Other than this phone call, Xiao-Xiao’s morning was really unremarkable. He was on his computer sometimes typing furiously, answering his phone sometimes talking about sending this file to this place and editing this file to these parameters, but mostly he was just flipping through folders, scribbling on them with a blue pen, his brow slightly furrowed in thought. Xingyu had been worried when he first saw him sitting at that desk looking so much like their ba but he was really nothing like him—when Ba used this office, and really any office, the secretary had to knock and wait for Ba to say she was allowed to enter. If guests were coming in, they had to have at least a week’s notice or there was no chance they were entering Ba’s office. This was all to prevent the company secrets—and any bigger secrets—from leaving the office, and Ba had hammered in over and over how important this process was. When people entered, he told Xingyu, any valuable information needed to be put away, and you needed to be absolutely certain of who you are dealing with. But Xiao-Xiao’s secretary drifted in and out of the office without even a knock all morning, and occasionally she sent in someone unexpected—an employee from downstairs who wanted to discuss something, a manager updating Xiao-Xiao on plans—but Xiao-Xiao turned no one away and sometimes didn’t even look up from his paper when some people entered, and when they came closer to his desk he made no attempt to hide or disguise the content of what he was working on.

What had Xingyu been so worried about?—that Ba would pounce on Xiao-Xiao as soon as he left, train him the same way he had trained Xingyu? But that hadn’t happened, or at least it hadn’t happened to the extent and severity that it had happened to Xingyu. Xiao-Xiao, as he had been when Xingyu left, was utterly free of Ba’s control beyond being his employee and his son. There was no stress of the heir that Xingyu felt every day of his childhood anywhere about him.

“Where would you like to go for lunch?”

Xiao-Xiao was in the middle of typing an email, so it took a few moments for him to finish whatever he was saying. Business was the priority—he’d at least learned that from Ba. “Anywhere discreet.”