Rain turned the city into a smear of reflected light and restless noise.
From the twenty-seventh floor, Sheng Anqi watched it streak down the glass, thinning neon and taillights into bleeding color. The office tower opposite flickered with pale blue screens and white panels, a vertical graveyard of PowerPoint decks and sleepless ambition. Somewhere on that grid, a floor was dark where it used to be awake—Li Xian's team had moved.
The absence glared brighter than any lit window.
"You're going to drill a hole through the glass," Han Jinyu said. "Stare any harder and it'll invoice you for property damage."
She didn't turn. "You're not funny."
"You laughed the first time I said that."
"The first time you said that," she corrected, "I hadn't pulled three all-nighters in a week."
He leaned his hip against her desk, arms folded, a quiet barrier between her and the rest of the open-plan office. Their corner was dim; she refused to let maintenance fix the overhead light, claimed it hurt her eyes. The truth: the half-shadow blurred edges, made it easier to ignore where someone used to stand, tablet in hand, pointing out flaws in her designs with gentle precision.
"Then take a night off," Jinyu said. "You've been circling the same set of numbers for twenty minutes."
"Twenty-one," she murmured. The budget spreadsheet on her screen glowed accusingly. "And the expense reports from the Qingdao project are still incomplete."
He followed her gaze to the tab labeled "LX-Consult Revision." The cell beside it was empty.
Li Xian's name had been on everything. Now it was a string of letters on legacy files, like a watermark the system had forgotten to scrub.
"It's not your responsibility," he said. "You delegated that to the new project lead."
"I delegated the surface," she replied. "The risk is still mine."
She meant the finances.
She did not mean the man.
Jinyu studied her profile, the set of her jaw, the way her fingers tightened around a pen that wasn't even uncapped. "You're not this controlling with anyone else."
"I'm not controlling," she said, too quickly.
"You're not," he agreed. "You just don't trust anyone's work but your own."
He watched the flinch she couldn't fully hide.
"Drink your coffee," he added, gentler.
It had gone cold. She drank it anyway, like punishment.
Across the city, in a different tower made of glass and optimized air, Li Xian adjusted his cufflinks and nodded as his associate finished a presentation.
"…so if we reroute the structural load here," the junior architect said, cursor circling a section of the projected model, "we can widen the atrium without compromising seismic safety."
The conference room was all clean lines and subtle expense: matte black table, acoustic panels that swallowed echoes, floor-to-ceiling glass looking out over a river of headlights. He had chosen every element of this firm's new headquarters. He had built himself a cathedral of design and efficiency, down to the angle of the chair backs.
Today, the chair fit him a little too well.
"Thoughts, Director Li?" asked the client, a sleek woman with a sharp bob and sharper questions.
"Move the support two meters west," he said, clicking through the load simulations. His voice was measured, even. "You'll gain light, but lose the sightline to the central staircase. It will feel impressive. It will not feel welcoming. Decide which matters more for your brand."
A ripple of murmurs. The client leaned forward. "And your recommendation?"
"For a financial firm trying to look less predatory?" His lips quirked, almost a smile. "Welcoming."
Laughter, the polite kind.
He laid out three options, advantages, drawbacks, the cooling tower of his mind operating at normal output again. He did not notice that his phone—screen down beside his notes—vibrated once, twice, then stilled.
He heard the sound; he chose not to react.
For three days he had been testing this new mode of existence: respond when necessary, not when needed. Don't anticipate. Don't intercept crises before they become evident. Don't run toward every siren like a fireman whose heart is a hose and a ladder and a spare oxygen tank for everyone else.
He clicked to the cost analysis slide. His assistant moved with silent competence at the edge of the room, aligning handouts, fielding questions, redirecting to him only when essential.
He had trained her well—carefully, deliberately, the way he trained everyone.
He had never trained himself to not care.
The meeting ended in a flurry of handshakes and "let's circle back." As the last suit left, his assistant, Ruan Yue, lingered.
"Director Li?"
"Yes?" He gathered his files, movements neat, unhurried.
"You have a message from your sister." She hesitated. "It's marked urgent."
He glanced at the phone: three missed calls, one from Meilin, two from an unknown number. A text banner lingered at the top.
[Meilin]: Are you free tonight? I need—no, I want—dage. Please.
Overlaid in his memory, the earlier one he'd already read:
[Meilin]: I'm handling it. Don't come charging in. Please.
His thumb hovered over the screen, the muscle memory of immediate reply pulling taut.
He set the phone down.
"Thank you," he said to Yue. "You can log the meeting minutes and send them to Legal first."
"Yes, Director."
When the door closed, silence expanded into the room. The city pressed against the glass, humming, alive.
Free tonight.
Three months ago, he would have reordered his life around that sentence. Meilin's needs, Sheng Anqi's crises, Han Jinyu's quiet requests for a second opinion on some obscure contracts—he had always filled the spaces between their breaths.
Now, his calendar held other blocks. Site visits. A lecture at the university. A rare dinner with an old professor. Hours marked "design work only" that he had guarded from client encroachment like sacred ground.
Burnout, his therapist had called it. Emotional depletion layered over physical exhaustion. The cure, she insisted, wasn't absence—it was boundaries.
He was still trying to believe boundaries weren't just prettier words for abandonment.
The phone vibrated again. This time, an email notification slid across the screen.
[From: Sheng Anqi]
Subject: LX-Consult – Contract Termination Addendum
He stared at the subject line, the way the letters of his name were compacted into something clinical.
Addendum.
Not apology. Not reconsideration.
The rain against the glass intensified, like static.
He opened it.
Director Li,
Per our discussion last week, please find attached the formal addendum finalizing the termination of LX-Consult's advisory role on the QTech redevelopment project. Legal has incorporated the revised clauses regarding intellectual property and liability that you requested.
Thank you again for your contributions over the last three years. I wish you and your firm all the best in your future endeavors.
Regards,
Sheng Anqi
Managing Director, Vantage Urban Development
There was nothing wrong with it.
Every word professional. Every sentence balanced. Not a single sharp edge. She had even included that polite, empty "thank you."
He read it twice, then a third time, as if a hidden message might emerge between lines.
None appeared.
He clicked the attachment, skimmed the legalese he'd already negotiated. It was clean. Fair. Efficient. She had always been efficient at cutting away unnecessary excess.
He had never thought he would be classified under that category.
He typed a reply.
Managing Director Sheng,
The revisions are satisfactory. Please proceed with execution.
Regards,
Li Xian
No more. No less. He hovered over the send button, feeling the strange hollowness in the gesture.
There was nothing left to fix here.
He clicked.
In her own office, minutes later, Anqi's email pinged. She saw his name in the preview and, against her will, her pulse hiccuped.
The reply was shorter than a breath.
She read it three times anyway.
The emotional ledger in her head, the one that had once hummed with their countless exchanges—drawings, corrections, late-night joke threads about clients who wanted gravity to be "more flexible"—did a quiet, brutal recalculation.
Satisfactory.
It should have been a victory. Clean cut. No dangling attachment.
Her chest felt scraped out.
Jinyu, returning from a call, caught her expression. "Bad news?"
"No," she said. "Exactly what I expected."
He watched her for a second, then sank into the chair across from her, stretching his long legs out. "You know," he said, tone deliberately light, "when I finally pay off all my family's debts, I'm going to treat myself to something extravagant."
"Like what?" she asked, grateful for the distraction. "A car that isn't older than you?"
"A dishwasher," he said. "One that doesn't sound like it's documenting its own death in binary. Or maybe a month where I say 'no' to everything I don't want to do."
She snorted. "You would implode from guilt in a week."
"Probably." His gaze flicked to her monitor. "Did he reply?"
"We're done," she said.
"With the contract," he clarified.
"With everything that matters," she said, too fast.
Silence settled. The rain softened for a few seconds, as if pausing to listen.
"You don't believe that," Jinyu said quietly.
She gripped her pen until her knuckles blanched. "Belief is irrelevant. Facts are: we had a professional relationship. It ended."
"And the house?" he asked.
She looked away, toward the city. The memory of that house rose unbidden: sun spilling into a kitchen with a double sink because she'd once complained about washing vegetables and dishes in the same basin; a built-in shelf at exactly the height of her favorite coffee mugs; a reading nook sized for one and a half people, not two, because she'd said she hated feeling crowded.
He had listened to all her throwaway comments over three years and turned them into walls and light and space.
She'd stood in that almost-finished living room, the smell of fresh paint and sawdust thick, and told him: "You have to stop."
He hadn't argued.
He'd just…stopped.
Now, the silence between them felt like that house—framed, roofed, but empty. Rooms echoing with things unsaid.
"What house?" she said.
"Right," Jinyu murmured. "Of course."
He had been there the night after she walked away from it. He had watched her drink herself hoarse, watched the tremor in her hand when she reached for her phone and forced herself not to call.
He hadn't asked why. He hadn't said, You're scared because this is what you wanted and you don't know how to accept it without surrendering control.
Instead, he'd poured her water. Simple. Practical. The way he always cleaned up after disasters not of his own making.
His own phone buzzed now. He glanced at the screen and went still.
[Meilin]: Our marriage certificate is ready for pickup. Try not to look like someone died.
His ears flooded with heat, an entirely different kind of panic. He locked the screen.
Anqi raised an eyebrow. "Problem?"
"Spam," he lied, too quickly.
"Your face is very emotionally invested in that spam."
He cleared his throat, reaching for his bag. "I have to go to the bank before it closes. Your quarterly reports are in your inbox. Read them. Slowly. Like a normal person."
She waved him away. "Text me if the bank tries to give you another credit card."
"They won't," he said, and it came out a little too dry. "They've memorized my 'I am already drowning in debt, please don't hand me a brick' speech."
As he walked away, he felt the weight of a different debt pressing at his ribs—the one he owed her, the years of loyalty and secrets, now tangled with a marriage she could never know about.
He stepped into the elevator, exhaled, and messaged back.
[To: Meilin]: On my way.
The elevator doors slid shut on his reflection: tie slightly crooked, hair damp at the temples, eyes ringed with a fatigue that knew too much.
On the third basement level of the civil affairs office, the air smelled of disinfectant and old paper. Fluorescent lights hummed. Couples queued with documents and hesitant smiles. The digital number display ticked upward at an infuriatingly slow pace.
Li Meilin stood near the far wall, oversized sunglasses perched on top of her head despite the lack of sun, a beige trench coat cinched dramatically at the waist. Even in this unflattering light, she looked like a magazine cover that had accidentally wandered into bureaucracy.
When she saw Jinyu, annoyance flashed first, quickly disguised as something sharper. "You're late," she said.
"You're early," he countered, glancing at the number display. "We still have twenty digits to go."
"I have a live tomorrow. I can't afford to stand under these lights any longer than necessary." She flicked invisible dust off her sleeve. "My skin is already crying."
"You posted a bare-faced skincare routine video yesterday," he said. "Your skin has sponsorship-level resilience."
Her lips twitched despite herself. "Flattery won't make this less stupid."
"I'm not trying to flatter you," he said. "I'm trying to make sure you don't bolt."
Her gaze sharpened. For a moment, beneath the practiced boldness, he saw the tremor—fear, not of him, but of the headlines that would explode if their one night turned into a scandal.
He thought of the zeros on his parents' hospital bills. Of the way his mother's hands had shaken when she'd apologized for needing his help again.
Chaos-contract. That was what Meilin had called it in the hotel room, mascara smudged, hair a mess, eyes blazing through the hangover.
"You need money. I need this quiet. We're both desperate enough to be useful to each other. Let's formalize our bad decisions."
Now, in the antiseptic corridor, the word marriage sounded less like chaos and more like a sentence.
"You're sure you want to do this?" he asked, low enough that only she could hear.
Her chin lifted, stubborn. "I won't let one mistake ruin what I've built."
"You mean your brand," he said.
She hesitated. "I mean my life."
Their number was called. The clerk barely looked up, sliding forms toward them, asking routine questions in a bored monotone.
"Have you fully understood the relevant laws and regulations regarding marriage?"
Meilin's fingers tightened around the pen. She looked at Jinyu.
"Have you?" she asked.
He thought of Anqi's face if she ever found out. The betrayal she would feel, not because he'd married, but because he'd hidden it. He thought of Li Xian, the man he'd quietly resented for years, now suddenly tied to him by law.
He thought of choice, and how sometimes it was just another name for necessity.
"Yes," he said.
"I have," Meilin echoed.
They signed.
The clerk stamped.
Red ink bled into white paper, turning them into something official, something that could not be undone with a hangover cure.
As they stepped back into the corridor, certificate folder in hand, Meilin exhaled in a rush. "Okay," she said. "Ground rules."
"I thought we already had those," he said.
"Additional ones," she replied. "One: Anqi can't know. Not for at least a year. Two: my followers can't know. Three—"
"Three," he interrupted, "we don't treat this like it's real."
She went very still. "Obviously."
"Good," he said, even as something in his chest protested at the word obvious. "Because the last thing either of us needs is more complicated feelings."
For a second, her eyes searched his, too direct. Then she slipped her sunglasses back into place, armor reassembled.
"Come on, husband," she said, the word half-mockery, half-dare. "I need to buy you a better suit. If we're going to fake this, we'll do it in style."
Back in her office, Anqi moved Li Xian's email into a folder labeled "Closed Projects." Her hand hovered over the mouse.
She could leave it. Archive. Move on.
Instead, she opened one of their older threads.
Her cursor skimmed past blueprints and attached files to a message from almost two years ago.
[From: Li Xian]
Subject: Re: Client insists on indoor waterfall. Help.
If you let them do it, the maintenance costs will eat their profits alive. But if you absolutely can't dissuade them, I've attached three designs that minimize damage. Option C is my favorite—it hides the filtration system in a way that makes it look intentional, not like a compromise.
P.S. You forgot to eat dinner yesterday. I left tea and buns on your desk. Don't argue with free carbs.
She stared at the line about dinner until it blurred.
He had always left small things: umbrellas at the door before it rained, chargers in meeting rooms, sticky notes on her monitor reminding her to breathe. Presence, threaded so tightly through her days she'd stopped distinguishing it from her own routine.
Now, her desk was bare. No stray cup with his precise handwriting labeling the brew time. No jacket over the back of the visitor's chair.
The quiet had grown edges. She could feel it, pressing.
Her phone buzzed. A new message from an unknown number.
[Mysterious ID]: Debts collect interest, Ms. Sheng. Emotional. Financial. You've been very efficient at ignoring both.
Her spine stiffened. "Who is this?" she typed back.
Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.
[Mysterious ID]: You'll find out soon enough. Start by checking who bought the land opposite your QTech site.
The city outside pulsed on, oblivious. Neon bled into rain-slick streets, car horns stitched a distant, impatient rhythm.
Somewhere amid that glow, Li Xian walked alone along a narrow alley toward a late-night noodle shop he'd discovered last year but never had time to visit. His hands were in his pockets, collar turned up against the drizzle.
He paused at the intersection, a familiar crossroads he had always taken to turn toward the subway station closest to Anqi's building.
Tonight, he turned the other way.
The weight of his absence, like gravity, pulled at the spaces he left behind.