During the first week after returning to Jing City, Qing Ye became clearly aware of one thing.
Chujiu Huang was avoiding her.
It wasn't overt coldness.Nor was it a shift in attitude.
It was something far more restrained, far more rational—almost flawless in execution—
Avoidance.
He still attended meetings on time.He still demanded high standards at work.He still pointed out her oversights in documents, his tone calm, his manner professional.
Yet all the closeness that had once seemed "only natural" had vanished.
Before the business trip, he had tacitly expected her to sit in the second seat to his right in meetings.Now, that seat was left empty.
Before the trip, he would hand documents to her directly.Now, he placed them on the table and had Ze Lin pass them along.
Before the trip, he would occasionally ask, after her reports, "What do you think?"Now, he no longer called her name.
Everything made sense.
And yet it was cold—like a line drawn with surgical precision.
At first, Qing Ye thought she was overthinking it.
She told herself:
Maybe the schedule was just more intense.Maybe things were being recalibrated after the trip.Maybe… she simply shouldn't take that subtle feeling so seriously.
But by the third day, she was certain.
That afternoon, after organizing an M&A memorandum, she followed procedure and delivered it to the president's office.
The door was ajar.
She knocked lightly. From inside came a single sentence:
"Leave it outside."
She paused. "Do you need me to come in and explain?"
After a brief silence, his voice sounded again:
"No need."
Just two words.
Yet they felt like an invisible door closing directly in front of her.
She stood in the corridor, the folder in her hands suddenly feeling heavier than before.
From that day on, Qing Ye grew noticeably quieter.
She no longer took the initiative to ask about matters beyond her responsibilities. She stopped trying to read his moods. Even when they crossed paths in the hallway, she limited herself to a standard nod of greeting.
"President Huang.""Mmm."
Brief. Restrained. Like two parallel lines.
Only she knew that every day, after returning to her desk, she would stare at her screen for a long moment.
It wasn't that she had never been given the cold shoulder.
In the workplace, she had faced far more direct suppression.
But this time was different.
Because she didn't know what she had done wrong.
That feeling—not knowing why you were pushed away—was far more tormenting than an explicit rejection.
Ze Lin was the first to notice something was off.
When he saw Qing Ye in the assistant area, he frowned slightly. "Have you been too tense lately?"
Qing Ye looked up. "Have I?"
"You're more cautious than before," he said quietly. "A little too cautious."
She smiled faintly. "Probably afraid of making mistakes."
Ze Lin didn't press further.
But that evening, after finishing overtime, he knocked on the door of Chujiu Huang's office.
"Don't you think you've been a bit too strict with Qing Ye lately?"
Chujiu Huang didn't look up. "I hold everyone to the same standard."
"But you weren't like this before."
The sound of typing stopped.
The office fell into brief silence.
Chujiu Huang leaned back in his chair and rubbed his brow.
"Ze Lin," he said, "she's an assistant."
Ze Lin froze.
"She only needs to do her job well," Chujiu Huang continued evenly. "Nothing else needs to happen."
"But you doing this—"
"I know exactly what I'm doing."
That sentence ended the conversation.
Ze Lin said nothing more. He glanced at him once, then turned and left.
The moment the door closed, Chujiu Huang's gaze fell on the M&A documents at the corner of his desk.
They were prepared by Qing Ye.
Clear logic. Meticulous annotations. Even questions he had thought of only temporarily were already addressed in the notes.
Too suitable.
So suitable that it had begun to cross a line.
What truly unsettled Qing Ye was an otherwise ordinary meeting.
That day, she had prepared the materials in advance and sent them to the meeting group.
After the meeting began, Chujiu Huang flipped to a certain page and frowned slightly.
"Who prepared this page of data?"
The room fell silent for a second.
Qing Ye stood up. "I did."
All eyes turned to her.
She was already prepared to explain the logic.
But Chujiu Huang only said lightly:
"Have Finance handle it next time."
Then he turned the page and continued.
No criticism.No correction.
Yet it felt as if he had removed her entirely from the matter.
Qing Ye stood there, her fingers growing faintly cold.
Slowly, she sat back down.
After the meeting ended, she stayed alone in the conference room and reviewed that page of data again.
There was nothing wrong with it.
In fact, it was more rigorous than the version provided by Finance.
But he didn't want it anymore.
That night, she returned to her apartment and didn't turn on the lights for a long time.
She sat in the darkness and, for the first time, seriously asked herself—
Had she crossed a line?
Not in action.
But in her heart.
She had thought she hid it well.
But perhaps, from the moment of that business trip, he had already sensed something.
And the way he chose to deal with it was to retreat.
To retreat back to the proper positions of "superior" and "assistant."
Leaving no space for ambiguity.
On the Friday of the second week, a project was adjusted at the last minute.
An external meeting that Qing Ye was originally meant to attend had her name replaced with Ze Lin's.
When the email arrived in her inbox, she stared at that line for a long time.
She didn't reply.
She simply organized the materials silently and handed them over to Ze Lin.
When he took them, he hesitated. "Are you okay?"
Qing Ye shook her head. "Just a work arrangement."
But that night, for the first time, she found herself unable to write in her notebook.
She flipped back to the pages where she had written about him.
"He remembered my name.""He gave me a shirt.""He shielded me for a moment."
Now, they all felt like misunderstandings on her part.
She closed the notebook, leaned back in her chair, and shut her eyes.
Her mind, however, was painfully clear.
If he truly intended to draw a line, she would not cross it.
She would step back into her proper place.
No matter how unwilling she felt.
What she didn't know was—
As she began to deliberately distance herself, Chujiu Huang's world did not return to calm either.
He started to suffer from insomnia.
Not because of projects.
But because—
Every time he passed the assistant area, she had her head lowered, so focused it was as if she had never noticed him.
She no longer looked at him.
She didn't even wait for him anymore.
That feeling—of being actively withdrawn from—made him realize for the first time:
Distance cuts both ways.
He had thought that as long as he kept his distance, everything would return to its proper track.
But when she truly stepped back, he finally understood—
Some things, once they have existed, are very hard to pretend never happened.
And now, he stood on this side of the boundary he had drawn with his own hands.
Unable to move.
And unable to retreat.