off, and come back to tidy up the place.

His apartment, if one were to describe it honestly, was neither messy nor orderly — an entirely middling state, the way a man living alone might be expected to keep a place, if people had any expectations at all.

Every piece of clothing had been pulled out, including his socks.

She was wearing disposable gloves, working with a small tool to measure the dimensions of the wardrobe, keeping notes — just as the patient next door’s mother had once kept emotional journals — with a large notebook in her hands.

When she saw him come in, Jiang Du immediately asked, “Why are Tweety Birds scattered everywhere?”

Wei Qingyue looked baffled. “Are there?”

“Of course — look, in the wardrobe, in the drawers. Dozens of Tweety Birds.” Jiang Du looked simultaneously amused and at a loss. “You buy this many Tweety Birds and then just throw them all over the place.”

His shirts, overcoats, and socks, as it turned out, were not excessive in quantity.

But Wei Qingyue’s underwear was purchased in bulk — thirty pairs of Calvin Klein underwear at a time, a full month’s supply. He never washed them.

Because underwear had to be washed separately, and he found that too inconvenient. So he simply treated them as disposable.

Wei Qingyue told her all his habits without the slightest embarrassment. In front of her, he felt a complete and utter sense of safety. Underwear was intimate — but he was transparent with her.

“Can’t you just buy one of those small washing machines for delicates?” Jiang Du touched her own flushed cheek, thinking privately that this man was terribly wasteful.

Wei Qingyue said, “Too much trouble. You still have to take them out and hang them to dry.”

Jiang Du looked at him with speechless exasperation. She asked, as though in passing, “Have you always been like this? Even as a child?”

“How young do you mean?” Wei Qingyue spoke of it lightly. “When I was boarding in primary school, in first grade, I was so small I didn’t even know to change my underwear. I didn’t like washing my feet either. Once it got dark I just wanted to crawl into the blankets. Everything was a mess everywhere, and noisy enough to drive you mad. I said so in the end — how come everything smells? Wei Zhendong caught the smell on me one day and beat me good and proper. After middle school, when I’d grown a bit, I started knowing to keep clean.”

He spoke of his childhood, and Jiang Du put down what she was holding and listened quietly. When he finished, she knitted her brows slightly and moved closer, brushing her arm gently against his — soft and delicate: “Then let me give you a washing machine.”

She felt, in truth, like crying. She had loved cleanliness from the time she was small — wore white socks without a mark on them. In school, other children’s red neckerchiefs would be twisted and dirty as old rags, but hers was always clean and neat and fresh. If only they had been classmates back then. She would certainly have reminded him — Wei Qingyue, you smell, you need to change your clothes. Does no one do your laundry? I could take it home and ask my grandmother to wash it for you.

“You’re going to give me a washing machine?” Wei Qingyue’s brow shot up. He gave a short, skeptical sound of amusement. “I thought you were going to say you’d wash my underwear for me from now on.”

As if he could wish for that.

Jiang Du smacked him with the notebook. Then she began folding, hanging, and sorting his clothes by category — even rolling his socks into neat little bundles.

Wei Qingyue made no offer to help. Instead he poured himself a glass of water and leaned against the doorframe, watching her work.

He was thoroughly oblivious, too — Jiang Du was going in and out of the space, and he didn’t think to move even an inch. “Move a little,” she kept saying.

“Mm.” Wei Qingyue shifted approximately one millimeter.

Jiang Du looked up at him. “Move a little more.”

Wei Qingyue shuffled right back into the original spot.

Absolutely in the way.

“Wei Qingyue.” Jiang Du called him by his full name. “Can you please go sit on the sofa?”

“No,” he said, watching her with a smile.

“You’re such a child,” Jiang Du sighed.

After more than an hour of work, it was finally done. She told him where everything had been put.

Wei Qingyue glanced around with only half his attention, and said, “As long as you know.”

But then, with lively interest, he asked her: “You’re quite domestic, aren’t you? I seem to remember you could never rinse your clothes properly — always left detergent marks all over them.”

That was ancient history. And she still couldn’t really manage hand-washing clothes — though Jiang Du had the sense not to say so outright. “I wouldn’t say I’m particularly domestic,” she said, a little self-consciously. “I can’t cook well — that’s a real flaw. But I do like keeping a home organized. Especially now, our rental is small, so good storage matters a lot. Half and half, I suppose — faults and good points.”

When she finished, she hesitated shyly, hemming and hawing a little before asking, “Do you want to come to my place for dinner? Grandfather has cooked for you.”

Wei Qingyue very much did. He told her to wait ten minutes — he needed to shower and change. The mirror had been fogged over with steam and he couldn’t see his own face clearly.

The two of them went out together, down to the parking garage. There, a mother was frowning and scolding her child, who was lying on the ground throwing a tantrum. The mother’s expression was stone-faced: “Li Haoran, if you keep this up, you can stay here — I’m leaving you behind.” She turned and walked away. The child froze for a moment, then, seeing his mother genuinely walking away, scrambled up off the ground and ran after her — arms flying out from behind to wrap around the woman’s waist. The mother turned around. Whatever she said, she picked him up in the end and put him in the car.

Wei Qingyue watched with an inscrutable expression until both mother and child were seated in the car. Only then did he turn away.

He opened the car door for Jiang Du to get in first.

Then he made no move to start the engine. With unhurried deliberateness he said, “If I ever have children, I will never say anything so careless about abandoning them.”

Something flickered in Jiang Du’s eyes — a shadow of heartache, profound and sharp. For him, or for herself — she couldn’t entirely tell. But she offered him what comfort she could: “Just now, that mother was only trying to scare the child. She didn’t mean it.”

“Then he’s very lucky,” Wei Qingyue said. “In the first year of middle school, at the midterm examinations, I ranked first in the entire school. Wei Zhendong came to the parent-teacher meeting as a parent representative — he gave a speech about how he had raised a top-performing student. A crowd of people came up afterward asking for his secret, complimenting him. That’s how it works when you’re a student — good grades are your greatest source of glory. Afterward, I walked home with him. I thought, since he was in a good mood that day, I could try to say something, anything — but the words went round and round inside me and never came out. Then halfway along the road he took a call, said he had an engagement he needed to attend, and told me to get out of the car. The weather was terrible — wind and rain. I said, Dad, drive a little further and drop me at the bus stop — the most ordinary request in the world — and it enraged him. He told me to get out immediately and clear off, called me exactly like my mother — always looking down on people, making demands. That kind of rain, and he wouldn’t even let me take an umbrella. I was soaked through like a dog, standing by the roadside watching his car disappear into the driving rain and mist. In that moment I understood completely — I was someone who could be discarded at any time. Whether it was Wei Zhendong or my mother, they could throw me away without a second thought. If I didn’t want to be the one left behind, I had to rise above them, never rely on them, never expect anything from them.”

He paused, then turned his head and looked at Jiang Du with a steady, searching gaze. “Will you abandon me? Suddenly demand that I get out of the car and clear off?”

Jiang Du felt her heart clench with a fierce, almost dizzying pain.

She shook her head. When she reached for his hand, she realized Wei Qingyue’s body was trembling faintly, in a way that was almost imperceptible.

“What you feel for me — it’s real, isn’t it?” he asked, in a voice that was almost anguished. Almost lost. “I mean to say — you won’t leave. You’ll stay and help me tidy the apartment.”

Jiang Du’s eyes filled with hot tears. Smiling, she said, “Even if you tried to drive me away, I wouldn’t leave.”

Wei Qingyue drew her head toward him and held her, kissing her in the car. The sense of mastery he felt over her presence filled him with a deep and complete satisfaction.

The trunk was loaded with gifts. When they arrived at the housing complex, Wei Qingyue instinctively looked at the security guard’s face — and the face that looked back at him was identical to the one from twelve years ago. It sent a cold shock through his entire body.

He remembered it clearly. The day he had come here last time, as they were leaving, the security guard had exchanged a greeting with Jiang Du. He had followed the sound and looked — an ordinary face, a middle-aged man.