Chapter 245: R.Z

*Runze’s POV*

The car pulls up to the address and I lean forward in my seat before it has even stopped moving.

It looks exactly like I remembered from the day I found it, yet completely different from the photographs Liang Feng sent since.

The building is a narrow four-story conversion on a quiet commercial street, the kind of street that has a good coffee shop on one end and a print shop on the other and not much noise in between. The ground floor unit has a clean glass frontage, the interior barely visible from the street, just the suggestion of white walls and light. Above the door, mounted flush against the frame in brushed steel lettering so understated you’d miss it if you weren’t looking:

**R.Z**

I stare at it through the car window.

"Are you going to get out," Ling Yue says from beside me, "or are you going to sit here and stare at it until it does something?"

"I’m just looking at it."

"Well, you’ve been looking at it for forty seconds."

"Ling Yue."

"I’m just saying. It’s not going anywhere."

I open the car door.

The morning air is cool and clean, the street quiet at this hour. I stand on the pavement and look at the frontage properly, the proportions, the way the light hits the glass, the small detail of the lettering.

Liang Feng had the sign made exactly to my specification, brushed steel on a matte black backing, set twelve centimeters from the top of the door frame. I had been very specific about twelve centimeters.

It looks right.

Liang Feng appears at my shoulder, slightly breathless from getting out of the front seat. "The interior is exactly as discussed. I had the cleaning team come through yesterday so everything should be—"

"I know," I say. "Thank you, Liang Feng."

He subsides.

Ling Yue has already drifted to the door. He tilts his head, reading the small text on the frosted glass panel beside it.

"R.Z," he says. "Simple."

"That’s the point."

"I like it." He steps back so I can reach the door. "Open it then."

I put the key in the lock.

***

The smell hits me first: fresh paint underneath something else, the particular dry clean scent of new materials and undisturbed air.

I step inside.

The floor is pale concrete, sealed and smooth, the ceiling high, I had chosen this unit specifically for that. Large windows run the full width of the front wall, filling the space with clean morning light. White walls, bare and waiting.

My drafting table sits in the center exactly where I had marked it on the floor plan, the adjustable lamp mounted at the left corner, tools organized along the top edge. The secondary worktable beside it, flat and long. The desktop workstation beyond that, monitor angled precisely.

Along the left wall, the pin-up board, full width, floor to ceiling, cork surface, empty. Along the right, the architecture books, the two small plants, the coffee machine with its clean white cups. In the back corner, the meeting table, three chairs, nothing corporate. The model from Grandmother’s project on the display shelf beside it.

On the door, small and precise, one word in brushed steel:

Runze.

I stand in the middle of the room and turn slowly.

"Liang Feng," I say.

"Yes?"

"You did well."

He exhales. I don’t think he realized he was holding his breath.

***

Ling Yue wanders the perimeter of the room with his hands behind his back, the way he does when he’s genuinely interested in something but doesn’t want to appear too interested.

"It’s very you," he says, stopping in front of the pin-up board. "Very clean, very precise." He tilts his head. "Very empty."

"It’s supposed to be empty. I fill it as I work."

"With what?"

"References. Material samples. Sketches. Photographs of sites." I come to stand beside him. "You pin things up where you can see them and move them around as the design develops. It’s a thinking wall."

Ling Yue considers this seriously. "I need one of these."

"For what?"

"For my life decisions." He turns away from the board. "I could pin things up and move them around and see if anything develops."

I look at him.

He keeps his expression neutral but I know him well enough to know what he’s actually talking about.

Jin Hao had sent the message four days ago — *I know where you are. I’ll come when it’s time.* Ling Yue had appeared at my door that night with his phone in his hand looking like a man who had seen something he hadn’t been prepared for.

"He knows," he had said.

"He said when it’s time," I had told him. "Which means it’s not time yet. So breathe."

He had breathed. Eventually.

He hasn’t mentioned it since, but I can see it in the way he keeps picking up his phone and putting it back down, the way his eyes go somewhere else mid-conversation.

"Give yourself time," I say, which is what I’ve been saying every variation of for the past several days.

"You keep saying that."

"Because it keeps being true."

He makes a noncommittal sound and wanders toward the coffee machine. "Does this work?"

"It should."

"Good." He examines the cups. "Do you want one?"

"Please."

***

I sit at my drafting table.

This is the first time I’ve sat at it, and I take a moment to adjust the height, the angle of the lamp, the position of the chair. My back has been aching since this morning, a low persistent pull that Dr. Xi said would get worse as the baby dropped further. I shift until I find a position that’s tolerable and open the Grandmother project file.

The base design is done. What comes next is the development phase, taking the concept and working it into something buildable, something real, something that could actually exist in the physical world and serve the purpose it was designed for. This is the part I like best. The part where an idea becomes a thing.

I pick up my pencil.

For a while the room is quiet except for the soft sound of Ling Yue making coffee and the scratch of pencil on paper. The morning light moves across the floor as the sun shifts. Somewhere outside a delivery vehicle passes and then the street goes quiet again.

"Runze," Ling Yue says eventually, setting a cup at the corner of my drafting table.

"Mm."

"You’re hunching."

"I’m working."

"You’re hunching while working." He leans against the secondary table. "Your back is going to make you pay for that later."

"Ling Yue."

"I’m stating a fact."

"I know." I straighten. The ache in my lower back sharpens briefly then settles. "Thank you."

He leans against the secondary worktable with his own cup and looks at the drawing taking shape under my hand.

For a while he doesn’t say anything, just watches. For someone who always has something to say, he’s surprisingly good at knowing when not to.

"It’s going to be good," he says quietly. Not about the drawing specifically. About all of it.

I keep my eyes on the paper. "I know."

***

An hour and a half later my back has made its opinion on sitting conclusively known, and Liang Feng has hovered past my table three times in the past twenty minutes with increasing anxiety.

"We can come back tomorrow," he offers, for the second time.

"I’m not leaving because of my back."

"You’ve been shifting in your chair for almost two hours."

"I’m fine."

"Runze," Ling Yue says, from the meeting corner where he has been reading something on his phone, "your jaw has been clenched since eleven-fifteen."

I unclench my jaw.

"We can go," I say.

Liang Feng’s relief is visible and immediate. He begins gathering things with the careful efficiency of someone who has been wanting to do this for some time and is now finally permitted.

I stand slowly, one hand braced on the drafting table. The ache blooms upward and then subsides to its usual low register. I stand straight and look at the drawing on the table — an hour and a half of work, the development phase beginning to take shape, the idea starting its long process of becoming real.

I photograph it with my phone before we leave.

At the door I stop and look back at the room one more time. The light has shifted since we arrived, warmer now, falling differently across the pin-up board and the pale floor and the careful arrangement of everything I had planned and Liang Feng had built for me.

My name on the door, my table in the center of the room, my work on the surface of it.

I pull the door closed behind me and lock it.

Outside on the pavement, Ling Yue falls into step beside me toward the car.

"Same time tomorrow?" he asks.

I look at him.

"You don’t have to come every day," I say.

"I know." He opens the car door. "Same time tomorrow?"

I get in.

"Same time tomorrow," I say.

***

In the car on the way back, I take out my phone and send Bael the photograph of the door, the **R.Z** lettering, the frosted glass, the quiet street behind it.

Three minutes pass.

Then: *Did you eat lunch?*

I look at the time. It’s twelve forty-seven.

I did not eat lunch.

I look at Ling Yue. "Did we eat lunch?"

He looks up from his phone. Thinks about it.

"No," he says.

I type back: *We’re stopping on the way home.*

Bael’s reply comes immediately: *Good.*

Then, after a pause, one more message:

*The door looks right.*

I set my phone face-down on my knee and watch the city move past the window, and the warmth that settles in my chest has nothing to do with the afternoon sun coming through the glass.