Rain arrived sometime before dawn, quiet at first, like someone testing the lock on a door.
By the time the city woke, the glass towers were veiled in a thin gauze of drizzle, neon colors bleeding into one another as if the streets themselves were overworked screens, brightness turned too high.
In Sheng Anqi's apartment, the world was soundless except for the soft, relentless pattering against the windows and the intermittent hum of the refrigerator. The huge, open-plan space looked like a showroom at this hour—perfect sectional, curated art, a kitchen island with a bowl of fruit that never seemed to rot because she never had time to eat it.
On the coffee table: three empty coffee cans, the silver laptop at a low battery warning, and her phone, facedown, as if in disgrace.
She had not slept so much as shut down in fragments. Every time she surfaced, she groped mechanically for the phone—the habit of years, searching for the name that sat at the top of too many message threads.
His name was no longer there.
She had archived it.
Not blocked, not deleted. Archived, like an old file: still existing, just… not visible by default.
Her chest tightened. It was ludicrous—she was the one who had drawn that line, sealed the boundary. She had given him back everything he hoarded quietly for her—schedules, reminders, small invisibilities. His resignation had been an act of clemency. She had wanted the clean break. No more living under the weight of his unasked-for devotion.
Still, the emptiness where his daily presence had once been felt less like freedom and more like someone had stripped out a load-bearing wall and told her the ceiling would hold just fine.
Anqi pushed herself upright. The room swam, then steadied.
Work.
Work was scaffolding. Numbers and projections, market flows and risk matrices—things that did what you told them to, within margins that could be quantified.
She padded to the kitchen. Opened the cabinet. Stared.
There was no coffee.
Of course there wasn't.
She remembered—vaguely—that the bag had been almost empty last week. She had meant to order more. The errand had folded behind a dozen others.
Usually, there would have been a fresh bag waiting in the second shelf, beside the filters. He never mentioned it; he simply refilled the invisible pantry that was her life.
She shut the cabinet slowly.
"You are not going to unravel over caffeine," she told the silent kitchen.
Her voice sounded unfamiliar, scraped raw by sleep and something she refused to name.
Her phone buzzed on the table, a sharp intrusion.
She didn't move.
Two more buzzes. Persistent.
She walked back and flipped the device over with a practiced flick, bracing herself for the familiar name that could not be there anymore.
It was not his.
The caller ID read: Han Jinyu.
Of course.
The timing was almost cruelly precise, as if the universe had synced their emotional failures to the same dawn.
She answered with a clipped, "What."
"No good morning?" Jinyu's voice was dry, like old paper. "The city is weeping dramatically outside your window. At least match its mood."
"You call me at—" she squinted at the corner of the screen, "—6:12 a.m. and you're complaining about courtesy?"
"You didn't answer at midnight," he said. "Or one. Or two. I was starting to wonder if a spreadsheet finally achieved sentience and murdered you."
"I was busy," she lied.
There was a pause on his end long enough for her to hear the hollow echo in it.
"Right," he said. "You were definitely busy."
She heard movement, fabric against fabric, something metallic clinking dully.
He sounded… tired. Not just the standard, overworked analyst tired, but heavier, like he was walking with stones in his pockets.
"What do you want?" she asked, softening the edge by a degree.
"Coffee. Actually, breakfast. More actually, life advice. But let's start with coffee." A breath. "Are you home?"
"Where else would I be at six in the morning, ballroom dancing?" She rubbed the bridge of her nose. "I have a 9 a.m. with the investment committee, a deck that's half done, and no coffee. The universe is conspiring against me. Is that why you called? To witness my suffering?"
"Mm," he said. "Partly. Also—can you open your door?"
She straightened. "What?"
"Your door, Anqi. The one to your very dramatic, very lonely hallway."
There was a knock, faint but unmistakable.
She stared toward the entrance, heartbeat stuttering. Of course he lived fifteen minutes' walk away, in an old building wedged between two biotech firms. Of course he knew her security codes; he'd been the one to help her set them up.
Still, the fact that he was here, now, carved something open in her that she did not want to see.
"Did you just—"
"Come bearing caffeine like some underpaid, underappreciated deity?" His voice came with the ghost of humor. "Yes. Open the door, please, before your neighbors call the police on the suspicious man holding pastries."
"Pastries," she repeated suspiciously.
"Don't pretend you don't like them. I've seen you attack croissants like they insulted your family."
She muted the call and walked to the door, bare feet silent on polished wood.
When she opened it, the hallway light pooled around a familiar figure: Jinyu in a charcoal hoodie under a clean but fraying jacket, hair still damp from the mist, glasses fogged at the edges. In one hand, a cardboard tray holding two coffees; in the other, a paper bag whose grease spots promised carbohydrates and regret.
He looked at her once—oversized T-shirt, thin cotton shorts, sleep-creased face—and then very carefully looked away, as if she were an overexposed photograph.
"You look terrible," he said after a beat, because it was safer than anything else.
"You look like you slept in your clothes," she countered.
"Technically, I never took them off," he murmured, stepping inside when she moved wordlessly aside.
He toed off his shoes, as he always did, lining them up neatly at the edge of the entryway. The gesture scraped raw against some muscle memory: another pair of shoes that used to line up beside guests', polished leather, laces tucked in.
She turned away quickly.
"Kitchen?" he asked, pretending not to notice the way her shoulders tightened.
"Where else," she said. "You think I host company in my bedroom?"
"Not since 2015," he said mildly.
"Shut up, Han Jinyu."
They moved through the apartment like people who had rehearsed this walk a hundred times. Because they had: late nights after university, shared projects, crises with her parents, his failed job interviews. Back then, she had been all sharp elbows and brittle optimism, and he had been the quiet anchor in the background, the one who knew when to talk and when to simply sit nearby and be real.
He set the coffee on the counter island, the bag beside it.
The smell hit her first: dark roast, just shy of burnt, the way she liked it. Not the artisanal single-origin nonsense, but the industrial strength fuel that kept markets turning and people like her upright.
"Bless you," she muttered, already reaching.
"Your deck?" he asked, nodding toward the laptop.
"Half done, like I said." She took a long, scalding sip. The heat unknotted something low in her belly. "I'll finish it."
"Will you?" His tone was light, but his gaze was precise, scanning her face. "When was the last time you slept more than three hours in a row?"
"Stop auditing my personal life."
"Someone has to."
The words slipped out of him too easily. For a second, she saw something like accusation in his eyes—toward someone who was not currently in the room.
Her fingers tightened around the cardboard cup. "Is this about him?"
Silence fell like a blade between them. The air hummed with the rain outside, the refrigerator's low churn, the faint ticking of the clock above her oven.
"If by 'him' you mean the structural support your life recently decided to eject," Jinyu said, "then yes, partly. But it's mostly about you."
"I told you," she said, mouth hardening. "I needed to reset. It was getting… unhealthy."
"For whom?" he asked.
"For me," she snapped. "He was everywhere, Jinyu. Every corner I turned, he was there, doing things I didn't ask for. Fixing things I didn't know were broken. I couldn't breathe without feeling like I owed him interest."
Her voice shook on the last word. She hated that he could hear it.
"So you decided to default," Jinyu said quietly.
Her head whipped toward him. "Don't use your financial metaphors on me."
"They work," he said. "You kept withdrawing. Time, effort, emotional bandwidth. He never once sent the bill. But that doesn't mean there isn't a ledger somewhere, with columns and numbers and a very clear bottom line."
She looked away, jaw clenched.
This was why she could stand his company: he did not worship her, he did not pity her. He audited her.
"You think I don't know that?" she asked, more quietly. "That's exactly the problem. I never asked him to… to build his life around mine. But he did. And suddenly I was responsible for how much that cost him. I don't want to be—"
"Loved?" Jinyu supplied, too gently.
"Indebted," she corrected, eyes flashing. "I don't want to live in a house someone can say they built for me. I don't want to be a project. I don't want to be the reason someone neglects their own life."
Jinyu watched her, something like fatigue mixed with compassion in his gaze.
"And now that he's not here," he said, "does it feel lighter?"
She opened her mouth to say yes.
The word stuck behind her teeth like a lie.
She swallowed coffee instead.
"It feels quieter," she managed.
"Quiet is only nice," he said, "if you're not used to someone humming along in the background."
His choice of metaphor was too pointed. She thought of umbrellas appearing in her bag unasked, chargers tucked into her briefcase, calendars gently rearranged so she never had to sprint from one end of the city to another. All those invisible touchpoints she had filed under "inconvenient affection."
She had wanted silence.
Now the silence had texture. It grated.
"Is this your life advice?" she asked, forcing her voice back to neutral. "Because you're doing a terrible job."
"No," he said. "This is the preface. The life advice is: don't open any social media for the next forty-eight hours."
She blinked. "Why?"
His expression did something complicated and briefly panicked, as if he'd just remembered a landmine he'd left in her path.
"Because the world is cruel and hashtags are worse," he said. "Also, I made a very questionable decision last night."
"Mmm." She chewed on a piece of pastry, eyeing him. "Did you finally download a dating app? Please tell me you didn't put your job title as 'data sorcerer.'"
"That is objectively better than 'influencer,'" he muttered before he could stop himself.
She froze. "Why are we talking about influencers?"
His face went carefully blank, the way it did when a client tried to bait him into breaching confidentiality.
"No reason," he said. "Anyway, are you going to make your 9 a.m.?"
"This isn't over," she warned.
"Unfortunately," he murmured. "I know."
---
Across the river, in a highrise where the rain made soft rivers down spotless glass, Li Xian stood in a conference room that smelled faintly of fresh carpet and machine oil.
He had come in early—old habits died painfully slow. The new firm was sleek and young, all edge and ambition, its lobby a gallery of models and holographic site simulations. He was not here as the founding visionary it courted; he had accepted a position that was almost modest, a senior architect among many.
It felt right. To be one name among others. To be part of something instead of the center of someone.
He stood now before a projection, his own design rotating in luminous lines: a mixed-use complex, residential units stacked like interlocking hands, green terraces spiraling up like a quiet breath threaded through steel.
"It's too generous," the junior partner beside him was saying, tapping a stylus against the diagram. "Look at this setback—these communal spaces. We'll lose leasable square footage."
Li Xian listened. In the past, he would have explained gently that people paid more, in the long term, for spaces that did not suffocate them. That presence mattered—the presence of light, of green, of breathing room.
Today, he only nodded. "We can tighten the footprint," he said. "Shift some of the garden to rooftop. Integrate vertical planters instead of dedicated terraces."
"Good." The partner smiled, brisk and pleased. "You're very… adaptable, Li Xian."
He smiled back, polite and noncommittal. Adaptable. He had been many things in three years: a driver, a secretary, a silent shield. Adaptability had almost killed him.
His phone buzzed on the table, screen lighting with a notification he'd forgotten to mute.
A message, from his sister.
[Meilin]: Are you busy?
He hesitated. In the old rhythm, he would have replied immediately, even in a meeting, thumb flying under the table. Now, he let the moment stretch. Finished his point about facade articulation. Waited until the partner left to take a call.
Then he picked up the phone.
[Li Xian]: In between things. What is it?
The reply came almost instantly, which meant she had been waiting with the chat open.
[Meilin]: Hypothetically, if someone did something *insanely* stupid, how much would you judge them on a scale of 1 to 10?
He frowned.
[Li Xian]: 7. To discourage repetition. What did you do?
Dots blinked, disappeared. Blinked again.
He felt the sensation of threads tightening again, invisible and persistent. His sister. Han Jinyu. The city knitting people together in loops he could not yet see.
[Meilin]: I can't tell you yet. But if my name trends, don't panic.
His jaw tensed.
[Li Xian]: Meilin.
No response. Instead, a link appeared, to a gossip forum he did not frequent but had seen enough times to recognize. He clicked before he could talk himself out of it.
The post was already in the thousands of views: GRAINY PHOTOS: Top influencer Li Meilin seen entering hotel with UNKNOWN MAN… Has she finally been caught?
His stomach dipped, not from scandal, but from familiarity. The other figure, half-turned, head ducked, was blurred by motion and low light.
But Li Xian had known that frame since university, had watched it sit at his kitchen table, quietly folding old bills into neat stacks.
Han Jinyu.
He swallowed, the conference room suddenly too bright, the projected building too sharp.
Presence had weight.
Consequences, too.
His sister was in some kind of trouble. His—former—shadow's best friend was with her. And he was here, in a room of glass and light, pretending his life no longer orbited other people's disasters.
His phone buzzed again.
[Meilin]: I'm handling it. Don't come charging in. Please.
Another thread pulled taut. He exhaled slowly.
For three years, his reflex had been immediate action: fix, solve, preempt. For the past three days, he had been practicing stillness.
He set the phone down.
Far away, in a glossy apartment, Sheng Anqi stared at the half-eaten pastry on her plate, the faint smear of chocolate on her thumb, the empty space on her calendar that used to say: Meeting with Li Xian – project review.
"You're spacing out," Jinyu said quietly from across the island.
She wiped her thumb with unnecessary force. "I'm thinking."
"About what?"
She almost said, About the quiet.
Instead, she said, "About the cost of debt."
"Emotional or financial?" He smiled without humor. "As your resident nerd, I should warn you: both can ruin your credit."
"Don't be dramatic," she said.
But the rain on the windows sounded very much like a countdown, and somewhere in the city, the man she had pushed away was learning how to occupy the space she had once filled.
The void between them was not empty.
It had edges now.
And every hour she did not move, it grew more real.