Feng Liang stood still, staring at the face in the mirror.
He was still finding it hard to accept. His hand came up slowly and pressed against his cheek, fingers pushing into skin that didn't feel like his own. This was real. The weight of it sat on him the way a stone sits at the bottom of water — settled, immovable. This was the face of Li Feng. This was the body of Li Feng.
A horrible husband. A useless excuse of a father.
Li Feng.
Feng Liang turned it over in his mind the way he had once turned over bad contracts — looking for the part that didn't add up, the clause that explained everything. He couldn't understand it. He had known men who were weak. Men who drank. Men who lost everything and blamed the nearest person for it. But to raise your hand against your own wife. To come home night after night and pour your failure into the people who had no way to leave. The idiot had lost his job, turned to drinking, and one night had drunk himself stupid enough to slip on the floor and crack his head open.
A fitting end.
But then the other half of it arrived, and it landed cold.
*If I am inside a dead man's body — then I am dead as well.*
He stood with that for a moment.
*My drink. The wine.Wu Zhen .*
That bastard. After everything Feng Liang had built, everything he had handed that man — trust, position, access — Wu Zhen had betrayed him in the end. Clean and simple. Feng Liang could see it now from the outside, the shape of it, and it almost impressed him in a distant, bloodless way.
He let out a small jagged laugh. It came out wrong, scraped at the edges.
*The great CEO Feng Liang. Dead over a glass of wine.*
He could picture his uncle's face right now. The man would be standing somewhere respectable, wearing the right expression for the cameras, and underneath it absolutely fuming with joy. The bastard had been waiting years for something like this.
Feng Liang looked at Li Feng's face in the mirror one last moment.
*Feng Liang is dead. I am now Li Feng.*
Then he turned and walked out.
---
He moved back into the room. The two of them were still there, pressed together near the wall, the little girl half-hidden behind her mother's leg. He looked at them properly for the first time — really looked, now that his head had cleared and the shock had settled into something quieter.
*Beautiful.*
It was the first thing that came to his mind and he had no defense against it. He had met countless women in his lifetime. Boardrooms and banquets and every calibrated social occasion a man in his position attended. Not one of them stopped him the way this woman did, standing in a wrecked apartment in the flat morning light with her eyes red from crying and her jaw set like she was bracing for whatever came next.
Zhao Lihua stood still, staring back at him.
Li Feng looked away. Quickly.
*What the hell is wrong with me. This is not your first time seeing a woman. Li Feng, control yourself.*
He looked up. Looked at the floor instead. At the mess, the bottles, the scattered trash that covered every surface. Something to focus on. Something concrete.
"You can wait in the room," he said. "I'll clean up and make breakfast."
Zhao Lihua didn't answer. She stood there, and he could see it moving behind her eyes — the calculation, the wariness, the question she wasn't going to ask out loud. *What is he planning now.*
She picked up Li Xian without a word. The little girl didn't look at him. She turned her face into her mother's shoulder, and the two of them moved away from the living room into the other room, and the door didn't quite close all the way behind them.
Li Feng sat down on the sofa.
He let out a long slow breath.
*Life really isn't fair. What did a woman like that do to end up with a man like Li Feng.*
He sat with it for only a moment. Then he stood up.
---
He found a large bin near the wall and started with the floor, working his way across the room methodically, the way he had approached every problem in his previous life — section by section, no wasted movement. He picked up the bottles first, then the trash, then the things that had no reason for being where they were. It took a while. The room had not been cared for in a long time and it showed in every corner. But he finished it. He stood back and looked at what was left — bare and sparse, but clean. Livable.
He headed toward the kitchen.
Li Feng had lived a life of luxury. He would not pretend otherwise. But there was one thing he had always been quietly proud of, something that went back further than the boardrooms and the tailored suits and the corner office — he could cook. Really cook.
The kitchen door opened and he stepped inside.
It was no different from the room he had just cleaned.
He stood in the doorway and looked at it.
*I seriously have my work cut out for me.*
He stretched his hands out and got started, clearing surfaces, moving things that had no business where they were, restoring some basic order to the space. When it was done he opened the drawers.
Empty.
He checked the refrigerator.
Empty.
*Looks like I'll have to go get some groceries.*
He picked up the phone from the counter, checked the wallet beside it, and walked out of the apartment.
---
The door clicked shut behind him.
For a moment there was silence. Then Zhao Lihua came out of the room.
She stood in the middle of what had been, an hour ago, a disaster. She turned slowly, taking it in. The floor clear. The trash gone. The room — clean. Really clean.
She stood there looking at it and didn't move for a long time.
*Is he changing. Or is this a scheme. A new way to break me that I haven't seen yet.*
A tear moved down her face, slow and quiet. She didn't raise her hand to stop it.
"Mummy." A small voice came from behind her. Li Xian walked toward her on careful feet, her voice low the way it always was. "Is daddy gone?"
Zhao Lihua pressed her arm across her face. She tilted her head down and looked at her daughter.
She patted her gently on the head.
"Yes," she said. "He's gone. Don't worry. Mummy's here."
---
After a while the door opened again.
Li Feng came back carrying two white bags, heavy with groceries. He didn't stop in the living room. He went straight to the kitchen, set everything down on the counter, and began laying it all out.
He looked at what he had in front of him.
A small smile crossed his face.
*Time to work my magic.*