The City Between Them

Omniscient

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Shanghai in October was the city at its best — the summer heat spent, the air clear and slightly cool, the plane trees beginning to consider turning. The light was different in October: sharper-edged, golden at the building edges in the late afternoon.

Zhao Chen spent the week after the meeting doing what he always did — working. His calendar was full in the way that his father's was full and his grandfather's had been full before that. He was good at this work. He had never been in doubt about his own competence, which had always been the cleaner, less interesting part of his professional life.

On Thursday evening he attended a rooftop business dinner in Pudong. The view was the standard magnificent Pudong view, and he ate and spoke and laughed at the right moments. A colleague beside him — grey-templed, enjoying his wine — said: "You seem distracted tonight."

"Do I?" Zhao Chen smiled. "My apologies. Something on my mind."

"A woman, I'd guess," the man said.

"A situation," Zhao Chen said, which was accurate and insufficient and exactly what he intended.

He left at ten. Standing outside while his driver brought the car around, he looked at the Bund across the river. He was thinking about the word soft, which his grandfather used as a diagnosis. He had spent considerable energy in his late twenties trying to work out whether his grandfather was right. He had not resolved this. He got in the car.

On the other side of the city, in a different kind of room, Xinyue was doing something her evenings rarely contained: nothing obligatory. Her parents were both out. The house was as close to hers as it ever got. She sat in the window seat of her bedroom with a book she was not reading, watching the garden in the dark.

She was thinking about music. The guqin in the practice room down the hall had not been played in several months. She missed it in the way you miss a habit that was good for you — with slight guilt mixed into the longing.

The charity event invitation had come to both households on the same day, three days after the meeting. A cultural foundation fundraiser for arts education in public schools. Both families had standing invitations.

At breakfast, Lin Guowei set his phone down and said: "The foundation event is on Saturday. You should attend. It would be useful to be seen."

"Of course," Xinyue said.

Zhao Mingyuan said the same to his son in slightly different words. Zhao Chen said he would go — there was a logistics contact he needed to speak to briefly. He would stay an hour. Neither of them knew the other would be there. The city is not very large when you move in particular circles, and coincidence in Shanghai's elite world applies more narrowly than it appears.

Sometimes Universe tangles the thread which no one can see, no one can detangle and no one can back away from...

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