Tang Shu POV
He had read her text and not replied.
Tang Shu knew he had read it. The delivery confirmation had come through immediately message received, forty-seventh floor, a building she was now standing outside of in the dark at ten-thirty at night like a person who had lost her mind.
I know about the cabinet.
She had sent it because she needed him to know that she was not calling out of confusion or embarrassment or the specific wounded pride of a woman whose husband had turned out to be someone else entirely. She was calling because she had put the pieces together, and the picture they made was serious, and she was not the kind of person who sat on serious information and did nothing with it.
He had read it.
He had not replied.
She had sat with that for forty minutes, and then she had gotten in her car.
The Lin Group building was exactly what she expected from the outside: tall, quiet, the kind of building that did not need to announce itself because its presence did the announcing for it. Glass and steel and a lobby visible through the front doors that was lit like it was noon, even at this hour.
She pushed through the front doors.
The receptionist looked up immediately. Young, professional, the particular smile of someone trained to be pleasant to everyone equally, which meant pleasantly to no one specifically.
Tang Shu said, "I need to see Lin Yao. I am his wife."
The receptionist's expression did not change. She typed something. She looked at her screen. She typed something else.
She said, "I don't see anyone by that name on Mr. Lin's approved contacts list. I'm sorry."
Tang Shu said, "I am his wife. Tang Shu. We were married for twenty-two months."
The receptionist looked at her screen again. She said, "Mr. Lin's file shows no current spouse."
Tang Shu stared at her.
No current spouse.
The divorce was signed yesterday morning. Yesterday morning. She had used the same lawyer her family always used, efficient, fast, thorough. She had asked for expedited processing because she had wanted it done cleanly and quickly, and without the specific discomfort of a legal process dragging itself out over weeks.
She had not expected it to be processed before the ink was dry on the page.
She thought about Lin Yao signing every line without hesitation. She thought about the chief of staff who had walked into the Tang family living room in an immaculate suit and handed over keys on a platinum ring. She thought about what a man who ran the second-largest fortune in the country could make happen in twenty-four hours when he wanted something done.
He had processed the divorce himself.
The moment she handed him the papers, he had made one call, and by morning, she was already erased from his file.
No current spouse.
She said, "Can I leave a message?"
The receptionist said, "Of course. You can write it here." She slid a small notepad across the desk with a pen on top of it.
A notepad.
Tang Shu looked at the notepad. She thought about the forty-seven floors above her head. She thought about the text she had sent. I know about the cabinet and the silence that had come back. She thought about a man who had lived in her house for twenty-two months and fixed things and cleaned things and been called nothing and shown nothing and apparently spent the entire time building a legal case that was going to dismantle her family.
She picked up the pen.
She wrote her name. She wrote her number. She looked at it for a moment. She wrote one more line:
I am not your enemy. I think you know that.
She put the pen down. She pushed the notepad back.
The receptionist took it with a smile that meant nothing.
Tang Shu walked back to her car.
She sat in the driver's seat without starting the engine.
The building in front of her, through the windshield, lit up and closed, and was completely indifferent to the fact that she was sitting outside it. She had been indifferent to Lin Yao for twenty-two months. She recognized the feeling from the other side now, and it was considerably worse.
She thought about everything she had found tonight.
Lin Group. Forty years old. Second in the nation. Thirty-two countries. A heir with no face and no interviews and two years of moving money through this city so carefully that professional analysts at established firms could trace the path but not the person.
Two years.
He had come to her house two years ago.
She tried to remember what she had thought of him when they first met. Her mother had arranged the meeting for a quiet dinner, family friends, and a young man from a respectable background who was looking for a stable domestic situation. He had been unremarkable. Polite, quiet, average-looking in the way that made it easy to forget you had looked at him. She had thought: this is a man with nothing going on.
She had married him because her mother pushed, and she was tired, and the person she had actually wanted to marry had chosen someone else the year before, and she had been making decisions from exhaustion for months.
She had never really looked at him.
Twenty-two months, and she had never really looked.
She thought about the window he had repacked in winter. She had not known about that. She had not known about the wages he paid the household staff when her uncle delayed the accounts. She had not known about the soup. She had not known about any of it because she had spent two years looking at a point past his shoulder and telling herself it was a marriage in name only, and names meant nothing.
Mr. Lin's file shows no current spouse.
She pressed the back of her head against the headrest.
She thought about the text she had sent. I know about the cabinet. She had sent it to make him understand she was serious that she had put the pieces together, that she was not calling to make things difficult, that she was calling because the picture the pieces made was bigger than both of them, and she thought he should know she was not on the wrong side of it.
He had read it and said nothing.
He had said no on the phone and hung up.
She looked at her hands on the steering wheel.
She had spent two years in a marriage she sleepwalked through. She had signed divorce papers in front of an audience and felt relief and also, underneath the relief, something else she had refused to name. She had searched his name online, called her friend, sat on her bedroom floor, and felt the specific vertigo of realizing that the person you had decided was nothing was in fact the opposite of nothing.
And now she was sitting outside his building at ten-forty at night, having been told she was not on the approved contacts list.
She had done this to herself.
She knew that.
She had built the distance between them as much as he had. She had decided early and without enough information that he was not worth looking at, and she had held that decision for twenty-two months without once asking herself if it was right.
She sat in the car.
Ten minutes passed.
Then twenty.
She was not sure what she was waiting for. The lights on the upper floors of the building stayed on. The lobby receptionist was visible through the glass, dealing with a late delivery. The city moved around the car in its usual way, indifferent, continuous.
She thought: go home, Shu. There is nothing you can do tonight.
She thought: he said no. He is not going to come down.
She thought: you wrote your name and number on a notepad, and a receptionist put it on a pile, and he will never see it.
She reached for the key.
Her phone rang.
She did not recognize the number for a half second, and then she did, she had seen it three times in the past month, always a missed call, always accompanied by a text from her mother saying Xu Ming called again, darling, please just have dinner with him, he is very suitable.
Xu Ming Bo. Thirty years old. Second-generation wealth. Handsome in the practiced way of men who knew they were handsome and had organized their personality around it. Her mother had been mentioning his name since the spring with the specific frequency of a woman laying groundwork.
She stared at his name on the screen.
She thought about a suitable.
She thought about a receptionist saying no current spouse with a smile that meant nothing.
She thought about twenty minutes in a parked car outside a building that was not going to open for her.
She answered.
Xu Ming's voice was warm and easy, the voice of a man who had never once been told he was not on the approved list.
He said: "Tang Shu. I heard the divorce went through. I wanted to call." A pause. "Let me take you to dinner."
Tang Shu looked at her own reflection in the dark car window.
She looked at the Lin Group building through the windshield.
She looked at her reflection again.
The woman looking back at her had spent twenty-two months not looking at someone who had spent twenty-two months looking at everything. That woman was tired and confused and sitting outside a building at ten-forty at night because she had written her name on a notepad, and that was apparently all she was capable of right now.
Suitable, her mother said.
She said: "Fine."
She ended the call.
She started the car.
She pulled away from the curb.
In her rearview mirror, the Lin Group building got smaller.
Her phone lit up on the passenger seat.
She glanced at it.
Unknown number. One message.
She stopped at a red light.
She picked up the phone.
The message said: I read your note.
Three seconds later: Go home tonight.
Three seconds after that, a third message:
I said no. Not never.
The light turned green.
Tang Shu sat at the green light for four full seconds before the car behind her honked.
She put the phone face down on the seat.
She drove.
She did not stop smiling for the next six blocks, and she was furious about it.