POV: Liang Meiyu |
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The Gu family held dinner on the first and third Thursday of every month.
This was not a tradition so much as a mandate — handed down by Madam Gu with the quiet, absolute authority of a woman who had spent forty years ensuring that authority was never questioned. The dinners were held at the family estate in Xuhui, a house that was older than most of the buildings surrounding it and carried itself accordingly. Heavy wooden furniture. Ink paintings behind glass. The particular smell of sandalwood and expensive restraint.
Meiyu had attended thirty-eight of these dinners.
Alone.
---
She arrived at seven, as she always did, because Madam Gu considered seven o'clock the only acceptable arrival time — early was anxious, late was disrespectful, and both reflected poorly on a woman's upbringing. Meiyu had once arrived at seven-oh-three due to a traffic incident on Huaihai Road and had received a single look from her mother-in-law that she had not forgotten.
The housekeeper, Old Chen, opened the door before she could knock. He was seventy-one years old and had worked in this house since before Zihan was born, and he was one of perhaps four people in Meiyu's current life who looked at her with something she could only describe as genuine warmth.
"Mrs. Gu." He took her coat. "You look well."
"Thank you, Old Chen. How is your knee?"
"Complaining, as usual." He smiled. "Madam is in the sitting room."
"And Mr. Gu?"
The smallest pause. Barely a breath.
"Mr. Gu sends his apologies. He was detained at the office."
"Of course," Meiyu said. "Thank you."
She had known before she asked. She had known when she left the penthouse, and perhaps before that — when he had said *don't wait up for dinner* that morning in the kitchen, there had been something in it, some particular quality of dismissal that she had become, over five years, expert at reading. He would not be at dinner. He was rarely at dinner. She came anyway, because not coming would create a problem larger than the one already present, and Meiyu had always been efficient about choosing which difficulties to absorb.
She straightened her dress — deep blue, understated, the kind of thing Madam Gu approved of — and walked toward the sitting room.
---
Madam Gu was arranged on the high-backed chair she preferred, the one that had belonged to her own mother-in-law and which she had inherited along with the house and the mandate and the particular expression she wore when receiving people she found satisfactory. She did not find Meiyu satisfactory. This had been established early and maintained consistently, with the discipline of someone who believed that certain standards, once set, should never be relaxed.
"Meiyu." She did not rise.
"Madam Gu." Meiyu crossed the room, took both of her mother-in-law's hands in hers, and pressed them gently — the greeting the older woman preferred. "You look rested."
"I am never rested." Madam Gu withdrew her hands and gestured at the chair across from her. "Sit. Tea is coming."
Meiyu sat.
The room was warm, over-warm in the way of houses belonging to older people who have decided that comfort is a right they have earned, and the lamps were amber-toned and cast everything in a light that should have felt welcoming. Meiyu folded her hands in her lap and waited.
"Zihan is working," Madam Gu said. Not a question. Not an apology.
"He mentioned he had a long day."
"He works very hard." She said this the way one might say the sky is blue — as established fact, requiring no elaboration, offering no opening. "A man in his position carries considerable responsibility."
"He does."
The tea arrived — brought by a junior housekeeper who set it down carefully and disappeared. Meiyu poured for Madam Gu first, then for herself, measuring the angle of the pot with the unconscious precision of someone who had done this enough times that her hands knew the ritual without consulting her mind.
Madam Gu watched her pour.
"You haven't been to Dr. Huang," she said.
Meiyu set the teapot down. "I've been busy."
"I made the appointment for you. Three weeks ago."
"I know. I apologize. I'll reschedule."
"It has been five years, Meiyu." Madam Gu lifted her cup, not drinking, simply holding it. "A specialist should have been consulted long before now. There are treatments. Options. If the problem is on your end—"
"I'll reschedule the appointment," Meiyu said.
Her voice was even. Her hands were still in her lap. She looked at her mother-in-law with an expression that was attentive and composed and revealed nothing of the particular quality of silence she was maintaining inside herself — the kind of silence that had weight, that had texture, that she had built up over five years the way you built a wall, one careful stone at a time.
Madam Gu studied her for a moment with the sharp, assessing eyes that had made her formidable in certain Shanghai social circles for four decades.
Then she said — "I only want what is best for this family."
"I know," Meiyu said. "More tea?"
---
Dinner was served in the formal dining room at a table that seated twelve and tonight held two.
The food was good — it was always good, Madam Gu employed an excellent cook — and Meiyu ate with appetite because she had learned that not eating at these dinners was interpreted as either illness or criticism and she intended to communicate neither. She asked about Madam Gu's charity committee. She listened to a detailed account of a disagreement involving the seating arrangement at a recent fundraising luncheon. She offered an opinion when one was sought and withheld it when one was not.
She was very good at this.
She had been good at it for so long that she sometimes could not remember if she had always been good at it or if goodness at this particular thing was something she had built, specifically, for this house.
"Yifan came by last week," Madam Gu said, somewhere between the fish course and the soup.
"How is he?"
"Loud. As always." But there was a softness when she said it — Gu Yifan was the one person in the family who could make Madam Gu's severity relax slightly at the edges, which Meiyu had always found both telling and almost endearing. "He asked about you."
Meiyu looked up. "Did he?"
"He said—" Madam Gu paused, with the expression of someone relaying a message they found mildly absurd. "He said to tell you that he still thinks you make the best hongshao rou in Shanghai and that Zihan doesn't deserve it." She set down her chopsticks. "I don't know why he says things like that."
"He's kind," Meiyu said. "He means well."
"He's a nuisance." But she almost smiled. "He's coming to next month's dinner. You should make sure Zihan is here for that one, at least."
"I'll remind him."
She would remind him. She would put it in his calendar, send him a message three days before and one the morning of, and she would do this not because she believed it would change the outcome but because the act of reminding was the act of someone who still participated in the maintenance of their own marriage, and she was not yet ready to stop doing that.
She was not sure what she was ready for.
She thought briefly, unwillingly, of the message on her phone. The French number. *Henri Beaumont.* She had not called it back. She had not deleted it either.
"You're distracted," Madam Gu said.
"I'm sorry." Meiyu refocused. "I was thinking about a patient."
It was the truest lie she knew how to tell.
---
She drove herself home at nine-thirty.
The penthouse was dark when she arrived — she had not left lights on because she had not expected to want them — and she moved through it in the dim spillage from the city outside, which was always enough. Forty-three floors of Shanghai at night cast a glow that made artificial lights feel redundant.
She changed out of the blue dress. Washed off the dinner, the careful posture, the tea-pouring hands.
Then she got into bed.
Her side.
The Gu penthouse master bedroom had a bed that was large enough to sleep four comfortably. She occupied the left side. He occupied the right. The middle ground between them was a territory neither crossed — not with intention, simply by a kind of unspoken mutual agreement that had established itself so gradually she could not have named the moment it became permanent.
There was a lamp on her bedside table and a stack of books and her medical journals, the ones she read openly because they could be explained away as a curious housewife's hobby, and the other ones, the surgical case studies and research papers, that she kept in the study in the wardrobe that was not his.
She opened a novel. Read the same paragraph four times.
Closed it.
She lay in the dark and listened to the city and did not think about the dinner or Madam Gu's appointment or the empty chair across the long table. She tried not to think about the way Old Chen had paused — that single breath of a pause — before telling her that Zihan had been detained.
The detained thing.
She had once asked him, in the second year, where he went on the evenings he did not come home. He had looked at her with a kind of measured patience, the way you looked at something that had raised a question you found beside the point, and said — *work, Meiyu. I work.* And she had nodded, because nodding was what you did when you understood that the conversation was finished.
She heard the front door at eleven-forty.
His footsteps in the hallway — she could chart his route through the apartment by sound alone, had done it so many times that it was involuntary now, her ears mapping him without asking her permission. Kitchen. The brief sound of the refrigerator. Then the hallway again. Then the bedroom door.
He moved through the dark without turning on the lamp. She heard him at the wardrobe, then the bathroom, then the quiet sounds of a person preparing for sleep who believed, or chose to believe, that the other person in the room was already there.
He got into bed.
The mattress shifted. Settled.
Silence.
She lay very still on her side and breathed slowly and looked at the ceiling and thought about a cargo ship on the Huangpu moving through the dark toward somewhere she couldn't see, and whether the somewhere was always there before you started moving toward it or whether it only appeared once you were already on your way.
She was almost asleep — or doing a convincing impression of it — when he shifted in the bed.
And then, in the specific, unguarded way of a person who believes they are alone with their own thoughts, he exhaled.
And said a name.
Soft. Low. Not quite a whisper.
*"Yuexi."*
Meiyu lay very still.
Outside, forty-three floors down, the city moved and hummed and continued being the city. The light through the windows was the same light it had always been. The bed was the same bed.
She lay still and breathed and did not move for a very long time.
And then, in the dark, without knowing exactly when she had decided to, she made a sound that was almost nothing — a small, quiet exhale of her own — and closed her eyes.
And smiled.
Not because anything was funny.
But because some expressions, she had learned, were armor.
And she had been wearing this one for so long she had nearly forgotten she had put it on.