POV: Liang Meiyu
Every morning for five years, Liang Meiyu made two cups of coffee.
She drank one. The other went cold.
---
The kitchen of the Gu penthouse was beautiful in the way that expensive things often were — all pale marble and brushed steel, designed by someone who had never actually cooked a meal in their life. The windows ran floor to ceiling, and at this hour, just past six, the Shanghai skyline was doing what it always did at dawn — turning itself gold and pink and briefly, heartbreakingly lovely before the city remembered it had somewhere to be.
Meiyu stood at the counter in her pale green robe, hair loose, feet bare against the cold marble floor. She had been awake since five. She was always awake since five.
The coffee maker finished its cycle with a soft click, and she poured both cups with the careful attention she gave to everything — evenly, without spilling, the way her mother had taught her before there was no longer a mother to teach her anything. She set Zihan's cup on his side of the kitchen island. Black, no sugar. She had not needed to be told this. She had simply watched, in the early months, and remembered.
Her own cup she wrapped both hands around and lifted to her lips.
Outside, Shanghai was waking up. Somewhere below, forty-three floors down, the city was already moving — taxis and morning deliveries and the particular urgency of eight million people who all believed their day was the most important one. Meiyu watched it from above and felt, as she often did at this hour, like she was observing something from very far away.
She heard him before she saw him.
The particular rhythm of Gu Zihan's mornings was something she knew the way she knew her own heartbeat — the shower running for exactly nine minutes, the wardrobe opening twice because he always forgot his cufflinks on the first try, the measured sound of his footsteps in the hallway. Unhurried. Certain. The footsteps of a man who had never once questioned whether he belonged in a room.
He came into the kitchen already dressed. Dark suit, silver cufflinks — he had remembered them today. His eyes were on his phone before he had fully cleared the doorway.
"Morning," he said. To the phone, or to her, or to no one in particular.
"Good morning," Meiyu said. "Coffee is ready."
He reached for his cup without looking at it. Without looking at her. He scrolled something on his phone and his jaw was set the way it got when he was reading work correspondence, and he drank the coffee standing up the way he always did because sitting down for breakfast was something that happened on days that did not exist.
Meiyu turned back to the window.
On the counter behind her, she had laid out breakfast. Congee with preserved egg and pork, because the weather forecast had said cold today and she knew he didn't eat enough when the temperature dropped. A small dish of pickled vegetables on the side. Sesame flatbread wrapped in paper to keep it warm, in case he wanted something for the car.
She did not mention any of it.
She had learned, somewhere in the second year, that mentioning it made him uncomfortable in a way she couldn't name — a slight tension in his shoulders, something that looked almost like guilt but moved through him too quickly to be sure. It was easier, for both of them, if the food simply appeared. If her effort was invisible. If she was invisible.
She was very good at being invisible.
His phone buzzed. He glanced at it and something in his posture shifted — barely, just a degree, the way a compass needle swings toward north. A small and involuntary orientation toward whatever the message contained. Or whoever.
"I have an early meeting," he said. "Don't wait up for dinner."
"Alright."
He set the cup down. It was half-full.
He left.
The front door clicked shut behind him with its usual soft precision, and Meiyu stood in the kitchen and listened to the silence settle back into place the way it always did — quickly, completely, like water filling a space where something used to be.
She looked at his cup.
Then she picked up her own and drank the last of it, still standing at the window, watching a cargo ship move slowly down the Huangpu River, impossibly large and unhurried, going somewhere she couldn't see.
---
She was washing both cups when the memory came, the way memories did — without permission, slipping in through the ordinary.
Their wedding day.
She had worn ivory silk, because his mother had said white was too severe for her complexion, and she had not had strong feelings about the color of her own wedding dress. The venue had been a hotel ballroom in Jing'an, six hundred guests, an ice sculpture of two cranes that had begun to melt by the time they cut the cake.
She had walked down the aisle on her brother Chenxi's arm — his hand covering hers on his sleeve, warm and steady, the only warmth she had felt all day — and she had looked toward the man waiting for her at the altar.
Gu Zihan had been beautiful in the way that cold things often were. Immaculate in his suit, composed, exactly as he always was. The guests had murmured appreciatively as she walked toward him.
And he had looked at her.
Or rather — his eyes had moved to her, tracked her progress down the aisle, registered her presence the way you registered weather or traffic. Acknowledged, processed, filed. There had been no intake of breath. No softening. Nothing that she could have held onto later, in the quiet, to warm herself with.
She had told herself, at the time, that he was simply a reserved man. That some people kept their feelings in, held them close, and that this was not the same as having none. She had told herself many things, in the early days.
She had been, in the early days, very good at telling herself things.
Meiyu dried her hands on the kitchen towel and folded it precisely over the oven handle.
The breakfast she had laid out sat untouched on the counter. She covered the congee and put it in the refrigerator. She wrapped the sesame bread and set it aside. She ate the pickled vegetables standing at the counter because she had already been standing and it seemed too much effort to sit down for something so small.
Then she put on her coat, picked up her bag, and went to be the second version of herself.
---
Shanghai Central Hospital in the early morning had a particular quality that she had always loved — a functional calm before the day's emergencies arrived, the hallways still unhurried, the staff moving with the quiet efficiency of people who understood that their work was real in a way that very little else was.
She used a private entrance on the east side of the building. The security guard, Mr. Fang, nodded at her the way he always did — not with surprise, not with curiosity, simply with the acknowledgment of someone who had learned that some things were not his business. She had tipped him generously at every Lunar New Year for five years and he had, in return, never mentioned to anyone that a woman came and went at unusual hours.
In the small changing room off the east corridor, she put on scrubs. She tucked her hair up. She traded her expensive coat for a white one with nothing written on the pocket — the embroidered version was at home, in the study, in a wardrobe that Zihan had never opened because it was not his wardrobe.
For a moment she stood in front of the small mirror above the sink.
The woman looking back at her was someone else, or the same person, or — more accurately — the part of the same person that existed when no one was managing her invisibility. Her posture was different here. Her eyes were different. She stood the way she had stood before she had learned to take up less space.
She exhaled once. Slowly.
Then she pushed through the door and walked into the hospital with the particular stride of someone who knows exactly where she is going.
---
The patient in Room 7 of the restricted surgical ward had been transferred three days ago from a hospital in Hangzhou after two surgical teams had looked at her scans and delivered, with varying degrees of gentleness, the same conclusion. The tumor was positioned at the junction of the hepatic veins and the inferior vena cava. Inoperable, both teams had said. Management and comfort care.
The patient was thirty-one years old. She had a daughter who was four.
Meiyu had reviewed the scans twice last night at the kitchen table while Zihan slept. She had looked at them the way she looked at all problems — not with the question of whether, but with the question of how.
She spent forty minutes with the patient now, going over everything again, explaining what she intended to do and why and what the risks were and what the alternatives were and what her honest assessment of the odds was. She spoke clearly and without false comfort, because in her experience patients were not fragile — they were simply people who deserved the same information she would want if she were lying in that bed.
The patient, whose name was Yao Jing, held her daughter's drawing in both hands while she listened. When Meiyu finished, she was quiet for a moment.
Then she said — "Will you try?"
"Yes," Meiyu said. "I will try."
---
The surgery took four hours and eleven minutes.
She did not think about the kitchen or the cold cup or the footsteps in the hallway while she worked. She never did. This was the truest thing about surgery — it required all of you, left no portion available for anything else, and so for four hours and eleven minutes she was only this, only here, only the precise and focused instrument of someone else's survival.
When it was over she stepped back from the table and breathed.
"Nice work, Dr. L," the senior nurse said quietly. The same thing she always said.
Meiyu stripped her gloves. "How's her pressure?"
"Stable. Better than stable."
She stood for a moment with her eyes closed. Not praying, exactly. Something adjacent to it — a private acknowledgment of the fact that some things had gone right.
Then she changed back into her coat, her bag, her other self, and she took the private exit back into the Shanghai morning.
---
She was home by eleven. The penthouse was exactly as she had left it.
She made herself tea, sat at the kitchen table, and opened the book she had been reading for three weeks. Outside, the city was fully awake now, loud and purposeful and indifferent.
Her phone buzzed on the table.
She glanced at it.
A message from a number she didn't recognize. International prefix — French.
*Dr. L. My name is Henri Beaumont. I believe you know my work. I have been looking for you for some time. I have a proposition. Please — when you have a moment — call me.*
Meiyu looked at the message for a long time.
Then she set the phone face-down on the table, picked up her book, and read three pages without taking in a single word.
Outside, a cargo ship moved down the Huangpu.
Going somewhere she couldn't see.
*But somewhere.*