Chapter 1: Page Eleven

Xu Yan signed her divorce the way she had signed everything in her marriage: fast, with her phone face down on the counter, between two other things.

There were eleven pages. Shen Zhiqiu had folded down the top corner of every page that needed a signature, a small neat triangle, so Xu Yan wouldn't have to hunt for the line. Zhiqiu's own name was already on each one in blue ink, every stroke finished properly, the way some primary-school teacher had once told her to write and she had never seen a reason to stop.

Window Four of the Civil Affairs Bureau smelled of instant coffee and radiator dust. The clerk wore her reading glasses on a beaded chain. Taped to the counter beside her keyboard was a laminated card: PLEASE TAKE YOUR TIME.

Xu Yan did not take her time.

Page one. Party A: Xu Yan, female, thirty-one years of age. Party B: Shen Zhiqiu, female, thirty-two years of age. Page two, the date of the marriage: seven years ago, this October. Page three. The parties have no children.

She signed, and signed, and signed.

Later she would try to remember whether she had read a single clause. She would lie awake rebuilding the agreement from the shapes of its paragraphs, the way you sometimes recover a phone number from the memory of your own thumb moving across the keypad. It never came back. What she remembered was the scratch of the pen. Her phone buzzing twice against the counter. A thought, very clear and very calm: Twelve minutes here, then the car, then the harbor people at eleven.

Pages four to eight were property. Her lawyer had drafted those, and they were thorough; they had been written for a different kind of wife, one who might want something. The apartment on the river. The shares her father had signed over on the wedding day. The car Zhiqiu had driven for six years and never once called mine. Clause after clause: Party B waives. Party B waives. Party B makes no claim. Zhiqiu had initialed every one.

Page nine.

Page ten had a line of handwriting at the bottom, under the last typed paragraph. Xu Yan's pen was already moving toward the signature, and she read it only because it was in the way.

The osmanthus on the balcony may be thrown away. It does not need to be kept.

She stopped.

It was the only thing in eleven pages that Zhiqiu had written herself, and it was not a request. It was a release. Zhiqiu had looked at the one thing she might have asked for, a potted tree she had carried home from the flower market their first autumn and watered every evening since, and instead of asking for it she had written Xu Yan a permission slip not to bother.

"Is there a problem with page ten?" the clerk asked.

"No."

Zhiqiu, in the plastic chair beside her, said nothing. She sat the way she always sat, back not touching the chair, hands folded on the handbag in her lap. Beige coat. Hair tied low at the nape with a plain black band. No ring. Xu Yan noticed that there was no ring, and then noticed that she had no idea when it had stopped being there.

Page eleven. She signed it.

The clerk gathered the pages, squared them against the counter with two taps, and looked at the two of them over her glasses.

"The cooling-off period has elapsed," she said, in the voice of someone who had said it many thousands of times. "I'm required to ask. Has either party reconsidered?"

"No," said Zhiqiu.

She said it gently. She said it the way she said thank you to waiters and it's no trouble to Xu Yan's father and of course to nearly everything. She didn't look at Xu Yan when she said it. And Xu Yan, who half a minute earlier had been thinking about the harbor people, found that she could not say anything at all.

The clerk waited. Then she stamped two booklets, one after the other, and slid them through the slot.

They were not red.

· · ·

Outside, the steps were wet. It had rained in the night, and the city had the scrubbed, metallic smell it got in late October, when the plane trees started letting go.

Zhiqiu's suitcase was waiting by the door, where a security guard had kept an eye on it. One suitcase. Gray, with a scuffed corner. Xu Yan had seen it before, standing in the hall of the apartment the night Zhiqiu moved in. She had stepped around it on her way to the airport.

"I've arranged a car," Xu Yan said. It came out sounding like a meeting.

"Thank you, but I've called one." Zhiqiu checked her phone. "It's two minutes away."

She put the phone in her pocket and stood holding the suitcase handle, and for a moment they were just two women on the steps of a government building with a gap between them about the width of a person.

"Xu Yan."

"Mm."

"The housekeeper comes Tuesdays and Fridays. Her number's on the fridge, in case you've lost it. The building management fee is paid until March." A small pause. "You should eat breakfast. You get headaches by eleven when you don't. You think it's the screens."

Xu Yan looked at her.

Seven years, she thought, and that's what you leave me with. My headaches.

Then a slower, much worse thought: She's right. It was always breakfast.

The car pulled up, a white sedan with a dented bumper. Zhiqiu lifted the suitcase into the trunk herself before the driver could get out. At the open door she turned, and something crossed her face so quickly that Xu Yan, who had spent seven years not looking at that face, could not afterward have described it to save her life.

"Take care of yourself," Zhiqiu said.

The door shut. The sedan merged into traffic. Xu Yan stood on the steps until her phone buzzed for the third time, and then she answered it, and went to the harbor meeting, and was eleven minutes late.

· · ·

The apartment wasn't empty when she got home. That was the strange part. Zhiqiu had taken one suitcase and left everything else: linen in the closets, rice in the bin, a winter scarf on the hook by the door, the second toothbrush. As if she had decided that nothing in here had ever really been hers to take.

The osmanthus was in flower.

Xu Yan stood on the balcony at midnight with the glass door open behind her and the smell coming at her in waves, sweet as apricots, far too strong for such a small tree. Twelve floors down, the river was black and moving. She tried to remember the tree being bought, and couldn't. She tried to remember Zhiqiu watering it and got only a shape: someone in the kitchen light, bent over a pot with a glass in her hand, at an hour when Xu Yan was always on her way somewhere else.

At 1:12 a.m. her phone lit up with a name she had saved years ago and never once used. Tang Ning. Zhiqiu's friend from university, the loud one, who at the wedding banquet had called Xu Yan Ms. Xu in a tone that turned it into an insult.

The messages came in a stream.

do you know what time her dad called her that morning
6:14. she told me. she was looking at the clock
she called you at 6:19. 6:21. 6:30. 6:52
you were in singapore. you declined every one. she sat on the bathroom floor waiting for the ambulance and watched your name go gray four times
you sent white lilies to the funeral. your assistant wrote the card. she kept it anyway
seven years she never said one bad word about you. not to me not to anyone. so im saying it
she loved you, you complete
she loved you since long before the wedding. since

Then nothing.

Xu Yan read it four times. Not the way she read contracts. The way you read a scan result, hunting for the line that says it isn't as bad as it looks.

She remembered Singapore. She remembered waking in a hotel room above a pool so blue it looked fake, and seeing four missed calls from Shen Zhiqiu, and thinking it must be about the thank-you gifts for the wedding guests, and deciding to deal with it later. She remembered, a week after that, Zhou Ming standing at her office door telling her that Mr. Shen had passed away, and asking whether she wanted flowers sent. She remembered saying lilies, the usual, and going back into a meeting.

She had not gone to the funeral. She had been closing a deal. She had been twenty-four.

That was not an excuse. She tested it, sitting on the balcony tiles with her back against the cold glass, and it would not take her weight.

She called Zhiqiu.

The number you have dialed is switched off.

She called again. The same patient recorded woman, the same sentence, in Mandarin and then in English.

At 2:05 she was in the car. She didn't know where Zhiqiu was staying. She knew Zhiqiu's mother still lived in the old lane house near the east market, and at two in the morning that was enough to put the car in gear. The elevated road was empty and shining. The rain had come back, fine as mist, and the wipers kept their soft double beat, and Xu Yan drove with one hand and held the phone with the other, dialing and dialing, listening to the woman say switched off until the words stopped meaning anything.

Since, the message had said. Since what?

She never saw the truck. She saw its light: a wall of white swinging across the median where no light should have been, filling the windshield, filling everything. She had time for one thought, and it was not about the deal, or her father, or the harbor people.

It was: I never once looked at her properly.

Then glass, and a sound like the world being torn down the middle, and nothing.

· · ·

"Eyes up. Xu Yan. Eyes up, I'm doing your lashes."

A brush on her eyelid. Bright bulbs around a mirror. Hairspray thick enough to taste.

Xu Yan's hand jerked and hit something, a pot of powder, which tipped and dusted the counter beige. The makeup artist hissed. Xu Yan didn't hear her. She was looking at the mirror.

The woman in it was twenty-four years old.

She knew that face. For years afterward she had disliked it whenever it turned up in an old photograph: the hair still long, past the shoulders, before she'd cut it short; the jaw set hard; the eyes of someone who believed the world was a series of problems and she was the only competent person in the room. A white suit, beautifully cut. A red silk flower pinned at the lapel.

Her phone lay on the counter. She picked it up with a hand that didn't feel like hers.

Saturday, 14 October
16:47

Under the time, a reminder she had set herself, in her own cold shorthand:

21:00 — car to airport, side entrance. SIN.

"Ms. Xu?" Zhou Ming in the doorway, younger too, a bad haircut she had forgotten he'd ever had, a tablet hugged to his chest. "They're ready for you in the corridor. Ms. Shen's already there." He hesitated. "Are you all right? You look—"

She was out of the chair before he finished.

The corridor behind the banquet hall was long and carpeted in gold, with double doors at the far end and soft piped music leaking through them. Staff in headsets. A coordinator with a clipboard. And beside the doors, half-turned away, listening to the coordinator with her head tilted the way she always tilted it when someone was talking to her, was Shen Zhiqiu.

Twenty-five. A white dress, plain, high at the neck. Pearls in her pinned-up hair. She was nodding at whatever the coordinator was saying, and she was holding her own left hand in her right, hard enough that the knuckles had gone pale, and Xu Yan had not noticed that either. Not the first time.

The first time, she had walked down this corridor, stopped beside her, and said without turning her head: Let's keep this efficient. I have a flight.

Zhiqiu looked up.

Something happened in her face, quick and bright, and was put away at once, like a hand closing over a match.

"Xu Yan," she said politely. "They're ready for us."

She turned toward the doors.

Xu Yan's hand closed around her wrist before she had decided what to say.