Lin Yao POV
The wine stain was not going to come out easily.
Lin Yao knew this the moment Tang Mother's guest knocked over the glass with a careless elbow, a dramatic gasp, and then twelve pairs of eyes looking down at the carpet like it had personally offended them. Nobody moved to help. Nobody called for a cloth.
They all looked at Lin Yao.
He was already getting up.
That was his life in this house. He was already getting up before anyone asked. Already cleaning before anyone pointed. Already invisible before anyone decided not to see him.
He carried the bucket from the kitchen and got on his knees beside the table. The dinner party continued above him like he was a piece of furniture that had learned to scrub.
"Who is that?" one of the guests asked. A woman in a red dress, pearl earrings, and a voice as if she had never once been told no.
Tang Mother laughed. It was the laugh she saved for questions with easy answers.
"Just the live-in husband," she said. "Good for cleaning and nothing else."
The table laughed. All twelve of them. Some louder than others, some politely, but all of them laughing.
Lin Yao kept scrubbing.
He did not look up. He did not tighten his jaw. He did not let a single thing show on his face because his face was not his own in this house; it was a mask he had worn for twenty-two months, and he was very, very good at wearing it.
Just two more weeks, he thought. Two more weeks.
His phone buzzed in his pocket.
He sat back on his heels, pulled out the phone, and angled the screen so nobody above him could see it.
The message was from a number listed in his contacts as Building Manager.
Q3 revenue report confirmed. Lin Group net profit up 14% year on year. All divisions operating above projection. Awaiting your instructions, sir.
Lin Yao read it once. He typed back two words.
Approved. Proceed.
He put the phone in his pocket and went back to scrubbing.
Above him, Tang Mother was telling the woman in the red dress about her brother's new investment deal. Around him, crystal glasses clinked and silverware scraped expensive plates. Twelve people eating a dinner that cost more than most families spent in a month, seated at a table in a house that was, on paper, partially his.
Not for much longer.
The stain came out. He gathered the bucket and the cloth and walked toward the kitchen without anyone acknowledging that he had moved, that he had been there at all, that he existed in any meaningful sense.
He was almost at the kitchen door when he heard the heels.
Light steps, quick and certain. He knew that walk the way you know a sound you've heard every night for almost two years.
Tang Shu came down the staircase.
Lin Yao stopped.
She was dressed for somewhere important, a deep green that made her look like she had somewhere to be and someone worth being there for. Her hair was pinned up. She was wearing the earrings her father gave her for her birthday, the small gold ones she only wore when she wanted to feel like herself.
She did not look at him.
She walked past him in the hallway, three feet of distance, two seconds of proximity, and he watched her go and felt something he had spent twenty-two months training himself not to feel.
She was going to a dinner he had not been invited to.
She had not even checked if he was there.
He stood in the hallway with a dirty bucket in his hand and watched her pull on her coat by the front door. He opened his mouth.
He almost said her name.
He closed his mouth.
Two more weeks, he thought. Keep the mask on for two more weeks.
The front door closed behind her.
Later, when the dinner party was winding down, and Tang Mother's guests were drifting toward the exit with their coats and their comfortable lives, Lin Yao sat at the kitchen table alone and ate the meal he had prepared for himself from whatever was left over after the main dinner had been served.
Rice. One dish. Tea.
He ate slowly. He was not hungry. He ate because he needed to stay sharp, and sharp people ate regularly, and Lin Yao had built his entire life on staying sharp.
His phone buzzed again.
This time, it was not the Building Manager. This was a different number from his grandfather's personal assistant. Old Master Lin never called unless something had moved.
The message read: Document confirmed received. Last piece in place. Sir, we are ready when you are.
Lin Yao set down his chopsticks.
He read the message again.
Twenty-two months. Four hundred and seventy days of scrubbing floors and being laughed at and eating leftover rice in this kitchen while twelve floors of the city's most powerful building ran on his instructions. Four hundred and seventy days of watching and waiting and building the case document by document, transfer record by transfer record, until the evidence was so airtight that not even the best lawyers' money could ruin a family that would be able to find a gap.
It was ready.
He was ready.
He typed back: Two weeks. Then we move.
He put the phone away. He looked at the kitchen around him, the good pots Tang Mother never let him use, the photograph of the Tang family on the wall that he was not in, the hook by the door where Tang Shu's spare key used to hang before she stopped leaving it there.
Two more weeks of this.
He could do two more weeks.
He picked up his chopsticks and finished his rice.
At eleven-thirty, he heard the front door open.
Tang Shu was home.
He heard her pause in the hallway, the specific sound of someone stopping, checking, noticing something. Maybe the carpet is clean. Maybe the bucket he had left neatly by the door.
He heard her footsteps go up the stairs.
He heard them stop outside the kitchen.
A pause. Three seconds, maybe four.
Then her footsteps continued to her room, and her door clicked shut, and that was that.
Lin Yao sat at the kitchen table in the quiet house.
He thought about the pause.
Three seconds was a long time to stop outside a kitchen door.
He told himself it meant nothing. He told himself he was reading into shadows because he was tired and two weeks felt long tonight.
He stood up, washed his bowl, and went to bed.
He did not think about the green dress. He did not think about the gold earrings. He did not think about three seconds outside a kitchen door.
He almost managed it.
The next morning, he woke up to find an envelope on the kitchen table.
His name was written on the front in Tang Shu's handwriting.
He had never seen her write his name before.
He stood in the kitchen in the early morning light and stared at it for a long time before he picked it up.