Chapter 4: The Fitting Room

By nine the next morning, Wei Chuan's account had posted the photo of the door.

Night Desk had nine million followers, and the caption was a single line: Who does Tang Mo visit in Jing'an at midnight?

"He's guessing," said Cheng Ping, standing in the doorway of the fitting studio with her tablet.

"He doesn't know whose flat it is. He wants us to say."

"Then we say," said Tang.

He sat on a velvet stool in the middle of the room in his underwear and a half-pinned jacket.

Two stylists crawled around his hem.

"Public is mine," he added, and looked at Shen.

Shen stood in the corner with his arms folded and a stylist's tape measure round his neck.

"I remember," said Shen.

"Give me your hand," said Tang.

Shen came over and gave it.

Tang took a photograph of the two hands on a cup of tea, his fingers lightly over Shen's knuckles, in the soft window light.

He cropped it, wrote Good morning, and posted it from his own account.

It took four minutes to reach a million likes.

"That," said Cheng Ping, reading her tablet, "is the least informative photo I've ever seen, and it has just killed Wei Chuan's story."

"It tells them what they want," said Tang. "Nobody ever wants the facts."

One of the stylists, a thin woman with pins in her mouth, laughed around them.

"You're good," she said. "Better than Ji Wanqing, and she's been doing it for years."

"Doing what?" asked Tang.

"The romance," she said.

She spat a pin into her palm.

"In 2022 she and her co-star had the whole country in tears for four months."

"The hug in the rain. The coffee in the lobby," she said. "I dressed her for the hug."

"She rehearsed it twice, with an umbrella on a pole."

The other stylist hissed at her to be quiet, and she waved a hand.

"Everyone knows. The studio gave them both a bonus."

Tang kept his face exactly as it was.

He made a small note of it, and of the four months.

His phone rang on the shelf.

The caller was the director of Winter Harbor, who did not call anyone before noon.

Tang put him on speaker.

"I have a question for the lovebirds," said the director's gravelly voice. "Is the tea photograph a joke?"

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