POV: Liang Meiyu |
---
She was already in the kitchen when morning came.
This was not unusual. What was unusual was that she had not slept — not truly, not in the way that counted — and yet she stood at the counter in the early grey light looking perfectly composed, because composure was the first thing she put on in the mornings, before the kettle boiled, before the city woke, before she allowed herself to think about anything at all.
The coffee maker ran its cycle.
She poured two cups.
She stood at the window and drank hers and watched Shanghai assemble itself out of the dark the way it did every morning — reluctantly at first, then all at once, the skyline sharpening into clarity like a photograph developing in real time. She had always loved this hour. The city at its most honest, before it remembered to perform.
She did not think about the name.
She was very good at not thinking about things.
---
He came into the kitchen at six-fifteen.
Dark suit. Different cufflinks — the silver ones today instead of the gold, which meant he had a formal meeting with someone whose opinion he valued. She noticed this the way she noticed everything about him — automatically, involuntarily, the way your eyes adjusted to light without being asked to.
"Morning," he said.
"Good morning." She did not look at him directly. "Coffee is on the island."
He picked up his cup. Drank. Scrolled his phone.
She turned back to the window.
The skyline was gold now, the sun having decided, as it always eventually did, to commit. A flock of birds crossed the upper frame of the glass — small and swift and gone before she could have said what kind they were. She watched the empty sky where they had been.
"I'll be late again tonight," he said.
"Alright."
"There's a client dinner. Pudong side."
She nodded, still at the window. She did not ask which client. She had stopped asking about the specifics of his evenings approximately two years ago, when she had understood that the specifics were not something he intended to share and that asking for them made something in the air between them go tight and uncomfortable in a way that served neither of them.
She heard him set the cup down.
She heard him pick up his keys.
And then — a pause. Briefer than a breath, but she caught it, because she caught everything, because five years of loving someone who moved through you like you were furniture had made her exquisitely attuned to the smallest variations in his presence.
He said — "You should eat something."
She looked at him then.
He was already looking at his phone again.
"I will," she said.
The door closed.
She stood in the kitchen for a moment, holding her cup with both hands, looking at the space where he had been. Then she looked at his cup — half-full, as always, as ever, the precise amount of a man who took what he needed and moved on without considering what he left behind.
She picked it up. Poured it down the drain.
Washed it.
Dried it.
Put it away.
---
Her phone rang at eight-thirteen.
She was in the study by then, sitting at the small desk by the window with her surgical journals open and her reading glasses on — the ones she only wore when she was alone — and a half-eaten piece of toast going cold beside her elbow. She saw the name on the screen and felt something loosen slightly in her chest.
Bai Ruoqing.
She picked up on the second ring.
"Tell me everything." Ruoqing's voice came through the phone like weather — immediate, surrounding, impossible to be neutral about. In the background, Meiyu could hear the particular ambient noise of Shanghai Central's nursing station — the soft beeping of monitors, distant voices, the percussion of a hospital morning. "And don't say *everything is fine* because I will come over there and personally—"
"Good morning, Ruoqing."
"Don't *good morning* me. I heard about Shen Yuexi." A pause, loaded with the specific energy of someone who has been restraining themselves and has now decided to stop. "She's back. She landed yesterday, Li Wei from the cardiology department saw her at Xintiandi last night, she was with — Meiyu. Are you listening?"
"I'm listening."
"She was with Zihan."
The study was very quiet. Outside the window, a pigeon had landed on the railing and was regarding the city with the blank authority of a creature that had decided long ago that the city belonged to it.
"I know," Meiyu said.
"You *know.*"
"He mentioned she was coming back." She kept her voice the same temperature it always was — the kind of even that took practice, that had taken years. "It isn't a surprise."
"Meiyu." Ruoqing's voice dropped, lost its percussive energy, became something quieter and more dangerous. The voice she used when she was genuinely worried rather than performatively outraged, and the difference mattered. "Talk to me."
She looked at the pigeon on the railing. It shifted its weight, ruffled its feathers, settled.
"He said her name," Meiyu said. "In his sleep. Last night."
Silence.
Then — "I'm coming over."
"You're working."
"I'm on break in four hours—"
"Ruoqing." She said her name the way you said it when you needed someone to stop moving toward you, not because you didn't want them close but because you needed to hold yourself together using only your own hands and the addition of someone else's kindness would make that impossible. "I'm fine."
"You're not fine."
"I'm not not fine." She paused. Considered. "I think I just — heard a thing I already knew. Out loud. For the first time."
"That's not a small thing."
"No," she agreed. "It isn't."
The pigeon on the railing took off without warning — there one moment, gone the next, the railing empty and ordinary as if it had never been there. She watched the empty space.
"He's just tired," she said. "People say strange things when they sleep."
The words came out correctly shaped. They had the right weight, the right texture, the kind of reasonable tone that made things sound like conclusions rather than deflections. She was aware, as she said them, that they were neither true nor untrue — that they existed in the specific territory of things you said not because you believed them but because saying the alternative out loud would make it real in a way you were not yet ready for.
Ruoqing was quiet for a moment.
"How long," she said finally. Not a question, exactly. More like someone laying something down carefully, giving you the option to pick it up or leave it.
Meiyu didn't answer immediately.
She closed her surgical journal. Took off her reading glasses. Set them on the desk beside the cold toast.
"Leave it, Ruoqing," she said gently.
"I can't leave it. You're my best friend and you're—"
"I know what I am." She said it quietly, without heat. "I know exactly where I am. I just — I need you to leave it. For now."
Another silence. Longer.
Then Ruoqing exhaled — a long, controlled breath that contained, Meiyu knew, approximately forty-seven things she was choosing not to say. This was its own kind of love, and she felt it the way you felt sun through glass — warm, real, slightly removed.
"Fine," Ruoqing said. "But I'm bringing dumplings on Friday."
"You don't have to—"
"I wasn't asking." A beat. "Pork and cabbage or pork and chive?"
"Chive."
"Good choice." Her voice had shifted back to its usual register — brisk and warm, the tone of someone who had rerouted their concern into logistics because logistics were something they could act on. "Eat your breakfast. I can tell from your voice you haven't eaten properly."
"I had toast."
"That's not breakfast, that's a suggestion. Call me tonight."
"I will."
"Meiyu."
"Yes."
"You deserve—" She stopped. Started again. "You just deserve better. That's all I'm going to say."
Meiyu was quiet for a moment.
"Go back to work," she said. "You'll be late from your break."
"I'm already late." But she heard the smile in it — reluctant, fond, the smile of someone who knew when they were being redirected and loved you enough to let it happen. "Call me tonight."
"Tonight," Meiyu agreed.
She hung up.
---
She sat at the desk for a while after.
Not thinking, exactly. Or thinking in the way that isn't really thinking — where your mind goes somewhere quiet and grey and just sits there, not processing, not concluding, simply existing in the space between one thing and whatever comes next.
The study was her favorite room in the penthouse. It was the smallest room — a fact she suspected was why she loved it — and it had the best light, east-facing and honest, and it smelled of books and the faint cedar of the built-in shelves. Zihan never came in here. This was not by design, simply by the way of a man who had no interest in the room and therefore no interest in what the room contained.
She had arranged it herself, in the first weeks of the marriage, before she had understood the shape of the life she was arranging herself into. She had put her books on the shelves in the order she preferred. She had hung one small painting — a watercolor of a Suzhou canal that had belonged to her mother — above the desk. She had set the reading lamp at the precise angle that her eyes needed for long reading sessions.
It was the only room in the penthouse that was entirely hers.
She looked at the wardrobe on the left wall.
Dark wood. Simple latch. Locked, though the key was not hidden anywhere complicated — simply in the small ceramic dish on the desk, where she could see it at all times.
She crossed the room and opened it.
Inside — neatly organized, as everything she owned was neatly organized — her other life. The white coat with the embroidered letters. Her surgical case notes in labeled folders. A framed photograph that she kept here and not anywhere else in the apartment — herself in a hospital corridor, laughing at something someone off-camera had said, wearing scrubs, her hair escaping its tie, looking so comprehensively like herself that even she found it startling sometimes.
She had been twenty-three in that photograph. Two years before the marriage. Two years before she had begun, in small increments she hadn't noticed until they accumulated, the work of making herself less.
She looked at the photograph for a long time.
Then she looked at the phone in her hand.
The French number.
*Dr. L. My name is Henri Beaumont.*
She had looked him up the previous night, in the small hours when sleep wasn't coming and the name in the dark had made the penthouse feel very large. Henri Beaumont was not a name you looked up and found ordinary. He was the head of surgical innovation at the Beaumont Institute in Paris, which he had founded twenty years ago and which had produced, in the interim, six Fellows who had gone on to transform their respective fields. He published in journals she respected. He was the kind of surgeon who made other excellent surgeons feel usefully humbled.
He had been looking for her.
She stood in front of the open wardrobe holding her phone and thought about that — the specific, foreign sensation of being looked for. Of someone having noticed her particular quality of work and decided, deliberately, that they wanted more of it. That they had looked at what she did and seen not a curiosity, not an anomaly, but someone worth pursuing.
She opened the message.
Read it again.
Then she opened a new message, typed a number, and lifted the phone to her ear.
It rang twice.
"*Allô?*"
"Dr. Beaumont," she said. Her voice was steady. It was always steady. "This is Dr. L. I apologize for the delay in returning your call."
A pause — and then a sound that was almost a laugh, warm and relieved, the sound of someone who had been waiting for something and had begun to suspect it wasn't coming.
"*Dr. L,*" he said, in accented Mandarin that was careful and genuine. "*I had almost given up.*"
"I needed some time to think."
"*Of course. Have you finished thinking?*"
She looked at the photograph on the wardrobe shelf. The woman laughing in the corridor, hair escaping, completely herself.
"Not entirely," she said. "But I wanted to hear what you had to say."
---
She was still on the phone when she heard, distantly, from the kitchen — the sound of the front door.
Zihan, home for something he had forgotten. She heard the brief sounds of retrieval — a folder from the study entrance shelf, probably, he was always leaving documents — and then footsteps returning toward the door.
Then they stopped.
A pause.
She stayed very still, phone pressed to her ear, listening to Dr. Beaumont describe Paris in October, the fellowship structure, the cases she would see.
The footsteps resumed.
The door closed.
He had not knocked. Had not called her name. Had moved through the apartment and back out of it without needing to know where she was, and she stood in her small study with her wardrobe open and her photograph on the shelf and a French surgeon in her ear, and she thought —
*Six months ago, that would have hurt.*
*Today it simply — is.*
She turned back to the window. Outside, the sky was fully bright now, high and clear and the particular shade of blue that Shanghai produced in the late morning when the weather was cooperating — almost aggressive in its clarity, like a thing insisting on being seen.
"Tell me more about the cases," she said into the phone.
And she listened.
---
At six in the evening, Zihan called.
She was in the kitchen, making dinner out of habit — for one, though she only acknowledged this after she'd already begun.
"Don't wait for dinner," he said. "The client meeting is running long."
"Alright." She stirred the pot. "I'll save you something."
A pause. Brief.
"You don't have to."
She looked at the steam rising from the pot.
"I know," she said. "I will anyway."
She hung up. Turned the heat down. Set a covered plate aside in the refrigerator with the automatic care of someone whose hands knew this particular kindness so well they performed it independent of whatever the rest of her had decided.
Then she sat at the kitchen table alone and ate her dinner while the city turned dark outside the window, and she thought about Paris in October, and fellowship structures, and cases she hadn't seen yet.
And she thought — *not yet.*
*But maybe.*
*Maybe soon.*