Zhang Wei returned ten minutes later carrying a small velvet box, which he set on the desk in front of Liuxian before withdrawing without a word, which was unusual enough that Liuxian noted it.
He opened the box.
Two rings, sitting side by side. Clean, elegant, well made. He had ordered them on a quiet impulse earlier in the week, before the arranged marriage he had been dodging had forced his hand, before a stranger with brown eyes and a completely unreasonable amount of nerve had walked across a government office and changed the shape of his day.
He thought about Guiying's hands.
Long fingers, well shaped, the kind of hands that drew the eye without the owner seeming aware of it. The rings would look good on him. He was fairly certain of that.
He closed the box and set it aside.
His phone screen showed the total of the day's deductions. He scrolled through them slowly, tallying the purchases in his head. Electronics, clothes, decor, miscellaneous items that became harder to categorize toward the end of the list. It was a substantial amount by any ordinary measure. By his measure it was not particularly significant.
He had not bought the Patek.
He had also not crossed a million yuan.
Liuxian looked at the total for a moment and thought that for a man who had spent twenty three years being treated as though he was worth nothing, Xue Guiying had exercised a restraint that was either deeply habitual or quietly deliberate. He was not sure which one was more telling.
He looked at the time.
Five o'clock. Closing hours had come and gone without him particularly noticing, which was not unusual. What was unusual was that he noticed it today.
He thought about the look on Guiying's face when the Xue family had been mentioned at the bureau. The way his expression had shifted, just slightly, beneath the composure he wore so carefully. That particular quality of stillness that was not calm but was performing calm, the way a person went still when something moved too close to painful.
Shen Zihao's name had done the same thing.
Just what had they done to him? What did time in that household, and the years before it, look like on the inside of a person? Guiying carried it well. Almost too well. The kind of well that took a long time to learn.
Liuxian gathered his documents, closed the files on his desk, and reached for his jacket.
He was going home early. He could not remember the last time he had done that voluntarily.
His car was waiting in the basement garage. He got in, set the velvet box on the seat beside him, and looked out the window as the city began to move past in the early evening light.
He was going home to meet the stranger he had married. A man ten years younger, from a family that had used him as a punching bag for as long as he could remember, with no backing, no allies, and nothing but a bag of documents and whatever he had managed to order on a tablet in the course of an afternoon.
An illegitimate child with a silver spoon nowhere in sight.
Liuxian looked out at the city and thought about that. About how a person could be born into a household of means and still grow up like someone raised in poverty, not the financial kind but the other kind, the kind that left marks on the inside. The kind that showed up in the way a person flinched at a raised voice, or went carefully still when a name was mentioned, or looked at an open car door like they had never seen one before.
How unfair life could be.
How reliably it found the people who had done nothing to deserve it.
The car turned through the familiar gates and rolled up the driveway.
Liuxian picked up the velvet box, got out of the car, and walked toward the front door.
The entrance hall was quiet when Liuxian stepped through the front door. Wang Chengli appeared almost immediately, as he always did, with the punctual reliability of someone who had spent years anticipating arrivals.
"Welcome home, Young Master."
The rest of the staff within earshot echoed the greeting, Mrs. Chen from the direction of the corridor, Old Li briefly visible through the kitchen doorway, Meimei and Rourou pausing at the foot of the stairs.
Liuxian handed his jacket to Wang Chengli. "Where is he?"
"Master Xue is in his room, Young Master. He has been there since after lunch, aside from a brief walk in the garden." Wang Chengli paused. "His deliveries began arriving at three. He was very pleased about the snacks."
Liuxian looked at him for a moment, then headed for the stairs.
The door to Guiying's room was open.
Liuxian stopped in the doorway.
Guiying was sitting at the small desk near the window, surrounded by the evidence of an afternoon well spent. A new laptop was open in front of him, already set up and running, and beside it sat what appeared to be his old device, which he was using simultaneously as a secondary screen.
Several of the delivered packages had been opened and neatly sorted. The bear slippers were on his feet. A half eaten bag of mixed nuts sat within arm's reach.
He had not noticed Liuxian in the doorway.
His attention was entirely on the screens in front of him, his expression carrying the particular focused stillness of someone working through something that required concentration. Liuxian looked at the screen over his shoulder.
Shares.
Startup companies, small ones, early stage, the kind that most people dismissed without a second glance because the risk was high and the returns were not guaranteed.
He was moving through them with quiet efficiency, pulling up data, comparing figures, making notes in a document open in the corner of his screen.
He was not browsing.
He was buying.
Liuxian studied the companies he had selected.
Bold choices.
Not reckless, from what he could see, but bold in the particular way of someone who had looked at a company's foundations rather than its current numbers and made a judgment call about where it was heading rather than where it currently stood.
Did he genuinely believe these companies were going to amount to something in the near future?
More importantly, where did an illegitimate child from the Xue household learn to read startup data like this?
"Why not buy some noteworthy shares as well?" Liuxian said.
Guiying's hands stopped moving.
He turned around slowly, and for just a fraction of a second, before his composure reassembled itself, something flickered across his face at the realization that someone had been standing behind him long enough to see exactly what he was doing.
He looked at Liuxian. Then at the screen.
Then back at Liuxian.
"How long have you been standing there?" he asked.