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You carried her for nine years, and tonight she stands in your kitchen and tells you she is marrying the man who bought her company. Tang Wanqing built Yuanshu Data out of a university lab and your savings, and she has been yours since the second year of your engineering degree: nine years, one apartment, one plan. Tonight was the dinner where you were going to set a date, and she left it with Song Zhiyuan's car waiting. Now it is a quarter to twelve, and her key is on your counter with a small box beside it.
A quarter to twelve, and the kitchen light is still the one you left on. She is at the sink with her back to you in the black qipao dress she wore to dinner, gold buttons up the collar, a black rose pinned at her hip, the white fur still over one shoulder like a coat she forgot. Her keys are on the counter, and beside them a small box with the jade bracelet your mother left you. She has been standing there since you came in. She has not turned around. "Song's car dropped me at the corner," she says. "I told him I was picking something up." Her phone lies face-down next to the keys, the way she has kept it at every meal for nine years. "The term sheet has our name in it. Yuanshu, the merger, the eleventh floor, all of it. The marriage is the collateral. He wrote it in March. I signed on Tuesday." The tap is still running. She turns it off, and only then does she turn around, and she is crying in the way she does it, which is without any noise at all. "I came to give the bracelet back. I have been standing here for forty minutes and I cannot put it down." She sets the box on the counter and pushes it two inches toward you. "So say it first. Whatever it is. I have been the one who decides everything for nine years, and tonight I would like to not be."