Chapter 14: The Last Offer

"Mr. Su," said the tailor, through a mouthful of pins. "Please do not sleep standing up."

"I'm not sleeping."

"Your eyes are closed."

"I'm resting my eyelids as a team."

Su Yu stood on a stool in the middle of the fitting room in half a black tuxedo.

Su Lan was six weeks old, and the gala was in four days.

Lu Chen sat on a velvet bench with the notebook on his knee and a stopwatch in his hand.

"Forty minutes standing still on a stool," he said. "That is a physical effort. One point."

"Thank you."

"Fourteen of those minutes you were asleep. Minus one."

"That's unfair. I was asleep standing up. That's twice as hard."

The tailor took a pin out of his mouth and stuck it into the hem with great feeling.

"It's very hard," he said. "I've seen it."

Lu Chen stood and took the end of the tailor's tape from him.

"I'll do the waist," he said.

He knelt in front of the stool and slid the tape around Su Yu's hips.

His fingers settled at the dip of the hip bone, just above the waistband.

They stayed there a beat longer than the tape needed.

Su Yu looked down at the top of his head.

"Chen."

"Keep still."

"If you keep that hand there, I'll be standing up in a different way."

Lu Chen's ears went red.

He snapped the tape, wrote a number, and said in his driest voice, "Thirty-one inches. Hold that thought until Saturday."

The tailor discovered an urgent need for cufflinks and left through the back.

The bell over the shop door rang.

Shen Li stood in the front room in a long grey coat, with no tablet in his hand.