I stopped halfway across the apartment. She was a dark shadow lined in blue and silver, intimate and remote. I was pissed at her on so many levels—over her privilege, over her casual certainty that anything she wanted, she would get—but it finally sunk in that she had come because she did care for me. Heat suffused my neck, rose to my face. I blamed it on a low fever and tried to ignore the guilt that settled in my stomach.

“Thank you, Daiyu,” I said. “Really.”

“You saved my life too,” she replied in her rich voice.

“I didn’t realize we were keeping score.”

“No,” she said as she walked into the kitchen. “Friends don’t need to.”

•  •  •

I holed up in my rich apartment for five days straight, seeing no one except for Daiyu, who visited and brought me food while she stayed in suit the entire time. Arun had warned that I would be contagious and to remain quarantined. We played Chinese chess, and she won every game. She had school assignments and spent many hours reading or working on research projects. After a few days, I got used to seeing her in the late afternoons at the dining table, as the Taipei skyline began to glimmer behind her at dusk. It was so that I almost began to believe that this was my life.

I was glad for her suit, which separated us. Because every time our eyes met, something intense ricocheted between us. I was still weak, but that didn’t prevent me from climbing often in those five days we spent together. Anything to distract me from her tantalizing proximity and my own sexual frustrations. If she was named for the tragic heroine in Dream of the Red Chamber, then I would be the hero, Baoyu—and our relationship was doomed from the start.

“What do the bodyguards think of all the time you spend here?” I asked out of curiosity one afternoon. She was chauffeured to the 101 in a white airlimo, just as Iris had said from her surveillances.

“I gave them all a paid vacation.” Daiyu’s grin was clearly visible behind her glass helmet.

“But your father—”

“I got access to his account and sent the message that way.”

I laughed, incredulous. “You mean you hacked into his account and pretended to be him.”

She crossed her legs demurely and flipped through an ancient textbook on Chinese folklore, feigning innocence. I could smell the must of its pages even from where I sat across from her, a distinct scent that always transported me to a different time, a different place.

“I didn’t actually sign off as him,” she replied.

I shook my head, amused. I loved how she always surprised me. “And your driver?”

“My driver is well paid by me,” Daiyu replied, still looking very pleased with herself. “And a brute. He’s all the bodyguard I need.”