“We don’t know. He might be trying to lure us in, catch us doing something obviously suspicious. There was no proof that we were looking into the List, so it’s possible…” He stopped, rubbed his face—even he didn’t totally buy this argument. He started again from another angle: “If he really was a part of the List, there’s no reason he didn’t say anything to Liu Bai—to your father when he was talking to him.”

“But if he wasn’t part of the List, there’s also no reason he shouldn’t have said something. At least not one that I can think of.” It wasn’t just that he’d not said anything to Ba—he helped them get out, helped them cover their tracks. Xingyu had been preparing all sorts of excuses in his head to explain why they’d spent so long in the office—they’d sat down to chat, they’d taken a short break after the length socializing the gallery demanded of them, they hadn’t been able to find Xingyu’s phone. But none of it was necessary: Xiao-Xiao had given them the key and taken his secretary with him so they could make a clean getaway. “Agh—I hate this. I need to just ask him.”

“Don’t ask him.” Weiran’s voice was sharp.

“Why?”

“Because—” Weiran’s hands tightened around the steering wheel again.

“He clearly knows we were in there. I can return the key to him, ask him—”

“And if he asks you why you were in there in the first place?”

“If he cared, don’t you think he would have asked then?”

Weiran tightened his jaw.

“I’m going to talk to him,” Xingyu said. “I have to know what he’ll say.”

But an hour later, Xiao-Xiao still hadn’t opened his door. Xingyu sighed and slid down to a seat next to it.

“Come on, Xiao-Xiao.”

Nothing.

“Are you asleep? At least tell me to go away if you really don’t want to talk.” He sighed again. “I’m worried about you.” It wasn’t just him helping them that Xingyu couldn’t stop thinking about—it was the way he’d looked and sounded when he’d come back in, the way his voice had audibly changed when he called Ba, the way his feet dragged. Weiran was watching Xiao-Xiao, but Xingyu was too, and his heart had sunk all the way to the ground. What was happening to him that he got this exhausted? Why did he call their parents by their names? Why had everything seemed so fine during breakfast and so wrong during that phone call?

“What are you doing?”