Chapter 4
1270 Words
POV: SARA
I find it between two quarterly reports.
Tucked in like it was never meant to be found. An old photograph, edges soft with age, colours faded into something warmer than real life. Two people standing outside a building I don't recognise. One of them is Kai Zhen, younger, unguarded, almost a different person entirely.The other one stops my blood cold.My mother.
My hands stop working. The document I came to find slides to the floor and I don't hear it land. I turned the photograph over. A date on the back. Twelve years ago. Her handwriting. Two words I don't understand yet.
Forgive me.I look up. Kai is standing in the doorway watching me hold it. Neither of us speaks. The storm outside has stopped. Everything else has just begun.
He crosses the room and takes the photograph from my fingers. Not roughly. But finally."Where did you find this?" His voice is flat and controlled and costs him everything to keep that way.
"It was in the files." I don't step back. "That's my mother. Kai Zhen, that is my mother standing right next to you."He says nothing. My jaw tightens. "How did you know her?"
He puts the photograph face-down on the desk and walks to the window. One hand pressed against the glass. The city below moves without permission or apology. He breathes through whatever is sitting on his chest."Leave it alone, Sara."I won't leave.
His grandmother calls at exactly the wrong moment. He answers. Her voice comes through the phone clipped and certain, like a woman who has been sitting with a decision for a long time and has finally made it. I can't hear the words, only the tone. Cold. Final.He hangs up. His eyes carry something between anger and something that looks almost like guilt."Go home." He picks up his jacket.
He walks out and leaves the photograph face-down on the desk, like it isn't the thing that just turned everything between us into something neither of us can name.
Three days have passed. He looks through me like I am glass.
Monday. Tuesday. Wednesday. No eye contact, no instructions delivered directly, everything routed through Daniel like I have become someone too inconvenient to address. I sit at my desk and do my work and tell myself it doesn't matter.It matters.
By Thursday the whispers have teeth again. I catch fragments near the pantry, in the bathroom, in the corridor between meeting rooms. I don't have to hear everything to understand the shape of the story being told about me in every room I'm not standing in.I called Wei Lin that night from the floor of my room."He won't even look at me. And I still don't know what that photograph means."
"Maybe he's protecting you from something." Wei Lin is quiet for a moment. "Or protecting himself."
I stare at the ceiling and think about my mother's handwriting. Forgive me. Who was she asking? And for what?
The gala is at a hotel in Marina Bay and nobody told me about the dress code.
Crystal chandeliers. Floor-length gowns. Men in black tie moving through champagne and careful conversation like they were born knowing exactly where to stand. I am wearing the best dress I own. Dark green, simple, clean. Exactly wrong for this room. I feel it the moment I walk in, the way certain spaces tell you immediately that you don't belong.
Priya finds me in thirty minutes.
She moves toward me with a glass in her hand and two women beside her like a current. The chandelier light catches her jewellery. Everything about her is designed for exactly this moment.
"I didn't realise assistants were invited as guests." Her voice carries perfectly. Not loud. Just loud enough. "Someone really should have told you about the dress code, sweetheart. HR can be so careless."
Soft laughter from somewhere near the left.
My face goes hot. I set my glass down so no one sees my hand shake and lift my chin and say nothing, because anything I say becomes tomorrow's story and she knows it. She built this moment before she walked over. I am standing inside a trap.
Then the room shifts.Kai arrives and everything rearranges around him. He stops beside me. Not across the room. Beside me. Close enough that I feel the warmth of him."Priya." His voice is quiet and final as a closing door. "I believe the foundation director needs you at the main table."
Something flickers behind her eyes. Surprise. Fury. A calculation running too fast to finish."Now." He doesn't raise his voice. He never needs to.She leaves. The room exhales. A camera shutter clicks somewhere to my right."You didn't have to do that," I say.
"I know." He puts a glass in my hand. "I did it anyway."I look up at him and he is already looking at me, and for one moment nothing else in the room exists. Then his phone rings. Something changes in his face. Quick and dark. He steps away without a word.
By eight the next morning it is everywhere. A society column with a photograph taken from across the ballroom Kai Zhen beside his assistant in her dark green dress, both of them looking at each other in a way that has no professional explanation.
I read it in the elevator and arrived at my desk already tired. Daniel passes without his usual nod. Two people from the legal system stop talking when I come into view. I open my laptop and begin my work, because work is the one thing I know how to hold onto when everything else moves too fast.
At nine-fifteen Ryan appears. "Kai wants to see you. His grandmother is here."I have never met Madam Zhen. I know her the way you know a weather system by what it does to the people around it. The floor is quieter than usual as I follow Ryan toward the corner office.
Madam Zhen is seated across from Kai's desk, back straight, hands folded, wearing the stillness of a woman who has never needed to raise her voice because the world has always arranged itself around her. She is smaller than I expected. Power that size usually takes up more space.
Her eyes are the same shape as his."Sit down, child." Her voice carries the weight of decisions already made. Kai stands at the window, jaw tight, holding himself very still so nothing escapes. He does not look at me."I understand you found a photograph," Madam Zhen says.
"Yes."
"And you have questions."
She studies me for a long moment, then glances at Kai's back. Something passes between them I am not supposed to understand but do anyway."Your mother," she says quietly, "was not a stranger to this family."The room goes very still."There are things," she says, "that should have been told to you a long time ago.”
- Writer
