The fluorescent lights in the underground parking garage buzzed and flickered. Facing the rearview mirror, Zhou Yuwei watched the strip of tie in her hands slip loose again.
That made seven times.
She wiped the sweat from her forehead, took a deep breath, and started over. At this rate, being late would be the least of her problems. The real humiliation would be passing out from strangulation in the parking garage.
The knot in the mirror was crooked like a question mark, one end long and the other short. No matter how she tugged, she couldn't straighten it out.
Her phone screen was still paused on the tutorial video she'd only gotten halfway through last night. The instructor's fingers made one light twist on-screen, and the knot settled into a perfect triangle. But whenever it was her own hands, the tie came loose at the very last step.
The time read 8:40. She had to be at Huangji Bedding by nine. She couldn't even manage her own collar. Her fingertips rubbed against the fabric until a thin layer of sweat formed, and she undid the knot and looped it again.
The sarcastic thought in her head had already made who knew how many rounds: a twenty-five-year-old who had never tied a necktie in her life now had to use a tutorial video to fight herself in a parking garage. If she told anyone, they probably wouldn't believe her.
The window of the car in the next parking space suddenly rolled down. It was the director's car.
Yin Che looked at her for three seconds, then let her gaze fall to the still-untied tie. Without another word, she tossed out two syllables: “Get in.”
Zhou Yuwei froze for half a beat before she understood. She hurriedly slung her briefcase over her shoulder, circled around to the passenger side, and got in. The click of the seat belt sounded unusually loud in the sealed cabin.
She glanced at the dashboard. Only fifteen minutes remained.
“Director, are you headed that way too?” The moment the words left her mouth, she realized how stupid they sounded. Yin Che's parking space was right beside hers. Whether they were headed the same way was beside the point.
Yin Che didn't respond. She turned the steering wheel with one hand and lowered the audio by one notch with the other before asking, “Huangji Bedding has been around for forty years. If Chairman Huang asks you face-to-face why a perfectly good brand needs to spend all this money changing its packaging, how would you answer?”
Zhou Yuwei hadn't expected an exam question the moment she got in. The structure of the proposal spun rapidly through her mind. “Because the average age of the people who recognize Huangji in today's retail channels is over fifty-five, and new customers can't get in. The brand has no memorability for younger people. There's nothing wrong with the products themselves. What needs to change is making the next generation understand why they're worth buying.”
She was stunned when she finished. Those were the exact words she'd written into the presentation last night, repeated without missing a syllable.
Yin Che turned her head and glanced at her but said nothing. She reached over and lowered the audio another notch. Only the engine and the tires against the road remained in the cabin.
Zhou Yuwei wondered silently whether that counted as passing. She had never been able to guess what was on the director's mind. Even if she could, she wouldn't dare ask.
Chairman Huang was already seated at the head of the conference table. The moment he saw them enter, he stood and grabbed her hand, shaking it twice with such force that her entire arm swung along with it. “Young man, sit, sit, sit.”
He sat back down. Before he'd even finished one cup of tea, he was already sizing her up with a beaming smile. His first question was, “Where'd you do your military service?”
The back of Zhou Yuwei's neck tightened. She quickly ran through her brother's military records in her head, then lowered her voice and answered, “Kinmen.”
The instant she answered, she let out a breath of relief. She had happened to review this question last night. Lucky.
“Kinmen's good. They put you through solid training.” Chairman Huang nodded in satisfaction.
Then he asked, “You got a girlfriend?”
That question had been nowhere in her preparations. Her mind went completely blank. For a moment, she didn't even know whose answer she was supposed to give.
“No.”
She answered even faster than before. Even she thought the reply had come out too decisively, like a memorized line.
She couldn't help mocking herself internally. These days, even turning in a blank exam had to be done with this much precision.
Chairman Huang laughed twice, then turned to Yin Che with a sigh. “Young people these days don't want to get married. My daughter doesn't either. A few days ago, she even told me that if we put our products out there, they'd look just as old-fashioned as the stuff her grandma uses. A brand this tacky? She'd die before taking it over.”
He shook his head after saying it, sounding half like he was complaining and half like he simply wanted someone to chat with. Then he picked up his teacup and took a sip.
Zhou Yuwei had only been smiling along politely, but when she heard “just as old-fashioned as the stuff her grandma uses,” her fingertips paused on the edge of her notebook for half a second. She memorized the sentence word for word, down to the punctuation.
Ke Minghan was seated diagonally behind her. He leaned over now, his polite tone clearly deliberate. “Chairman Huang, while we're at it, was Zhou Yuen in the alternative service or the regular military?”
That question was completely outside the process. Zhou Yuwei's palms instantly broke into sweat. She could feel that the knot at her collar had somehow loosened, dampened by cold sweat.
“Regular military.” The moment she answered, she lowered her head and flipped through the documents, trying to steer the conversation back. “Chairman Huang, what we'd like to present today is—”
“Wait, wait, wait.” Chairman Huang waved a hand. He wasn't done asking questions.
Then he asked, “How much do you make a month?”
This question was even more direct than the first two. Zhou Yuwei froze, unsure whether a salary confidentiality clause could be used to fend off an older relative. She shot a glance at Yin Che, but the other woman showed no sign of stepping in to rescue her.
All she could do was answer vaguely. “Uh, company policy says we're not allowed to talk about it.”
Chairman Huang didn't press her. He merely shook his head with a smile and took another sip of tea, looking reasonably satisfied with the answer.
Zhou Yuwei silently made a note to tell Lin Xiaoyu later that she'd nearly been pushed into revealing her entire family history by one older man's small talk.
Yin Che finally spoke. Her voice was brief. “Chairman Huang, we're short on time. Let's look at the proposal first.”
Only then did Chairman Huang drop the joking expression. He waved for them to begin and put on the serious face of a businessman.
Zhou Yuwei opened the presentation and flipped through it page by page. Speaking half a beat faster than usual, she finished explaining the key visual, packaging, and distribution-channel plan. The entire conference room fell silent, leaving only the sound of the projector fan.
After looking through it, Chairman Huang shook his head and shoved the materials across the table. “Too young. We've been doing this for forty years. This isn't how we do things.”
Ke Minghan immediately added, ingratiatingly, “Chairman Huang is right. We'll go back and revise it. We'll keep changing it until you're satisfied.”
After speaking, he turned his head toward Zhou Yuwei, his eyes waiting for her to chime in and apologize too.
But Zhou Yuwei didn't echo him.
She stared at the folder. The words “just as old-fashioned as the stuff her grandma uses” still hadn't faded from her mind. Suddenly, she felt that “too young” didn't line up with those words at all. She clenched her knuckles beneath the table, then lifted her head.
“Chairman.” Her voice was steadier than before.
“Do you think it's too young, or did someone tell you it looks too old?”
The conference room went completely silent.
Chairman Huang was stunned, his mouth hanging half open as if he hadn't expected to be questioned in return.
Ke Minghan froze too, his fingers stopping mid-spin around his pen.
Chairman Huang stared at her for two seconds before slowly asking, “How—how did you know?”
Zhou Yuwei followed the opening and continued, slowing her speech as she reorganized the words she'd prepared. “Huangji's problem has never been that it's too old. It's that no one has turned forty years into a selling point.
“There are countless brands on the market that can make bedding, but not one of them has done it for forty years. That's not a weakness. It's something no one else can copy. Our job isn't to make Huangji young. It's to turn those forty years into a story even your daughter would want to tell people about.”
Chairman Huang was silent for several seconds. Then he reached out and took back the materials he'd shoved away. He flipped through them page by page without saying another word, pausing longer on one page and tapping the edge twice with his finger. It was the page showing the redesigned key visual.
He looked up at Zhou Yuwei again. This time, his gaze was completely different from when she'd walked in. There was more scrutiny in it, but he was no longer sizing up a young man to see whether he had a girlfriend.
Ke Minghan didn't say another word beside her. His fingers remained suspended above the pen, as if he still hadn't figured out what had just happened. The ingratiating smile on his face had frozen halfway, unable to retreat or fully return.
Before the meeting ended, Chairman Huang left them with, “I like this angle. Come back again at the end of the month,” then got up to see them out.
Everyone stood and began gathering the materials. Zhou Yuwei lowered her head and closed the laptop, her fingertips still trembling. Even now, she couldn't understand how those words had burst out of her mouth. Her heart was beating far too fast.
Just as she bent down to pick up the pen she'd dropped on the floor, Yin Che suddenly turned sideways. Her fingertips reached over and caught Zhou Yuwei's loosened tie knot through the shadows beneath the conference table. In two or three quick movements, she straightened it. The whole motion was as brisk as tidying a document. Then she withdrew her hand, her eyes fixed on Chairman Huang in front of her, never once turning to look at Zhou Yuwei.
Zhou Yuwei remained frozen in her bent-over position. Only belatedly did she feel the lingering pressure around her throat where the tie had been tightened again. Heat traveled up her neck and burned all the way to the tips of her ears.
She opened and closed her mouth, but nothing came out. Yin Che had already straightened and reached out to shake Chairman Huang's hand goodbye, her tone as steady as ever. “Thank you for making time for us today, Chairman Huang.”
As if that gesture had merely been her brushing a speck of dust off the table, and had nothing to do with Zhou Yuwei at all.
For the next ten minutes, Zhou Yuwei didn't hear a single word of what Chairman Huang said or what Ke Minghan added. Her mind held only those three seconds beneath the table, replaying them over and over like a broken tape stuck on the same track.
She walked all the way out of the Huangji building and back into Yin Che's passenger seat. She stared at her fingers for a long time. The straightened tie knot sat obediently in place, without a trace of crookedness, almost as if those three seconds had never happened.
At nine that night, only the third floor of Clearstone Building was still lit. In Ke Minghan's office, the glow from the computer screen flickered across his face.
The ice in the bubble tea on his desk had mostly melted long ago. He took a sip. It was cloyingly sweet, but he didn't put it down.
He pulled up Zhou Yuen's personnel file. The ID photo showed a man. His education, military service records, and copy of his ID card all checked out, clean enough that he couldn't find a single loose thread.
He repeatedly zoomed in and out of the screen and went through everything three times. The anger from being outmaneuvered in the conference room that afternoon still hadn't faded. He simply refused to believe that the first person an airborne director had personally signed could have a background this spotless.
After the meeting, he'd stood in the parking lot for ten minutes without getting on the elevator. The more he thought about it, the more he couldn't swallow his anger. A rookie had stumped Chairman Huang with his very first comment. Ke Minghan had been handling Huangji for three years and had never been able to stump him.
On the third pass, his mouse stopped.
The hiring notice listed Monday as the reporting date, but the start date entered in the HR system was Tuesday. Exactly one day apart.
Normally, no one would give such a minor discrepancy a second look. But he stared at the two dates for a long time, reached over to the notes field, and typed an asterisk. Then he entered two words: “For the record.”
He couldn't explain what the one-day discrepancy meant. He was simply relying on the instinct he'd developed over years of catching people by their loose threads. He felt that a mismatch like this would be useful sooner or later. His instincts had never been wrong.
He continued scrolling. His mouse stopped over the attachments section. The portfolio Zhou Yuen had submitted was still sitting in the system.
He opened it casually and flipped through page after page. He didn't understand much of the design logic in the first few pages, but even he could tell the layouts were cleaner than those of several veterans in the department.
The final page was a scanned list of winners from a student competition. The scan was slightly crooked, but the text was perfectly clear. Three characters were printed in the winner field: Zhou Yuwei.
He enlarged the image and looked at it twice, making sure he hadn't read it wrong.
Zhou Yuen. Zhou Yuwei. He silently repeated the two names several times. The more he did, the more wrong they felt.
The corners of Ke Minghan's mouth slowly curled upward, the expression unnoticed even by him. He took a screenshot and saved it to his phone's photo album, even changing the filename to a string of dates and numbers so he could find it later.
Plagiarism or using someone else's name—it didn't matter which. The conclusion was the same: the first person the new director had interviewed and signed herself had a problem with his background.
He had never wanted to destroy a minor player like Zhou Yuen. What he wanted was for everyone to see that Yin Che's ability to judge people wasn't actually as accurate as everyone thought. An outsider parachuted in from above would show her flaws sooner or later. It was only a matter of time.
He locked his phone screen, leaned back in his chair, and glanced at the calendar on the wall. The day after tomorrow was Friday. That date was circled in red: the department's morning meeting, 9:30.
He reached out and traced the box again. Two layers of red ink overlapped, making the color slightly darker.