Chapter 25

Jinhua Gardens.

Ji Ran finished her homework and checked the time. Half past nine.

Not a sound from downstairs.

Since New Year's Day the two Ji men had often worked late, but they generally got in around nine. After dinner they would walk off the meal and talk and get to know each other a bit better.

By rights they should have been home by now.

There was nobody.

Perhaps there was a great deal on today, she thought.

She considered messaging to ask, and was afraid of taking up their time. She picked up the phone and put it down again, and at that moment it buzzed, and a group called Go and Study started going off.

Meng Lai: Aaaaaaaaah!

Meng Lai: Hugging Ranran and kissing her loudly.

Meng Lai: The test results came out today. I got 102.5 in maths. Do you know what 102.5 means?

Meng Lai: It's the first time I've been over a hundred since I started high school. The maths teacher looks at me now like there's hope for me yet. When she handed the papers back she picked me out in front of everyone and said I hadn't slacked over the holiday and the rest of them should learn from me. That is the single finest moment of my life.

Meng Lai: And more to the point I've passed my mother's test. Half my medal belongs to Ranran. When we break up I'm buying her ten pounds of layer cake.

The group of three was set up during the coaching, so they could ask about questions and bits of theory as they came up and do video calls between all three. Later it turned into somewhere to chat nonsense, and after term started the messages slowly thinned out.

Ji Ran remembered that Meng Lai had brought layer cake every single day of the coaching. Sometimes the three of them got hungry in the afternoon and made a pot of tea and divided it up. More often they could not get through it at all, and for several days running the Ji household had layer cake for pudding.

Anything is too much when you eat it every day.

Gi Changning: Dinner yes. Say layer cake once more and I'm reporting you to your form teacher for smuggling a phone into school.

Ning had eaten layer cake for a solid week and reached the point where she could not get it down with tea. When the coaching ended she breathed out properly and swore to Ji Ran that she would never touch another piece of layer cake as long as she lived.

Meng Lai is at a state school and comes home one weekend in two. The rules are explicit that phones may not be brought in, and anything found is confiscated until the end of term, and then only returned to a parent in person after the form teacher has had a word. But every rule breeds its own dodge, and a fair number of students smuggle phones in, Meng Lai among them. In the daytime it sat switched off inside her folded quilt, and after evening study she got it out while everyone was washing and played with it for a while.

Right now she was behind the curtain on the balcony with a roommate watching for the teacher who checks the dorms, hammering away at the keys.

Meng Lai: Gi Changning, you have no heart.

Gi Changning: Correct. I have none.

Ji Ran had nothing to say.

You could see exactly how deep the layer cake had gone.

Ji Ran: Congratulations.

Meng Lai: Thank you, thank you. When I'm home I'm taking Ranran out for hotpot. Not Gi Changning.

Gi Changning: Who wants your hotpot. Ranran, you and I are going for barbecue after school tomorrow. Let Meng Lai suffer.

They messed about for a few minutes and Meng Lai was the first to fall, because she had to wash and the teacher would be round shortly, and to keep the phone out of trouble she had to strike the colours and beat the retreat. They agreed to continue the fight when the holiday came, in person and live.

Ji Ran goes to bed early and gets up early. She told Gi Changning to get some sleep too, then went to wash, and read ahead in her textbooks while she waited for the two men. By half past ten, which was already past her bedtime, there was still no sound from downstairs.

The living room was lit up. She had left the lights on deliberately. On the coffee table was her brother's book, still unfinished from the morning. On the massage chair was the brown towel her father had left there, exactly where it had been that morning.

Ji Ran went down, frowning slightly, and messaged the family group. "Dad, Changfeng. What time will you be home?"

Three minutes. Nobody answered.

Her frown deepened. Neither of them ever ignored the family group. The moment they saw a message they answered it, and if they could not type they sent a voice note.

Too busy to look at it, perhaps. That was all she could think. She put the phone down, found millet in the fridge and made a simple millet porridge in the kitchen. Once it was on, she wrote in the group, "There's millet porridge in the kitchen. Have some when you get in. I'm going to bed."

Early the next morning her body clock woke her on time.

She picked the phone up off the pillow, checked the time and opened her messages without thinking. The last two messages in the family group were still hers, from the night before, and nobody had answered.

What was going on? Had they not come home at all?

She pushed her feet into slippers and hurried downstairs without even changing out of her pyjamas.

The morning was bright, the sun not fully up and its light a warm yellow, leaving a stretch of shadow. The chandelier in the living room was still on, which was not obvious at a glance, and the switch had not been touched.

Nothing in the living room had been moved. The rice cooker in the kitchen was showing warm. One thing after another, and all of them said the two of them had been out all night.

She went up, dressed, washed, and came back down with her school bag and had a bowl of the porridge for breakfast. Then she rang her brother.

It rang and rang and nobody picked up.

There was nothing she could do. It was nearly time for school. All she could put in the group was, "There's millet porridge in the kitchen. Have some if you haven't eaten."

Ji Ran: Look after yourselves.

She was somewhere else all day. She said even less than usual, drifted off in lessons, and had to be called several times before she heard. Once a teacher asked her a question and she missed it entirely. She nearly went past her stop that morning, and would have if Gi Changning had not been listening to the announcements.

At break, Xiao Xiao came over to her desk and said quietly, "Next lesson's biology."

The book Ji Ran had just taken out was physics.

"Oh." She looked down, and so it was. She let out a breath, pushed the phone with its lit screen back into the desk, and gave Xiao Xiao a smile. "Thanks. I've been miles away today."

"It doesn't matter. You'd have noticed when the teacher came in." Xiao Xiao kept her voice low. She could see something was wrong, and even that smile had been an effort, with nothing left of Ji Ran's usual steadiness. Besides, Ji Ran respects the school and respects the classroom and never brings a phone in, let alone leaves one lit on her desk in full view. "Has something happened?"

Ji Ran put the physics book away and got the biology one out instead, and rubbed her temples. "Sorry. I'm not with it today. My dad and my brother didn't come home last night and they haven't answered my messages, and they're not picking up the phone. I'm a bit worried."

"Busy, probably?" Xiao Xiao went by her own experience. Her mother and father are partners in business, and when the company is busy they are gone not for a night but for a month at a time. She had gone from frightened to used to it, and these days she sometimes chivvies them out of the house so they will stop interrupting her free time. She thought about it. "End of February, they'll be on the summer range. I saw the concept film for Anzhi's summer theme this year, and if I remember rightly the push is new trends? It's a good way into the theme. So being busy would be nothing out of the ordinary."

Anzhi is the Ji family's clothing brand. The initials run A to Z, the twenty-six letters of the alphabet joined end to end, taking in every variation, meaning every possibility.

And zhi is a homophone of the zhi in Liang Zhi, the Ji family's late mistress.

Ji Ran had seen the film and knew the family were using the idea of new trends to test the water, and that a strong response would open a whole new line. What she could not understand was that however busy her brother and her father were, surely they had time to send one message.

But no amount of worrying helps. She made herself calm, and said to Xiao Xiao, "Thank you. I feel a lot better."

Xiao Xiao did not call her on it, and swallowed what she had been going to say to comfort her.

Honestly, Ranran, your face does not say you feel a lot better.

---

After school Gi Changning walked twice round Ji Ran, then put a hand on her shoulder. "Ranran. There's something not right with you today."

Not right was putting it kindly. She had nearly missed her stop that morning, had seemed all right at lunch, and was now drifting off again as badly as before.

In all the time Gi Changning had known her she had never seen her like this.

Ji Ran told her what had happened.

"Oh, is that all. I thought somebody had been picking on you and I'd have to go and sort them out." Hearing the whole of it, Gi Changning's heart settled. The two Ji men being out all night was nothing new to her, and she said, in the voice of one who has been there, "You can stop worrying entirely. What's going to happen to those two? At most they're so busy they left their phones behind, or the batteries have gone. Sit tight until they remember they've got a house."

Talking of it reminded her of last night's chat, and she suggested, "Dad and Changfeng are both out anyway. Shall we go for barbecue?"

Ji Ran had no wish to pass her own low mood on to anybody, and in any case Gi Changning knew the two men better than she did, so she let it alone. But at the mention of barbecue she shook her head. "Are you really not waiting for Meng Lai?"

Gi Changning had only been suggesting it and had no real intention of going, especially since she had not told anybody her plans and her father would certainly be at home with a dish she liked waiting for her. Barbecue is nothing beside her father's cooking. All the same her mouth held the line. "What do I want to wait for her for? So she can take my meat?"

Ji Ran looked at her. "Didn't you tell me that what you've fought for tastes best?"

"That depends what you're fighting over. If it's layer cake, Meng Lai can have it with my blessing. In fact I'll put it in her mouth myself."

How deep that cake had gone.

They talked the whole way, and Ji Ran even got some vocabulary learned, and by the end of it she felt more or less steady again.

She said goodbye to Gi Changning, went back into Jinhua Gardens and walked slowly up to the villa.

The house was dark. It did not look as though anybody had come home.

She opened the door, and before she could change her shoes something on the floor tripped her. She put a hand on the wall to steady herself and saw two pairs of men's shoes lying anyhow in the hall. The light had not gone completely, and when she looked properly there was a shape on the sofa, still in its suit, with a cushion wedged behind the small of its back and its head tipped back against the sofa, not moving.

Asleep, by the look of it. The noise she had made tripping had not woken him.

It was her brother.

She did not turn the light on. She changed into slippers quietly, went up without making a sound, put her bag down, fetched a blanket and came down to put it over him.

It cannot have been a comfortable position, because he was not sleeping soundly and his forehead was tight. She laid the blanket over him, and as she turned to go she heard him say, blurred with sleep, "Ranran? You're back?"

"Mm." She mixed a cup of warm water and set it on the table. "Go up and sleep properly. The sofa isn't good for you."

"It's all right." He rubbed a neck that had nearly seized, took the water and drank the lot, and came fully awake. "Thank you, Ranran. We were out all night. You must have been worried sick."

"A bit," she said honestly. "Not now. Where's Dad?"

Two pairs of shoes in the hall meant he was home too.

"He's had a bowl of the porridge and I sent him up to rest. He's not a young man and he lost his temper very badly, and I was worried about his heart and his blood pressure." He gave her the short version. "There's trouble at the company. Serious trouble. We didn't get to your messages. I was going to answer today and then remembered you don't take a phone to school. I'm sorry, Ranran."

Ji Ran sat down beside him and pulled the chinchilla into her lap. She did not mention that she had taken her phone, and only shook her head. "You don't have to apologise. The company matters."

She paused. "Can I know what it is? Not if you'd rather not say."

"There's nothing to keep back. It may even be trending in a few days." It was impossible to tell from that whether he was looking forward to it or being bitter. He stopped a few seconds to steady himself. "A designer got drunk and the drawings got out. The lead design for the range that's about to go on sale. There are counterfeits online already, and if we hadn't been watching the market in real time we would not even have known."

The temperature beside him dropped a degree with every sentence, and by the last there was something ugly in his voice. "And the designer still thinks there's a career for him in this trade. He can dream."