The humid heat of August rose like steam, and the sea breeze from Victoria Harbour swept through Central, carrying the briny scent of the water. Tang Yu had just stepped out of the taxi when a wave of heat rushed straight at him. Today was the opening day of the Asia-Pacific Business Forum. Outside the revolving doors of Two IFC, a long line had already formed. Tang Yu entered through a side door. The young woman waiting for him finally relaxed, speaking so quickly her words nearly tripped over one another.
“Mr. Tang? Thank God you’re here. It’s an emergency today. We really couldn’t find anyone else who could interpret between English and Japanese at the same time.”
“Materials,” Tang Yu said, extending a hand.
She hurriedly handed him the folder. Tang Yu flipped through it as he walked. As the elevator doors slid shut, he skimmed through the background information of the first five speakers. When Tang Yu pushed open the door to the interpreting booth on the second floor, guests were still filing into the conference hall beyond the soundproof glass. He put on the headset and adjusted the frequency. Pressing the microphone test button, he cleared his throat.
“One, two. Test.”
Scattered murmurs drifted up from below.
“They changed interpreters at the last minute? Is he going to be able to handle it? Zezhou Group has very high standards.”
“I heard they pulled him in urgently. The original interpreter’s flight was delayed.”
“The file says he doesn’t seem to be a professional simultaneous interpreter. What if he messes this up? There are plenty of foreign media here today.”
Tang Yu turned the volume up one notch, drowning out the rustling whispers. The first speaker was a representative from the Japan External Trade Organization. His Japanese-accented English blurred his R’s and L’s, but Tang Yu remained perfectly composed, interpreting every line without a single flaw. Next came the CEO of an Australian mining company, whose speech was rapid from the moment he opened his mouth. Tang Yu followed his rhythm without hurry. His delivery was calm, controlled. When the speaker went off-script with a joke, Tang Yu even smoothed the punchline back into place.
At the back of the hall, the staff member in charge of coordination quietly let out a breath of relief. Tang Yu lowered his gaze to the profile of the third speaker. On the page was a photo of a cold, sharply handsome face. A high nose bridge. Thin lips pressed lightly together.
He froze for a second.
Those features looked far too much like someone else. Someone he had thought he would never see again in this lifetime. Tang Yu snapped back to himself and reached to adjust the headset frequency. Then a voice, so familiar it felt almost strange, sounded from deep inside his earphones.
“Thank you to all our distinguished guests for attending.”
The low, unhurried voice paused for a brief moment.
“On behalf of Zezhou International, I will be giving a brief statement on the subject of cross-border asset restructuring in the Asia-Pacific region.”
Ji Qian’ang.
The man whose left eye Tang Yu had blinded with a basketball five years ago. The man who had stood before his grandmother and promised, What the Ji family owes the Tang family, I’ll repay. The same man who had left without a word five years ago, disappearing without a trace after a night of torrential rain. Tang Yu’s fingertip pressed hard against the tuning button. After a moment of silence, he still opened his mouth. Instinct forced the translated words from him. Phrasing. Pauses. Number conversions. Business terms rendered into natural Cantonese expressions.
He interpreted every sentence without a single mistake.
“Zezhou International’s position is that, against the current backdrop of regional overcapacity, cross-border asset restructuring should not be regarded as a simple act of bargain hunting.”
Two voices of different timbres intertwined inside his headset, like two rivers that should never have met again, suddenly forced by a violent storm into the same mouth of the sea.
Tang Yu’s mind flashed back uncontrollably.
The old villa on a rain-soaked night.
He had stood alone in the empty music room. Rain poured in through the window, soaking the side of the Steinway grand piano. And then there was that phone call he would never forget.
“If I said I did all of this not only to repay your family’s kindness, would you believe me?”
That sentence overlapped with the voice in his headset. It had been five minutes after the final notes of Candlelight faded. The last time Ji Qian’ang had looked at him with eyes so painfully sincere. Tang Yu’s hand slipped from the desk into his pocket. The cufflink he had touched countless times dug into his palm until it hurt.
But the pain steadied his breathing.
The man on the other end of the headset kept speaking.
Tang Yu kept interpreting.
His tone did not change at all.
As if they were silently competing to see who would break first. Ji Qian’ang’s speech entered its final section. When he mentioned several key partners in the Asia-Pacific region, he said, “If our failure in the Candlelight project last quarter was due to the sudden withdrawal of a key ally…” Tang Yu translated the sentence about Candlelight into British English.
His pace was steady. His diction precise.
As if he had heard no hidden meaning at all. When the interpretation ended, scattered applause sounded through the conference hall. Tang Yu removed his headset, his hand still trembling despite his best efforts to control it. He snapped the folder shut and quickly retreated toward the stairwell at the end of the corridor. His hand had just touched the door handle when a voice came from behind him.
“Why are you running?”
Tang Yu continued pushing the door open.
In the next second, his arm was caught in a powerful grip.
He clenched his teeth.
“Let go.”
The voice-activated light in the stairwell flickered on, casting a harsh white glow over both their faces. Ji Qian’ang lowered his eyes to look at him. The strength in his hand tightened.
“Five years apart, and the first thing you say to me is ‘let go’?”
Tang Yu turned his face slightly and gave him a cold glance.
“What, did you want to hear ‘long time no see’?”
“That works too.”
Ji Qian’ang gave a low laugh, then tugged at his tie.
“You interpreted well out there. Except for the two words Candlelight. You stalled.”
Seeing that careless, amused expression on his face, Tang Yu could barely suppress the fire in his chest.
“Ji Qian’ang.”
His voice turned sharp.
“Do you think I won’t dare hit you a second time?”
Ji Qian’ang pointed to his own left eye. The iris had faded by half, almost transparent beneath the stairwell light.
“Hit me,” he said. “I’ll prepare the basketball for you myself.”
Tang Yu’s breathing grew uneven.
He stared hard at Ji Qian’ang’s face. He did not want to say another word. He wanted even less to stay entangled with him.
“Get lost.”
He abruptly raised his hand, knocked Ji Qian’ang’s grip away, then slammed the door shut behind him and left the stairwell without looking back.
Ji Qian’ang’s smiling voice followed him from behind.
“Next time we meet, don’t forget to return my cufflink.”
Tang Yu stopped on the steps and exhaled deeply.
His heartbeat still had not returned to normal.
Lin Juefei hurried over from beside the flower bed, his shirt slightly rumpled and a sheen of sweat on his forehead.
“Ji Qian’ang. Ji Qian’ang! Why is he here? Did he say anything to you?”
Tang Yu did not slow down.
Lin Juefei jogged after him and grabbed his arm.
“Tang Yu, say something. Did he come here for you?”
Tang Yu shoved the folder into his arms and replied coldly, “What do you think he could say? A mad dog jumped out and barked twice.” With that, he shook off Lin Juefei’s hand and strode away. His grandmother’s nursing home was halfway up Pok Fu Lam. When the nurse on duty saw Tang Yu arrive, she smiled from a distance and pushed the visitor register toward him. Inside the room, half the curtains were drawn. His grandmother leaned against the headboard with a pair of reading glasses on, an iPad resting on her lap.
On the screen was the replay of the financial forum livestream from earlier. Tang Yu walked over, turned off the tablet, and placed it on the cabinet.
“The doctor said you should spend less time looking at screens.”
His grandmother narrowed her eyes at him through the lenses and patted the edge of the bed, signaling for him to sit.
“An You dragged you there at the last minute, didn’t she? She told me you interpreted very well. Many people in the audience were asking about you.”
“I still haven’t learned the essence of it from you,” Tang Yu said, walking to the water dispenser to mix half a cup of warm water.
“I thought I heard the Ji family boy’s voice in the livestream.”
“Qian’ang,” she said softly. “Ji Qian’ang.”
It had been a long time since she had spoken that name. She said it carefully, as if afraid she might get it wrong.
“It was him, wasn’t it?”
“When he used to live at home, he came to fetch the newspaper for me every morning and knocked on my door. Not too hard, not too light. I even told Old Lin that the boy knew exactly how much strength to use.”
Tang Yu gave a cold laugh.
“Strength? What kind of restraint does he have?”
His grandmother removed her reading glasses and looked at him.
“I was talking about how he knocked on the door. Why are you getting worked up at me?”
Tang Yu obediently shut his mouth.
The warm water scalded his palm. He set the cup back on the bedside table. His grandmother glanced at him over the top of her glasses.
“Xiao Yu, do you still remember the time right after your brother left?”
Tang Yu felt as if she had seen straight through him from head to toe.
He did not answer.
His memory drifted back to that summer at the old house in Repulse Bay.
The summer he had never truly left.
Tang Yifeng had just died. Their parents had rushed back to Hong Kong from abroad. They handled Tang Yifeng’s funeral efficiently, then left just as efficiently. Before going, they only told Tang Yu to study well and to ask Butler Lin if he needed anything. The grief of losing their biological son seemed to end the moment the tombstone was set.
Only Tang Yu remained trapped where he was.
He curled up in the dark corner beside the curtains, long lashes shadowing his eyes, letting the news report about the accident echo through the empty room. Or he spent entire days in the music room, playing Rachmaninoff again and again. Three months after the car accident, Tang Yu had wasted away for three months. Butler Lin could not persuade him. His parents called to scold him, but that did nothing either. In the end, Tang Yu’s prolonged collapse alarmed his grandmother. She moved back from Mid-Levels to the old house.
She did not try to lecture him. She simply handed him a glass of warm milk from time to time. After Butler Lin came out of the music room once again, he sighed before knocking on the study door.
“Madam, Young Master still refuses to eat.”
His grandmother pushed up her glasses.
“Mm. How is the companion arrangement coming along?”
Butler Lin said it was being handled as quickly as possible. His grandmother said nothing. She simply lay on the sofa, pretending to have been angered into a headache for several days in a row. In the end, Tang Yu could only force himself to swallow a few bites of food. Tang Yu would not go outside, so his grandmother forced him to study simultaneous interpreting. The moment Tang Yu heard that, he frowned deeply. He immediately came out of his room, grabbed a basketball, and ran outside with remarkable efficiency.
For the entire afternoon, he stood alone beneath the hoop, shooting baskets. After each shot went in, he picked up the ball and shot again. A mischievous girl from the neighboring yard climbed onto the fence and asked, “Tang Yu, how long has it been since you came to school?” Tang Yu acted as if he had not heard her.
The girl asked several more times.
The blazing sun made Tang Yu narrow his eyes. He shot her an impatient, icy look and shouted, “What the hell does it have to do with you?” Without waiting for her reply, he carried the basketball and ran back inside. Sweat soaked his forehead, and the collar of his T-shirt had not escaped either. Tang Yu crossed the front hall, intending to return to his room for a shower. Before he reached the door, a melody suddenly reached his ears.
His hand, which had been brushing back his hair, froze in midair. The basketball was still wedged against his hip.
His entire body stiffened.
Someone was sitting at his piano.
Playing his brother’s favorite piece.
Tang Yu stood outside the doorframe.
The setting sun gilded the side of that person’s face with a thin edge of gold. Every line overlapped with the figure buried deep in his memory. Tang Yifeng had also liked playing piano at dusk.
The same posture.
The same beautiful sound.
Tang Yu tightened his grip on the slightly dirty basketball. For one impossible second, he fell into a daze.
His brother wasn’t dead.
His brother had come back.
When the piece ended, the person on the piano bench asked, “How was it?” Tang Yu was still staring at that familiar profile. Only when the person on the piano bench turned his head did Tang Yu finally see him clearly.
His eyes widened.
The boy wore an old pair of black-framed glasses, the temples badly crooked.
He was not Tang Yifeng.
He was nothing like his brother.
His brother’s brow bone had not been that high. His lips had been thinner. His eyes had not been that gentle shade of brown.
“My name is Ji Qian’ang,” the boy said, standing up and introducing himself in an even voice. “I’m from the mainland.”
Ji Qian’ang.
Not his brother.
Tang Yu finally tore himself free from the illusion. The beautiful dream woven by the sunset was cut off, brutally and completely, by Ji Qian’ang’s introduction.
His breathing suddenly turned rapid.
Rage surged up into his chest. He could no longer tell whether it was anger or fear. With one sharp swing of his arm, the basketball flew and slammed into Ji Qian’ang’s face with a dull thud. The ball bounced down onto the piano keys, striking a chaotic, discordant sound.
Ji Qian’ang’s head snapped to the side.
His glasses flew off and shattered on the floor. Tang Yu panted hard, his chest rising and falling violently. He stared at the blood on Ji Qian’ang’s face and shouted in a rush, his voice nearly breaking.
“What gives you the right?”
“What gives you the right to have that face?”
“Who are you?”
“Why are you in our house? Get out!”
Tang Yu screamed without restraint, the bloodshot madness in his eyes spilling over like something endless and savage.