Zhou Yuwei stood in the lobby on the first floor of Clearstone Integrated Marketing, gripping an employee ID that didn’t belong to her so tightly her knuckles had gone white. She had stuffed all her hair under a baseball cap today, and the cuffs of her brother’s suit jacket extended past her wrists. She’d followed a video three times before barely managing to tie his tie straight.
An LED wall directly across from the elevators was playing an onboarding presentation. The slides rolled past one after another. When it reached the third slide, her entire body froze in place, and she even forgot to breathe. On the screen was a brand identity proposal. The main visual was clean and sharp, and she knew the color balance and use of white space far too well. It was the version she had spent three weeks working herself to the bone on, revising until her eyes nearly gave out. In the signature line at the bottom right were two words: Zhou Yuen.
She stared at those two words for so long that someone nearby turned to look at her. Only then did she realize she was standing right in the middle of the walkway, blocking traffic. She hurriedly moved beside a pillar.
This is my work. The thought bounced around inside her head several times before finally finding its way out. I arranged every word myself. I tested every single color swatch number myself. How did the signature end up looking like that?
The three-story glass curtain wall filtered the daylight into something bright and cold. All around her, office workers hurried to clock in. Several people just like her, wearing temporary new-hire badges, stood in line at the reception desk. She quietly tugged her own badge lower, covering half her face. The clock on the wall showed that less than ten minutes remained before reporting for work, and the thought made her steps falter again.
That was her brother.
The hospital corridor from three days ago was still stuck in her memory. The smell of disinfectant and the chill of the air-conditioning had rushed into her nose together, while the machines at the nurses’ station at the end of the hall beeped at regular intervals. Through a thin fabric curtain, she had heard her brother restlessly shifting his casted leg on the hospital bed. His right hand was wrapped in gauze, the exposed fingertips slightly swollen. The nurse had just finished telling him not to move around when he was already searching for his phone.
The doctor had said he needed at least six weeks of bed rest. As she stood beside the hospital bed listening to that, all she could think about was the fact that he was supposed to report for work the day after tomorrow. No matter how she calculated it, the two things didn’t line up. She was so anxious that her fingernails tapped out a string of tiny sounds against the bed rail.
His voice messages kept popping up on her phone one after another. The voice coming through the speaker was thin and trembling, half a note higher than usual. “Sis, I really can’t go in on my start date. Go to the company and explain things for me first. The contract says it’s a breach of contract if I don’t show up, and I’ll have to pay eight hundred thousand. Don’t tell Mom. Please.”
She wanted to reply, Don’t overthink it. Her fingertip opened the text box, then deleted the words. In the end, she typed only two characters: Got it.
The third time she listened to the message, she was leaning against the hospital corridor wall, unconsciously picking at the edge of her phone screen. Eight hundred thousand. The family’s breakfast shop couldn’t flip enough griddles for a whole year to come up with that much, and neither could her parents’ retirement savings. Even all the freelance jobs she had taken over the past six months wouldn’t add up to a fraction of it.
He had fallen from the second floor while chasing the thief who had stolen her laptop. The leg he broke had been chasing three weeks of her hard work. She could work hard for another three weeks. A broken person couldn’t be put back together and started over.
So today, she had only meant to explain the situation. She wanted to tell HR that her brother had gotten into an accident and ask whether they could make an exception, let him pay in installments, or give him a little more time. On the subway, she had silently rehearsed her explanation three times. She had practiced where to pause and even thought through how she would respond to the questions they might ask.
All she had to do was explain everything. She didn’t actually have to go inside and sign any documents. This would end here. She shoved the employee ID back into her pocket and turned around, her heel tracing half an arc across the tile.
She had only made it halfway through the turn when the crowd waiting to scan their cards suddenly surged forward. Someone’s briefcase slammed hard into her elbow. She stumbled, her fingers loosened, and the employee ID slipped from her palm, scraping diagonally across the card reader beside her.
The security guard nearby glanced up at the green light that appeared on the screen, then lowered his head and went back to scrolling on his phone. He didn’t give her a second look. The instant the indicator light turned green, she instinctively wanted to close her eyes, afraid the photo on the screen would fail to match her face. Luckily, the gate only recognized the card, and no one bothered to look any closer.
Beep—a short electronic chirp cut through the noise beside her ear, more punctual than her heartbeat.
The moment the gate sprang open, she froze. Before she could retreat, the people behind her were already pressing forward one after another, completely blocking her way back. Someone’s suitcase wheel even rolled over the tip of her shoe. Before she could steady her heel, she was wedged into the elevator. The doors silently closed in front of her, separating her from the lobby screen playing her proposal as if they were two different worlds.
The elevator was packed with several faces wearing new-hire badges just like hers. The floor numbers climbed steadily upward. She stared at them, feeling her heartbeat rise along with the elevator, while the employee ID in her palm was clenched so tightly its corners had curled.
Oh, crap. The thought floated through her mind. What kind of insane entrance is this? I was just passing through. How did I officially enter the gauntlet in the blink of an eye? If I’d known, I would’ve taken the fire stairs.
The elevator stopped on the ninth floor. When the doors opened, a woman wearing an ID badge was already waiting outside with a stack of forms in her arms. Her gaze paused on Zhou Yuwei’s face for half a second before she asked in a strictly businesslike tone, “Mr. Zhou Yuen?”
Her throat tightened. The words I’m not him rolled around the tip of her tongue, her teeth even touching the syllables, before she forced them back down. She only nodded stiffly, pressing the explanation into the deepest part of her heart.
HR led her past an entire row of cubicle partitions and into a small conference room in the corner. The clatter of keyboards and office conversations blended together behind them. Once inside, HR spread the forms across the table one by one, briskly and without the slightest hesitation.
A copy of his ID, labor and health insurance enrollment forms, a direct-deposit application—each sheet was laid out in front of her. Every name field had already been printed with Zhou Yuen’s three characters in clean, dry ink, waiting for a signature to complete them. HR flipped through the forms and casually rattled off the items: who to list as the emergency contact, whether the withholding account was correct, whether a note needed to be added to the start date. She spoke so quickly it sounded like she was reciting lines from a script she could never memorize. When she finished, she casually handed a ballpoint pen toward her. The cap was still on. “Try to make your signature neat. A lot of places will need to match it later.”
At one point, HR casually asked whether she had a cold and why her voice was so hoarse. She gave a vague response and lowered her head even further.
She stared at the three characters for two seconds, the pen tip hovering in midair without coming down. Her knuckles stiffened slightly. Under the table, her other hand clenched her own old employee ID so tightly that her nails nearly dug into her palm. It was the only thing she still had with her name on it—and a useless card that didn’t belong to this company at all.
She glanced at the gender field at the top of the form. It contained an option she had never checked on any document in her life. As her eyes passed over it, her heart skipped a beat.
The string of thoughts in her mind wouldn’t stop. This is my brother’s name. What am I actually doing right now—helping him sign, or getting myself tangled up in a lawsuit? If someone asks for his ID number later, which set of digits am I supposed to recite without blowing my cover? If I fill out even one box on this stack incorrectly, does that mean I’m personally handing myself over to the list of people charged with forgery?
At last, the pen tip touched down. Following the habits of her brother’s signature, she wrote Zhou Yuen’s name across the form, stroke by stroke. Start date, emergency contact, withholding account—she filled in each box until she reached the end. Only then did her hand stop. A thin layer of sweat dampened a small patch of paper beneath her palm. Even after signing the final box, she didn’t dare let go right away, afraid someone would suddenly recognize that the name on the page hadn’t been written by the person himself.
“Welcome to the team. Go meet everyone in your department first.” HR gathered up the forms and turned to leave in a relaxed mood, walking so quickly that she didn’t notice the person behind her whose heartbeat had just skipped half a beat.
She was brought into the Brand Strategy Department. A whole row of horizontal nameplates lined the wall, and in the far corner was a freshly pasted sticker that still wasn’t aligned properly. It read Zhou Yuen. More than a dozen pairs of eyes turned toward her in unison, making the back of her neck burn and her ears heat up along with it.
Her throat tightened. She forced her voice as low as possible and squeezed out, “Hi, everyone. I’m Zhou Yuen.” Her voice sounded like a portable speaker running out of battery, rolling dully out of her chest before cracking at the end. Even to her own ears, it sounded absurd.
The conference room fell silent for a full three seconds. Even the air conditioner vent suddenly sounded crystal clear. Someone’s mouse stopped in midair, and the clacking of the keyboards cut off all at once.
A ponytailed girl in the corner let out a sudden snort of laughter, then quickly covered her mouth. Her shoulders were still shaking, and her eyes had crinkled into slits. That was Lin Xiaoyu, whose desk was right beside hers.
Someone in the back row leaned against his chair, twirling a pen between his fingers. The tip tapped against the desktop over and over as he asked in a tone that was half teasing and half assessing, “The director personally interviewed you?” That was Ke Minghan. As the words left his mouth, one corner of his lips curled up, carrying a competitive edge she couldn’t quite put her finger on.
Most of the people at the other desks merely looked up once before lowering their heads again. Their mice resumed clicking back and forth. She could only nod once more, keeping the barely audible “Yeah” trapped in her throat. She was afraid that if she opened her mouth again, her voice would completely crack. Every second she stood there felt like being roasted over a fire.
HR led her to a seat by the window. The sound of traffic outside came through the glass in a muffled rumble. A paper clip that the previous user had forgotten to take lay on the desktop.
A stack of paper documents sat on the desk. The top one was the cover of that proposal, the same image currently playing on the lobby screen. She opened it and saw three small revision notes written in pencil. Each one circled a place she had revised over and over but had never felt confident about: increase the type size, not enough white space around the color blocks, create more separation between the primary and secondary headline hierarchy.
She checked them one by one. The first revision was exactly the headline size she had agonized over the longest. The second hit the white-space ratio she hadn’t been able to make up her mind about. The third went even further, writing out the hierarchy adjustment she herself had secretly considered but hadn’t dared make because she was out of time. Even the pressure behind the circles varied. The strokes around the third note were visibly heavier.
She didn’t recognize the handwriting. The pressure was light, but the lines were precise, as if someone had seen straight through every hesitation she’d had while creating the proposal. Her fingers hovered above the three lines of pencil writing. She didn’t dare actually touch them, and her fingertips even felt a little cold.
What kind of person is this? The thought rose in her mind. What kind of person can revise my work more accurately than I can? So accurately it makes me want to crawl into a hole. I haven’t even said one thing right in this company, and someone’s already seen straight through me once. How am I supposed to settle this score?
The sound of the door being pushed open made her look up. A woman strode in, her footsteps light but quick. Her high heels crossed the carpet, and that stretch of silence was more unnerving than any footsteps could have been.
Lin Xiaoyu’s shoulders, which had still been shaking with suppressed laughter, instantly went rigid. Ke Minghan’s fingers stopped twirling his pen. Both their gazes drifted toward the document. No one at any of the desks she passed dared to look up. Without so much as glancing at anyone, she walked straight to Zhou Yuwei’s desk and pushed a document in her hand toward her, stopping it squarely on top of the proposal cover.
Zhou Yuwei’s back went rigid in an instant. She even softened her breathing. From the corner of her eye, she caught sight of the watchband at the woman’s cuff, and her heart slammed harder than it had at the card reader.
“Zhou Yuen.” The woman’s voice was brief and devoid of warmth. “Did you make this cover?”