As Yan Sishi’s words fell, Xia Li’s breath went a little lighter.

Compared to going to a Starbucks, going to the office, or simply checking into a hotel — going to Yan Sishi’s place didn’t really qualify as a sensible suggestion at all.

And yet, for reasons she couldn’t explain, it was as though half her rational mind had been lifted out of her. Her thoughts swayed for a moment, and she heard herself say, “That would be another imposition.”

About twenty minutes later, they arrived at the apartment complex where Yan Sishi lived.

The car pulled into the underground garage and parked. Yan Sishi asked whether she needed her suitcase brought upstairs.

Xia Li’s laptop and charger were both inside it, so she nodded.

Yan Sishi opened the trunk and lifted out her suitcase.

The parking space wasn’t far from the elevator. At the elevator entrance, Yan Sishi swiped a card to open the security door. Beyond it was a marble corridor, its reflection almost clinically clean under cool white light, as if no human presence had ever disturbed it.

One elevator per floor. The elevator, suspended and waiting, descended swiftly.

Yan Sishi reached out and held back the sliding elevator door with a light, unhurried motion, letting Xia Li enter first.

Xia Li was immediately reminded of years ago — the night of the first snowfall before New Year’s, at the elevator in the karaoke venue — Yan Sishi had made the same gesture then.

Xia Li watched Yan Sishi press the button for the twenty-seventh floor.

The elevator ascended in an instant, leaving the passengers with a faint sense of weightlessness.

All four walls of the elevator cab were mirror-bright. Xia Li made a deliberate point of staring only at the floor indicator screen.

The effort to appear natural felt oddly like something from a former life, revisited.

Stepping out of the elevator, the space was profoundly quiet — so much so that Xia Li felt the gentle roll of the suitcase Yan Sishi was pushing behind her was almost an intrusion.

The glimpse of the interior past the entryway: white as the dominant tone, with grey and dark accents.

Yan Sishi opened the entryway cabinet and handed Xia Li a pair of unopened disposable slippers.

The apartment had a housekeeper who came on a schedule to clean. Yan Sishi disliked having traces of other people left in his space, and so he kept a supply of these slippers.

As Xia Li changed into the slippers, she couldn’t help casting a glance at the shoe cabinet — every pair inside was men’s footwear.

She walked in and looked around. The level of cleanliness brought to mind a high-tech sterile laboratory from a science fiction film.

Yan Sishi gestured for Xia Li to sit on the sofa while he walked toward the counter.

Xia Li sat down on the black leather sofa, unable to shake an inexplicable sense of not knowing what to do with herself. She reached for a nearby cushion and hugged it to her chest, which helped a little.

She turned to look at Yan Sishi at the counter. He was rinsing a glass tumbler — the soft rush of water actually added a few more beats of breathless stillness to the space rather than breaking it.

“This place seems like it’s very close to the park,” Xia Li said, aware that this was really just making conversation for the sake of it.

“Wen Shubai found it for me,” Yan Sishi said. “Just the location is convenient. Everything else, not so much.”

She saw him turn off the tap, fill the glass with plain water, and then ask: “Do you want ice?”

“No.”

Yan Sishi pulled out a tissue, dabbed at the water remaining on the outside of the glass, then walked over, bent down, and set it gently on the coffee table in front of her.

“Thank you,” Xia Li said softly. She picked up the glass and took a sip.

Leaving a small gap between them, Yan Sishi sat down beside her.

In an instant, the surrounding air seemed to take on a physical quality, pressing in on the rhythm of her breathing. She stole a glance at Yan Sishi from the corner of her eye, took another sip of water, and said as casually as she could manage, “I’ll need to borrow your dining table in a bit.”

Yan Sishi looked at her. “Don’t you need the study?”

“No, no — the dining table is fine.”

As she spoke, she put down the glass and stood up, heading toward the entryway. “Let me get my laptop.”

Yan Sishi followed and asked if she needed help.

“No, it’s fine,” she said, setting the suitcase flat and unzipping it in one clean motion — then pausing. Her undergarments were stored in separate zip-up bags, but if she opened the suitcase fully, they’d still be visible.

She glanced up at Yan Sishi.

Yan Sishi looked back at her.

A moment later, just as she was steeling herself to open the suitcase without ceremony, Yan Sishi seemed to understand the cause of her brief hesitation. He turned away. “I’ll clear the dining table.”

The dining table was immaculate. There was nothing to clear.

Xia Li felt a sudden flush of embarrassment.

She retrieved her laptop and charger from the inner sleeve of the bag, closed the suitcase, and returned to the living and dining area.

She sat down at the dining table, plugged in the laptop, opened the network settings, and asked, “Can I use the wifi?”

Yan Sishi nodded. “The password is 219 in binary.”

“219 in…” Xia Li went momentarily blank.

Yan Sishi paused, then walked over to her side. He braced his left arm lightly against the back of her chair, and his right hand reached toward the laptop keyboard.

Both of Xia Li’s hands, which had been resting on the keyboard, immediately withdrew.

She didn’t dare move at all. His breath was right above her — cool and clean, like mist drifting through a cold mountain valley, and she was half-wrapped in that mist.

She kept her eyes down, fixed on the keyboard in front of her, watching as his fingers moved quickly, typing a string of numbers — 1, 1, 0, 1…

What came after, she couldn’t track. Her attention had been completely captured by that hand — fair-skinned, with clearly defined knuckles.

Yan Sishi pressed the enter key last. A moment later: “Done.”

He pulled back immediately. The warmth of his presence receded with him.

“…Thank you.”

Only her heartbeat remained slightly off-balance.

Fortunately, once she was absorbed in her work, Xia Li had no space left for anything else.

Yan Sishi sat on the sofa with one leg crossed, a magazine spread open across his knees.

He turned a page at an unhurried pace. His gaze drifted over the top of the pages toward the dining table.

Xia Li was wholly focused on her laptop screen, expression intent — typing rapidly, then stopping, then typing again, falling into a rhythm with no discernible pattern.

Occasionally, when she paused longer than usual, she would reach for the glass of water nearby, take a sip, set it back down, and then return to what she was doing.

At one point, he noticed her glass was almost empty. He got up, retrieved a bottle of mineral water from the refrigerator, and placed it beside her glass.

She looked up briefly to say thank you, but the current of her work wasn’t fully interrupted — she slipped back into it almost immediately.

He stood beside her for a moment, without disturbing her, then returned to the sofa and sat down.

The afternoon sun blazed outside, but filtered through light-blocking sheer curtains, it entered the room only as a pale, diffused brightness — the heat entirely stripped away.

In that clear, serene light she seemed to become something permanent, something that, for no particular reason, brought a sense of calm to whoever happened to be near.

Somewhere around four-thirty in the afternoon, Yan Sishi heard a series of yawns.

Several more followed. He glanced toward the dining table — and saw that she had laid her head down on her folded arms and gone completely still.

Yan Sishi rose and walked over, his footsteps quiet and unhurried.

He leaned against the edge of the table and looked down. He could hear the low, even rhythm of her breathing. She was truly asleep.

He went to the sofa and picked up the white blanket draped over it, then returned to the dining table and draped it gently over her shoulders.

His hand paused — because her hair had fallen loose and gathered around half her face, and her lashes, long and dense, cast a faint fan-shaped shadow beneath her eyes.

As if without quite meaning to, he reached out, and the tip of his finger brushed lightly against those lashes.

Even in sleep, one can feel an itch — she furrowed her brow ever so slightly.

He withdrew his hand in an instant.

The reason Xia Li had chosen to sleep with her head on the table was precisely because that position would leave her arms numb within half an hour at most, which would prevent her from sleeping too long and falling behind on time.

She opened her eyes. Yawned. As she straightened up, something slid from her shoulders.

She reached out and caught it — a thin, cream-colored blanket.

She blinked, then looked up at Yan Sishi.

He was still on the sofa, reading the magazine, just as he had been before she fell asleep.

Except that now he was already looking in her direction — as though he had simply been waiting for her to raise her eyes — and the moment their gazes met, he said in a quiet voice, “Awake?”

It was Xia Li who looked away first. “…Yes.”

“It’s five o’clock. What are you thinking for dinner?”

“Are we going out?”

“Either way is fine.”

“I’d rather order in — saves more time.”

“What do you feel like eating?”

“Is there anything you’ve ordered from that’s been good?”

Yan Sishi rarely ordered delivery. No matter how busy work got, he would at minimum carve out half an hour to go downstairs and eat a simple meal, even if that only meant a sandwich and coffee.

This time, he thought for a moment and said, “Let me handle it.”

Xia Li nodded. “Thank you — can I keep working for a bit?”

Yan Sishi answered with a quiet sound of agreement.

There was a Hong Kong-style tea restaurant nearby — one of Wen Shubai’s investments, as it happened.

Back when Wen Shubai was showing him the apartment, he had mentioned it in passing: at the time, he’d been living here himself and wanted an on-call, affordable canteen, so he had offhandedly invested in a restaurant nearby. To his surprise, it had done quite well, and the numbers in his account climbed year after year.

A couple of years back, the restaurant had undergone an upgrade, stepping up considerably in quality and prestige — which made reservations all the harder to come by.

Yan Sishi messaged Wen Shubai on WeChat, asking if he could arrange to have his “canteen” deliver a meal to the apartment.

Wen Shubai replied as if baffled, sending a string of question marks: You’re contacting me for something this trivial?

Yan Sishi replied: I’ll treat you to dinner sometime.

He pulled up the restaurant’s menu on a review site and selected a few dishes, then forwarded the list to Wen Shubai.

A little while later, Wen Shubai replied — he’d called the restaurant manager. Today was the last day of the holiday and the restaurant was packed, but he’d do his best to have the order delivered within the hour.

The restaurant was right on time. A few minutes before six, the food arrived.

It wasn’t the simple takeout containers one might expect — instead, it came in a bamboo wicker basket. Inside were four dishes, each presented in refined, elegant tableware.

When Xia Li was unwrapping her chopsticks, she noticed the restaurant’s logo. She looked puzzled. “I thought this place didn’t offer delivery?”

She and Xu Ning had eaten there for Xu Ning’s birthday once — well worth the three-hundred-yuan-per-person price, especially those flaky, fragrant, sweet pineapple buns.

Yan Sishi’s expression didn’t shift in the slightest. “They might have just started.”

Xia Li believed him without further question, because she was genuinely ravenous.

After dinner, Xia Li returned to her work.

Yan Sishi cleared away the wicker basket and tableware, then came to the dining table and asked how much was left.

Xia Li hesitated. “Do you have plans tonight? If it’s inconvenient—”

“No,” Yan Sishi said. “If it’s too much to handle on your own, I can help.”

Xia Li was genuinely tempted — she was past the point of having any complaints about the overtime. “Would that be alright?”

At that, Yan Sishi pulled out a dining chair and sat down directly beside her.

“There are still a few documents I haven’t finished reading. I need to go through them and compile everything into a summary.”

Xia Li opened a PDF file.

Yan Sishi glanced at it. All in English, densely packed, with a great deal of data. Each document ran thirty to forty pages.

She was an English major — reading wouldn’t pose any difficulty. The sheer length was the problem.

Yan Sishi gestured for her to hand him the laptop.

She did.

She watched him open the device settings and connect to a printer.

After confirming with her, he opened each of the three documents in turn.

A moment later, she heard the faint, rhythmic whirring of paper feeding from a printer behind a closed door somewhere ahead.

Yan Sishi got up and walked toward that room.

When he returned, he was holding three neatly bound sets of printed documents and a red ballpoint pen.

He sat back down beside her, picked up the pen, and opened the first document.

Xia Li noticed him absently twirl the pen once — and had a moment of distraction, remembering that he had this same habit back then.

Yan Sishi looked over at her just then, as if asking what she was spacing out about.

She immediately turned her eyes back to the laptop screen.

Beside her, the quiet scratch of pen on paper came at intervals. Xia Li glanced over occasionally and saw him circling, checking, and marking passages.

Her gaze moved along without permission — past his wrist below a rolled-up shirt cuff, to the collar of his white dress shirt, to the clean line of his neck…

She stopped herself there and quickly looked away.

Her thoughts drifted back to the rain-washed library of years before.

Under pale, soft light, she could almost smell again the fresh, clean scent of rain that day, the whole world swallowed in a rising wetness, drifting and suspended.

The quiet, the faint swell in the chest — all of it so perfectly, uncannily the same.

Less than an hour later, she heard the click of a pen cap being replaced, then the pen being set down with a light tap against the table.

The three documents were passed over to her. Yan Sishi said, “Done.”

Xia Li took them and flipped through casually — then let out a sudden laugh.

Entire stretches of the documents had been circled. In the margins beside them, two words in red: Filler.

The parts that were actually useful had also been circled, their main ideas summarized in concise notes, with key data and figures marked for easy reference.

She still remembered his handwriting. It had always had a quality of slanting ease, clean and unrestrained.

Now, compared to how it used to be, the style had shifted more toward cursive — the structure looser, freer, carrying a kind of grown-up nonchalance.

She was working her way through the annotations one by one when Yan Sishi spoke. “I have a question for you.”

Xia Li looked up. “Yes?”

Yan Sishi looked at her too, his gaze clear and deep, his tone as level and unhurried as ever. “At the time — were you reading the book I recommended to Wang Chen?”

It was less a question than a statement.

Like a decisive, unanswerable strike.

Xia Li’s pupils dilated slightly. For a moment, she couldn’t find a single word.