“Literally anything else? Who would forget about their phone for that long?”

“I told her I’d been absorbed in catching up with Xiao-Xiao.”

“You said that to someone who knows Xiao-Xiao. Someone who works with him every day. You really think she believed that?”

The way he said Xingyu’s didi’s name was full of disdain. Xingyu looked over his shoulder at him as he moved back toward Xiaokai’s desk, now cleaned off. “Well, she let me in. What’s your problem with my brother?”

Zhang Weiran made a face. He brushed past Xingyu to the computer and wiggled the mouse a few times to see if it would turn on. It didn’t. “What makes you think I have a problem with him?” He reached below the desk and pressed the power button, wiggled the mouse again. Xingyu stood in front of the desk, right where he’d been standing when he was stumbling over his questions for Xiao-Xiao. He wasn’t sure what to say—that he could usually read people like they were open books? That Weiran had always been easy to read? That Xingyu could usually tell exactly what he was thinking at a glance?

“Just a hunch,” he said instead.

“Whether I like him is irrelevant. Why is this computer so slow? Don’t these people run a tech company?”

“You said we needed to be unbiased.”

Weiran huffed. He turned the frustrated gaze he’d trained on the computer to Xingyu and lingered for a moment on his eyes, on his mouth, and then dropped it back down to the screen. “What do you want me to say? I don’t like him for treating you the way he does.”

“He doesn’t treat me like anything.”

“For someone who claims to be observant, you can be an idiot sometimes. Ah—here it is.” Weiran plugged a flash drive into the computer and tapped a few things into the keyboard. “Okay, it shouldn’t take long before I can get in.”

“What did you mean by that?”

“I mean that you left because you had to.” Weiran wouldn’t look away from the monitor again. “Because staying here would have killed you or, worse, turned you into a monster.”

It already turned me into a monster, Xingyu wanted to say.

“But he treats you like that anyway.” He tapped a few more things into the keyboard and then the tightness around his mouth relaxed some—he’d gotten in.

“I don’t know what he went through,” Xingyu said.

“It can’t be worse than what your father did, right? You said you don’t see any of your father’s training in him. You were being abused and you escaped and he’s acting like this because he’s still an immature kid who hasn’t accepted that his ge had his own life.”