Chapter 1

Chapter 1

My boyfriend and I moved to Beijing after graduation to chase our dreams.

The day we decided to stay, the two of us talked about the sky-high housing prices and encouraged each other. “Worst comes to worst, we’ll rent for the rest of our lives. A humble room is still virtuous if its owner is, right?”

Years later, when I thought back to how full of ambition we’d been, all I could do was smile bitterly.

A few days ago, the agent said next year’s rent would go up to four thousand, and we’d have to pay him an extra month’s rent as an agency fee.

This was just the secondary bedroom in an old residential compound. The lighting was awful, the room was less than ten square meters, and charging four thousand for it was absurd.

But the agent wouldn’t budge. He knew the apartment fell within my boyfriend’s company housing subsidy range, so he’d already factored the subsidy into the price. Besides, a new batch of graduates was about to leave school. If we didn’t rent it, plenty of other people would.

I didn’t want to be ripped off, so I started frantically scrolling through every rental app I could find, trying to locate listings rented directly by landlords and save the agency fee.

The internet was flooded with fake listings and fake landlords. I was exhausted from searching. When I checked the time and saw that my boyfriend was about to get off work, I couldn’t help sighing to myself: at least I still had love. That was already enough.

Lu Zhi’an came home. Before he’d even taken off his backpack, he started complaining to me about the intern who’d joined his team.

“Ugh, kids these days are terrible. I have to teach them so many basic things from scratch.”

Knowing how hard he worked, I pulled myself together and got ready to comfort him.

But the more I listened, the more something felt off.

There was a faint smile tugging at the corners of Lu Zhi’an’s mouth. “Xu Lin is hilarious. She brings vases of flowers to her workstation, one after another, until it looks like she’s opened a flower shop. And she insists on telling me the name of every single flower. So childish.”

I opened my mouth, but I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t help wanting to ask for more details, but then I felt ridiculous.

He stared off into space for a while, then said, “I guess it’s no wonder. She’s six years younger than me. When I started college, that little thing was still in elementary school.”

Six years younger. That meant she was only twenty-one now. No wonder she still had the leisure to decorate her workstation with fresh flowers in a major internet company that everyone online described as suffocating.

Fresh flowers were the most troublesome things. They were so expensive, and they wilted after only a few days.

You couldn’t even eat flowers. They were more extravagant than fruit. To save money, we barely even bought fruit.

That day was the first time Lu Zhi’an mentioned Xu Lin, but I had a feeling it would be far from the last.

Something that pierced my heart happened again soon after.

That day, my boss scolded me at work for no reason. After I got off work, I vented to Lu Zhi’an, hoping to be comforted like before.

At first, he was silent. Then he lifted a hand, pressed his fingers to his forehead, sighed, and said, “Actually, you were in the wrong too.”

“Your boss criticized you, so couldn’t you have just admitted you were wrong? Why did you have to argue about who was right and who was wrong and make your boss unhappy?”

“Take today, for example. Xu Lin’s code almost caused a production incident. I couldn’t hold back and scolded her, but she didn’t stiffen her neck and argue with me the way you did. She admitted her mistake right away, apologized sincerely, and even bought me milk tea.”

He licked his lips, as if savoring the lingering sweetness of the milk tea. “It was actually pretty good.”

My heart sank to rock bottom. Lu Zhi’an never drank milk tea. He thought it was a product of advertising and marketing, an IQ tax, something only idiots would drink.

In the past, he would frown whenever he saw me drinking milk tea once in a while. Now he had accepted it so quickly.

I smiled bitterly and fell silent.

Lu Zhi’an lowered his head and swiped through his phone. Every so often, he would tap the message notifications at the top of the screen, his fingers flying.

He really had changed. In the past, the thing he hated most was wasting time on messaging apps.

It was almost midnight when Lu Zhi’an finally put down his phone and went to shower. The moment he left, the screen lit up again.

I never checked his phone, so he had never thought to guard against me. But this time, I shifted my gaze over.

A contact saved as “Little Dummy” had sent a message: “Nine tomorrow morning. See you at the cafeteria.”

“If you’re late, you’re buying milk tea.”