Ruan Yu snapped back to her senses, opened the bedroom door, and held out her open palm. “My USB drive with the outline on it was never lost. What does that mean?”

Xu Huaisong looked down, his gaze going still.

For a brief moment, he wanted to tear the mask from his own face with his own hands.

And it wasn’t just this moment. Before this — when he had pretended not to know how she’d figured out he was from Su Shi, and when he had deliberately made her read that passage from “the dream” aloud in front of him — he had thought the same thing.

He told himself: if she finally stopped being able to keep up the act, then he could give up too.

But she kept concealing it. And his lies kept rolling into a bigger and bigger snowball. Every time he tried to force himself to come clean, he would imagine her face — the fear she would feel, upon learning the truth, at the near-obsessive and calculated lengths he had gone to. And he would stop.

In the silence he left behind, Ruan Yu was busy working through other possibilities on her own.

She asked, “Could it be that some kind of computer expert used certain techniques to hack into my computer without anyone noticing?”

“Theoretically, that’s possible.”

“And practically speaking?”

Xu Huaisong had no desire to spin any more lies, so he answered honestly: “Who would have nothing better to do?”

“Cen Sisi would.” Ruan Yu didn’t take his words as a rhetorical denial — she was simply reasoning that Cen Sisi had already dug up even her home address, and had gone as far as staging a live-streamed suicide attempt just to strike at her. What else would she be incapable of?

The confession that had been rising to Xu Huaisong’s lips sank back down again.

No wonder she couldn’t guess the truth.

Who could easily connect the dots to something this absurd?

But just like that, he had lost his window to speak.

The hand hanging at his side clenched, then relaxed, then clenched again. In the end, he turned and went back to the living room.

Ruan Yu didn’t notice anything was off with him. She was too absorbed in the hypothetical she was building in her own mind.

If even the outline had been stolen by Cen Sisi, then what role had the author of Her Eyes Can Smile — “Xie Shiren” — played in all of this?

If she and Cen Sisi were working together, then why had she been the one to voluntarily pass information to Liu Mao in the first place?

She couldn’t resolve that contradiction. After she finished packing the essentials and had moved everything over to the new apartment, once she’d parted ways with Xu Huaisong, she reached out to Li Shican.

He had called her yesterday with an update on the PR situation, saying that the live-streamed suicide attempt had generated such deeply negative social impact that it had been taken down almost immediately after it happened. The fallout had been relatively contained, so his damage control work had gone smoothly — things were basically resolved.

Ruan Yu was genuinely grateful. Over the phone, she asked what she could do for him.

Li Shican said she didn’t need to do anything — just take him out for a meal as payment.

The favor she owed him couldn’t possibly be repaid with a single dinner, so she couldn’t very well refuse such a modest request. She agreed that once he got through his upcoming concert obligations, she’d treat him to a meal.

But before that dinner could happen, she already needed to trouble him again.

When the call connected, she went straight to the point: “Junior, would you be able to give me Cen Sisi’s father’s contact information?”

The night of the incident, Cen Rongzhen hadn’t left behind his phone number. She’d received a compensation payment recently, but it had been deposited into the bank account she’d provided to the defendant earlier — she hadn’t been in direct contact with the Cen family at all.

Before answering, Li Shican asked: “Did something happen?”

“He mentioned a couple of days ago that he’d help me look into any ongoing risks. I just want to find out how things are progressing.” And to confirm, while she was at it, whether Cen Sisi had actually hired someone to hack into her computer.

Li Shican said: “I have a general idea of the situation. Uncle Cen didn’t find anything suspicious while going through her external communications records, but he’s a cautious person, so he hasn’t given you a final answer yet. He’s planning to bring in a hypnotherapy specialist from abroad to speak with Cen Sisi under hypnosis, in order to confirm the facts through her recollections of past behavior. But she’s in poor physical condition right now and can’t travel overseas for treatment, so things have been delayed.”

By the end of the conversation, he did provide Cen Rongzhen’s number — but Ruan Yu now had a clearer picture of the situation, so she didn’t rush to contact him. She decided to wait a little longer. From the perspective of a father, he was already overwhelmed. And from the perspective of the responsible party in the incident, he was already doing everything he could.

She settled into her new two-bedroom apartment — living room, kitchen, bathroom — and spent the rest of the afternoon sorting through her belongings. By the time she finished, it was past two o’clock. She realized she hadn’t eaten, went downstairs, and stepped out intending to grab some takeaway.

She didn’t expect to run into, right outside the building, the same young woman who had been trapped in the elevator with her and Xu Huaisong a few days ago.

Today, without the heavy makeup, she had a fresh, clean face — and was actually much prettier than she had appeared that day.

Sun Miaohan saw her and lit up with surprise and delight. “It’s you! Do you live in this building too?”

Ruan Yu was just about to say she’d recently moved in when Sun Miaohan seized both her hands with a grip that allowed no escape, looking every bit like someone who had run into a fellow villager in a foreign land. “You and your boyfriend are my lucky stars!”

The emphasis had landed on the very last part — so before Ruan Yu could clarify “he’s not my boyfriend,” she first had to ask: “Lucky stars?”

“I was going to that audition at Huanshi that day, remember? When I got there, I realized my makeup had been ruined from crying. I wanted to take it all off and redo it, but they called my number before I had the chance, so I just had to walk in bare-faced…”

Ruan Yu already sensed how this ended: “And you got in?”

Sun Miaohan nodded vigorously. “After I got in, I found out they’d been specifically looking for a natural, no-makeup look recently.”

Ruan Yu smiled and said, “Congratulations,” then added: “But that was your destiny — what does it have to do with me or my friend?”

Sun Miaohan blinked. “Just a friend?”

Ruan Yu nodded, genuinely puzzled. “What else would he be?”

“Well, even though you said that day you’d never had a boyfriend — I just assumed that in a moment like that, when you’ve been through something scary together, he should’ve confessed to you!”

Ruan Yu started to smile and explain that nothing of the sort had happened — but halfway through, she suddenly stopped.

In her mind, two fragments of conversation clicked into place.

“Hey, don’t cry — honestly, I don’t have a boyfriend either. I’m already twenty-six…”

“Do you want one?”

The missing word between “want” and “one” — could it have been “boyfriend”?

If so, then the full question was: “Do you want a boyfriend?” — and what came after that? “What do you think of me?” Or “Let me introduce you to someone?”

The sudden flash of realization left Ruan Yu rooted to the spot for a long moment, until she heard Sun Miaohan’s voice: “Are you okay?”

She came back to herself and shook her head. “I’m… I’m fine.” Then she drifted out the door like a wandering spirit.

A quarter of an hour later, she found herself standing back downstairs outside the apartment building. Her hands were completely empty — not a single bite of food.

Xu Huaisong was in the living room of his hotel suite, discussing work with Lu Shenglan.

She had run into a dispute involving overseas investment, and had come back to China with him in order to investigate the case in person. She’d hit a critical sticking point and was asking for his insight on how to break through it.

After listening to the full situation, Xu Huaisong said nothing. He opened his laptop and began typing. Five minutes later, he turned the screen toward her. “Contact this person — it should get you access to the investigation.”

She nodded. “Thank you.”

“No problem.”

His manner was as it always was — professionally detached, distant, and cool. But Lu Shenglan sensed, with faint unease, that something wasn’t quite right. She looked at his complexion, which didn’t look entirely healthy, and asked: “Is your stomach acting up again? Did you skip lunch?”

He had.

After dropping Ruan Yu off at the new apartment, it had been close to mealtime. She’d offered to take him out for a meal as thanks, but he had been distracted and unsettled — his mind stuck on the matter of the USB drive — and had told her “next time.”

After returning to the hotel, he’d simply forgotten about eating altogether.

Now his stomach was twisting in sharp, knotting spasms.

Before he could answer, Lu Shenglan was already on her feet. “Where’s your medication? The bedroom? I’ll get it.”

“Don’t bother.” Xu Huaisong endured another wave of cramping pain and stood up. “Go work on your case. I’ll handle it myself.” He turned and went into the bathroom off the bedroom, gripped the edge of the sink, and waited for the pain to pass — cold sweat beading and rolling down him in a thin, damp sheen.

Ruan Yu was sitting at her computer, stomach equally empty, clicking open Xu Huaisong’s chat window and then closing it, closing it and then opening it again. Finally, she sent Shen Mingying a message:

Tell me — when a man asks a woman “do you want a boyfriend,” what’s the implied meaning? Is it (a) “what do you think of me?” or (b) “let me introduce you to someone?”

She sent the message and waited, but got no reply. Absent-mindedly, she right-clicked on the message and hit “Forward,” intending to ask a different friend.

But because she’d been clicking in and out of Xu Huaisong’s chat window this whole time, when she went to select a recipient her mind glitched — and she tapped his name, which sat second in her contact list.

The moment she hit “Confirm,” the realization hit her. She scrambled frantically to tap “Recall.” The second she saw the message “You recalled a message,” she exhaled — but then a reply came through from the other side.

b.

Ruan Yu sat frozen in front of her computer screen.

On the other end, Lu Shenglan — having typed that single letter “b” from Xu Huaisong’s laptop — quickly deleted the message history. She called out toward the bedroom: “I’ll be off then. Take care of yourself.”

Author’s note: A rival who surpasses her mentor has arrived. Don’t panic — stay steady. Our soft girl can win!