Chapter 5
1126 Words
Chapter 5
POV: SARA
The photo hits my screen at six in the morning. Kai. Me. Side by side at the gala. The way his shoulder is angled toward mine like he is shielding something. I stare at it until my coffee goes cold.
By eight o'clock my notifications are piling up like accusations. Someone typed: "Who is the woman he's always with?" My stomach drops. They mean me.
Wei Lin calls before nine. "Have you seen it?" Her voice is too careful, too quiet. "Everyone's saying his engagement is falling apart. That he has feelings for someone else."
"They think it's you, Sara."The kitchen shrinks around me. I press my back against the cold wall and slide down until the floor catches me. My chest hurts in a place I've been ignoring for weeks.
He texts me at noon. Can we talk?
Three words. Simple. Devastating.
I read the message seven times before I type back: There's nothing to talk about. My hands are shaking when I hit send. I hate that they're shaking.
I sit in silence and think about everything I have memorised without meaning to. His laugh, quiet and rare. The way he stirs his coffee wrong every morning. The way when he's nervous he goes completely still instead of loud. I have been memorising him the way you memorise something you are afraid to lose.
The morning at the office is unbearable. People are too careful around me. Too polite. The kind of politeness that sits right on top of something sharper. Two directors from legal stop talking when I step into the lift. I sit at my desk and keep my face perfectly even and feel the day pressing down from every direction.
At two, Daniel appears. "Mr. Kai would like to see you. Conference room three."
The conference room is empty except for him. He stands at the window, back to the door, jacket off, the skyline behind him grey and still. His face is unreadable in the way that means he has been working very hard to make it that way."Close the door."
The silence between us is heavy with everything unsaid for weeks.
"The photograph," he starts."I told you. There's nothing to talk about."
"Sara." He says my name quietly and it stops me. "Sit down."I don't sit. But I stopped moving."The photo in the papers is being used to question the company's internal standards. Priya's family has seen it. Her father called me this morning." He crosses his arms. "This needs to stop. Whatever this is."
"I agree." My voice doesn't shake. I'm proud of that."Then we understand each other."
"Yes, Mr. Kai."He turns back to the window. I pick up my notebook and walk to the door."Sara."I stop.
"The gala. I shouldn't have"
"You were being professional." I keep my back to him. "That's all it was."
I walk out and keep my spine straight all the way to the bathroom and only then do I grip the edge of the sink and wait for my hands to stop shaking. I told him there was nothing to talk about. I lied. We both know I lied.
That evening I found an envelope slipped under my apartment door. No name. No return address. My name is written in handwriting I don't recognise.
Inside is a single piece of paper. Private Investigation Report preliminary findings. My name. My mother's name. And then Kai Zhen's name.I read it once. Then again. The paper drops from my hands.
I pick it up and read it a third time, slower, because my brain keeps refusing to process what my eyes are seeing. The words don't change, patient and immovable, and I understand with cold certainty that someone sent this deliberately. Someone wanted me to know.
My mother met Kai Zhen twelve years ago through his father. The report goes further than the photograph into letters, meetings, a financial arrangement that ran for almost two years. At the centre of it, a decision my mother made that she apparently spent the rest of her short life trying to undo. She knew something about the Zhen family. Something someone paid her to keep quiet. And when she stopped keeping quiet when she wrote those two words on the back of a photograph everything stopped. She moved us across the city, changed her number, and never explained why. Then she was gone and the questions buried themselves in ordinary grief.
Until now.I sit at my kitchen table with the report and a cold cup of tea and build the shape of it carefully. By three in the morning I have two possibilities.The first: Kai knows everything. Hired me because of it to watch me, to keep me close, to control whatever threat my mother's secrets might still carry.
The second: Kai knows nothing. Was used by his own family the same way my mother was used, and has spent twelve years carrying guilt about a woman he cannot name without reopening something never properly closed.I think about the way he took the photograph from my hands. Not roughly. But final. I think about the guilt in his face that I didn't have a name for then. I think I have a name for it now.
I am at my desk at seven-fifteen. He arrives at seven-thirty and stops when he sees me. Something moves across his face, relief, or something close to it.I wait until Daniel disappears into the copy room. Then I take out the folded report and place it flat on my desk where he can see it.He goes very still.
"You've seen this." Not a question. His voice is stripped of everything except truth.
"Last night. Someone slid it under my door."He crosses the distance in four steps and reads it. His jaw tightens with each line. By the end his hand is not entirely steady."I did not know," he says quietly. "About your mother. About the arrangement. About any of it. Not until three weeks ago."
Three weeks ago he put the photograph face-down on the desk and told me to leave it alone.
"You've known for three weeks. And said nothing."
"I was trying to find the rest of it first. Before I brought it to you."I looked at him for a long time. Outside, the city hums forty-one floors below, indifferent and enormous."Find it faster," I say quietly.
I pick up my pen and go back to work. And this time, it is his hands that are not steady.
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