Chapter 2: Inside the Band

Zhiqiu's pulse was right there under her thumb, quick and light, like something small running.

That was what Xu Yan noticed first. Not the dress, not the music, not the coordinator's clipboard stopped halfway to her chest. A pulse. Warm skin over a narrow bone. On the steps of the Civil Affairs Bureau there had been a gap the width of a person between them and she had not crossed it. Now there was no gap at all, and she had no idea what to do with her own hand.

Zhiqiu looked down at it. Then up.

Her face barely moved. It was a face that had been trained, Xu Yan understood now, by years of not being looked at; it had learned to stay pleasant and still and to ask for nothing. But her voice was careful in a new way, the way you'd speak to a stranger on a train platform who had caught your sleeve and might not be well.

"Is something wrong?"

Your father, Xu Yan thought. The lilies. The tree you told me to throw away. You on a bathroom floor at nineteen minutes past six, watching my name go gray.

"Your hand is cold," she said.

Zhiqiu blinked.

"It's the air conditioning." A small, polite pause. "It's no trouble."

Behind the doors the music swelled into something with strings. The coordinator made a noise in her throat. "Ms. Xu, Ms. Shen, that's our cue—"

The first time, they had walked in side by side with a hand's width of air between them, and the photographs had come out beautifully, because the photographer was a professional and knew how to stand two people so the air didn't show. Zhiqiu had framed one for the hall. It had hung there for seven years. Xu Yan had walked past it twice a day and could not now have said what either of them was wearing in it.

She let her fingers slide down from Zhiqiu's wrist and took her hand properly.

Zhiqiu's fingers went rigid. Then, slowly, as if testing whether a floor would hold, they curled around Xu Yan's.

"All right," Zhiqiu said, very quietly, to no one in particular.

The doors opened.

· · ·

She had kept almost nothing of the ceremony the first time, which meant she had nothing to measure this one against. That frightened her more than she expected. An entire hour of her own life, gone without a trace, because she had spent it checking her watch.

This time she saw all of it. The emcee in his shiny gray suit, who called them two beautiful brides in the same bright voice he presumably used on everyone. The hundred and eighty guests, most of whom were her father's business contacts and had come to be seen. Zhiqiu's mother in the second row, crying into a handkerchief embroidered with plum blossoms. Zhiqiu's father next to her, broad and red-faced, laughing at something his wife whispered, one hand pressed flat against his breastbone in a way that anyone else would have read as emotion.

Xu Yan knew better. She looked at that hand and could not look away from it.

The rings arrived on a velvet tray carried by a solemn six-year-old in a puffy pink dress, Zhiqiu's cousin's daughter, who held the tray out at arm's length like it might explode.

Zhiqiu went first. Her hands were completely steady. The band slid over Xu Yan's knuckle and settled, snug, cool for a second and then not. It would leave a mark by morning.

The first time, Xu Yan had worn it for four hours. In the car to the airport she had worked it off and dropped it in the cup holder, and Zhou Ming had found it there the next day and put it in an envelope, and the envelope had lived at the back of her desk drawer for seven years with a rubber band around it. She had never opened it. She had not, she realized now, ever really looked at the ring at all.

Then it was her turn, and her hands shook so badly that the second ring knocked against Zhiqiu's fingernail and nearly went on the floor.

The guests laughed, warmly, the way people laugh at nerves on a wedding day. Zhiqiu didn't laugh. Her free hand came up under Xu Yan's, just for a moment, and held it level until the ring was on.

Then she let go.

· · ·

After the vows came the tea.

Xu Yan's father sat in a carved rosewood chair on the dais, in a dark suit, looking like a man attending a shareholders' meeting he had called himself. The chair beside him should have been her mother's. Instead, on a small stand, there was a photograph in a silver frame.

Xu Yan's breath stopped.

It was the right photograph. Her mother in a garden, mid-laugh, a straw hat sliding off the back of her head, one hand flung up to catch it. It wasn't the formal portrait from the memorial hall that her father used for everything. It was the one Xu Yan kept in her wallet, behind her ID card, where nobody looked.

The first time, she had seen that frame on the dais and been furious. She'd assumed it was the Shens' idea, a bit of sentimental theater, and she had barely spoken to Zhiqiu for the rest of the banquet because of it. She had never asked who chose the picture. She had never asked how anyone knew.

She knelt, and lifted the cup to her father, who drank and nodded. Then she turned with Zhiqiu to the photograph and bowed.

Her mother had died on the ninth of March, five years ago, at eight minutes to midnight, in the cardiology ward of the Second People's Hospital. Xu Yan had been nineteen. She hadn't cried in the ward. She had walked out past her father, who was on the phone to someone about the funeral home, and pushed through the fire door, and sat down on the concrete stairs between the seventh and eighth floors, and stayed there until morning.

At some point in the night, someone had come down the stairs and sat two steps below her.

They never spoke. Xu Yan never looked up properly. She remembered white canvas sneakers, one of them laced with a piece of red string instead of a shoelace. She remembered, sometime after three, a paper cup of hot water set down on the step beside her foot. When the narrow window over the landing turned gray, the person was gone, and the water had gone cold, and Xu Yan had drunk it anyway.

She had never told anyone about the stairs. Not her father. Not, in seven years of marriage, her wife.

"Xu Yan." Zhiqiu's voice, low, at her shoulder. "You can stand up now."

She stood up.

· · ·

At 8:40, with the banquet loud and the fish course going round, Zhou Ming bent to her ear.

"The car's at the side entrance. Flight's at eleven-fifty. I've packed your—"

"Cancel it."

He straightened. Opened his mouth. Closed it again.

"Cancel," he said. "Singapore."

"Tell them I'll call on Monday."

"Ms. Xu, they've flown in their entire—"

"Monday."

Zhou Ming looked at her for a long moment, the way you might check a face against an old photograph of it. Then he said, "Yes, Ms. Xu," and went away to do it, typing on his phone with the expression of a man defusing something.

Beside her, Zhiqiu had changed into a red qipao for the toasts. She had heard. She set down the teapot she was holding and said, without turning her head, so softly that no one at the table could have caught it:

"If you need to go, it's all right. I can tell people there was an emergency at the company. They'll understand. I'll wait until you've left, so nobody stops you to ask."

Xu Yan turned and looked at her.

"You had that ready," she said.

A pause, very small.

"I thought it might be useful."

It was, Xu Yan thought. The first time, it was. You stood up at a quarter past nine and said it to a hundred and eighty people, and you smiled, and you finished the toasts by yourself.

"I'm not going anywhere," she said.

Zhiqiu looked at her for a moment. Then she picked the teapot back up, topped off Xu Yan's cup, and turned to the next table with her smile already in place.

· · ·

Shen Zhiqiu had decided a long time ago that hoping was a kind of bad manners. It made demands on people who had never agreed to anything.

In the ladies' room at half past nine, she reapplied her lipstick and examined the hand at the door, the way she would have examined a stain on a tablecloth. Nerves. The cameras. Xu Yan's father watching from the dais. People were kind on wedding days the way they were kind at funerals, and it meant nothing at all about the morning after.

She had known Xu Yan, from a distance, for five years. She knew this much: Xu Yan did not look at small things. She looked at numbers, deadlines, the clock on the wall.

That was why, three weeks ago at the jeweler's counter, Zhiqiu had let herself do one foolish thing. Inside her own ring, she'd had them engrave the wedding date, as anyone would. Inside the other one, something else. Something just for herself, kept in the one place she was certain nobody would ever look.

She capped the lipstick. Smoothed the red silk over her hips. Practiced the smile once in the mirror, and went back out.

· · ·

The apartment on the river was exactly as Xu Yan remembered it, which was the worst part.

Zhiqiu had furnished it in the week before the wedding. Pale wood, gray sofa, a long table nobody would eat at. There was no framed photograph in the hall yet. On the balcony, beyond the glass, stood a small tree in a black plastic nursery pot with the price tag still hanging from a branch on a loop of string. It wasn't flowering. Not yet.

Xu Yan stood in the hall and looked at it until her eyes stung, and then she looked away.

The door to the second bedroom was open. A lamp was on. The bed was turned down, and the gray suitcase with the scuffed corner stood beside the wardrobe.

"I've put my things in here," Zhiqiu said behind her. "You keep late hours. I'd only disturb you. The main bedroom has the better view, and your towels are the dark ones."

She'd had this ready too.

The first time, Xu Yan had not seen this room tonight. She had been somewhere over the South China Sea with her laptop open. For seven years she had assumed, vaguely, that the separate bedrooms had been her own idea.

"Fine," she said, because she couldn't think of anything else that wouldn't sound insane.

Ten minutes later, passing the guest bathroom, she stopped.

Zhiqiu was standing at the mirror in the red qipao with both arms raised behind her head, wincing, working at the pins in her hair. Pearl-headed pins, dozens of them, sunk deep into the coils at the back. She had gotten perhaps six out. Her arms were trembling with the effort of holding them up.

"Let me," Xu Yan said.

Zhiqiu's eyes met hers in the mirror. "It's no—"

"Trouble. I know."

Something happened at the corner of Zhiqiu's mouth. It wasn't quite a smile. She lowered her arms.

Xu Yan stepped in behind her. The bathroom was small, and the light was bright and unflattering, and she was close enough to see the fine down at the nape of Zhiqiu's neck. She found the first pin by touch and drew it out. It came with a tiny resistance, a pearl at its head, and she dropped it in the soap dish, where it clicked.

Another. Another. The hair began to loosen in heavy sections, still holding the shape the stylist had given it, as if it didn't yet believe it had been let go. Under one coil there was a red line on Zhiqiu's scalp where a pin had been pressing for eight hours. Without thinking, Xu Yan put her thumb there and rubbed, slowly.

Zhiqiu drew in a breath. Not pain.

In the mirror her eyes had closed. A flush was climbing her throat, past the high collar of the qipao, all the way to her ear.

Seven years, Xu Yan thought, and I never once touched your hair. She knew the share price of every company her father had ever bought. She did not know that Zhiqiu's hair, under the hairspray, smelled of nothing special at all, plain soap and warm cotton, and that this would undo her.

Zhiqiu opened her eyes.

She met Xu Yan's gaze in the mirror, and stepped forward, out from under her hands.

"I can manage the rest," she said. "Thank you." She pulled the last few pins out herself, quickly, without looking, and they rang against the dish one after another. "Goodnight, Xu Yan."

"Goodnight, Zhiqiu."

Zhiqiu's hand stopped on the edge of the door.

For seven years Xu Yan had called her Shen Zhiqiu, all three syllables, the way you'd read out the name on an account. Never once just the given name. Zhiqiu stood there with her hand on the door and her loosened hair falling down her back, and did not turn around.

Then the door closed. Slowly. A soft click.

· · ·

In the main bedroom, Xu Yan sat on the edge of the enormous bed and twisted the ring.

It didn't want to come. She had to work it over the knuckle, and when it finally slid free it left a red band on her skin, exactly as she'd known it would. She held it under the bedside lamp. Plain platinum. No stone. She tilted it toward the light and saw, along the inside of the band, a short line of engraving.

She had expected the wedding date. Everyone engraved the wedding date.

3 · 9

The ninth of March.

The fire stairs between the seventh and eighth floors. A pair of white canvas sneakers, one laced with red string.

A paper cup of hot water, set down beside her foot by someone she had never seen.