There were still eleven minutes before the morning meeting. Zhou Yuwei crouched in the farthest stall in the women's restroom. The toilet lid was down, and she sat on it with the glow of her phone shining between the tile seams, cold and painfully bright.
She scrolled through the statement in her notes app from beginning to end. More than three thousand words, with a timeline broken down to the minute. The day she drew the first draft, the day she revised the key visual, the exact time she stayed up until—everything was written out clearly. She had even included four screenshots of the file's revision history. Every one of them could prove exactly how the project in the portfolio had been created step by step.
Her thumb hovered over the delete button for nearly ten seconds. Outside the stall, a faucet ran the whole time, rushing and splashing. She had considered keeping the statement as a backup, but then she thought better of it. Keeping it would only leave it in the same account. It wouldn't change a thing.
She finally understood one thing.
If she took this statement out, Ke Minghan would hear only two words: excuse-making.
And everything that could prove what had happened—the timeline, the screenshots, the revision history—would ultimately have to be pulled from an account called Zhou Yuen before she could show it to anyone.
The more she explained, the deeper that name would be driven in, while the three characters Zhou Yuwei were pushed farther down, buried so deeply no one could reach them.
She hit delete. The screen returned to a blank note, the cursor blinking on the first line. It jumped again and again, as if counting down for her.
A toilet flushed outside. The person in the next stall left before she did, their footsteps fading away.
She locked her phone, shoved it into her suit-pants pocket, and stood. Facing the mirror, she straightened her tie and casually wiped away a little puffiness at the corner of her eye. She skipped the deep breath. No matter how much air she took in, it wouldn't squeeze out any evidence.
As she left the restroom and headed for the elevators, she ran through what she planned to say again in her head. Halfway through, she rejected it herself and decided not to prepare anything at all. She'd speak off the cuff.
When the elevator doors opened, she glanced at the floor display. Third floor. The light changed more slowly than usual.
In the small conference room on the third floor, all eleven people had already arrived. The curtains were half drawn, and the white glow of the projector cast a bluish pallor over the entire row of faces.
Ke Minghan sat directly across from the projection screen. The light from his laptop shone on his face, making his expression look even more polite than usual. A stack of printed pages sat on the table, its edges aligned perfectly.
He happened to look up when Zhou Yuwei walked in and smiled. It was a measured smile—the calm of someone who had prepared to win.
“This isn’t questioning you. It’s just something we need to ask as part of the process.”
He stood and walked over beside the projection screen, then clicked open a screenshot. It showed the winners list from a design competition, with one entry circled in red. Beside it was a photographed page from the portfolio. The two images were enlarged side by side, and the red box looked especially glaring on the screen.
“This project is listed under your name in the portfolio, but the name on the winners list is someone else’s. So who actually made it?” No one answered. He didn't wait and continued on his own.
“Who is Zhou Yuwei?”
He paused for half a beat, as if deliberately leaving her room to respond. When she said nothing, he flipped through the stack of printed pages in his hand and added a third question.
“If you weren’t the winner, what gave you the right to put this project in your portfolio?”
When he finished, he slapped the printed pages onto the table. The title on the first page was printed in huge letters. He tapped the paper twice with his fingertip, producing two dull thuds.
He stepped back half a pace and leaned against the conference table, folding his arms as he watched her. The posture looked like he was waiting for a play with a predetermined ending to finish.
The conference room fell silent. The coworkers on either side lowered their heads and typed on their laptops, their keystrokes more rapid than usual.
Someone quietly scooted their chair back half a notch, as if afraid the fire about to start might reach them.
Zhou Yuwei stood beside her seat without sitting down. She looked at the line boxed in red on the screen and lightly pressed her knuckles against the edge of the table. That was her only movement.
She raised her eyes, looking past Ke Minghan to the empty whiteboard in the corner. It was usually used only for drawing Gantt charts, and the corners still held a few half-erased words from the last progress meeting.
In her mind, she rearranged the order of the three versions one more time. First, talk about the technical details. Second, bring up the users. Third, save the most difficult judgment for last. The order couldn't be changed.
“I’m not going to explain.”
Her voice was calm and steady.
“Give me a whiteboard and ten minutes.”
Ke Minghan froze for a moment. The smile hadn't left his face, but he was half a beat slow to figure out what to say next. The stack of printed questions in his hand was clenched so tightly that the corners had crumpled.
The mobile whiteboard in the corner had already been wheeled over. Its casters rolled across the carpet with a dull thud.
Zhou Yuwei picked up a whiteboard marker, pulled off the cap, and touched the tip to the board. The smell of ink reached her nose before her words did. Her hand was so steady that even she found it surprising.
“For the first version of this proposal, the key visual used a monospaced grid, with the letter spacing set according to the standard proportions. For the English typeface, I chose a relatively thin sans serif.”
As she spoke, she drew two vertical lines and framed a layout. The marker moved lightly across the surface, yet the sound cut through the entire conference room.
“It wasn’t until the day I reduced it to business-card size that I realized shrinking this grid below six centimeters made the strokes of that typeface too thin. Two letters would blur together into one mess. You couldn’t even tell what they said.”
She crossed out the entire layout. The marker dragged across the board with a grating squeal.
“So I recalculated the entire spacing system, switched to a heavier font, and changed it to a proportional typeface. We sacrificed a little visual neatness for clarity.”
Someone in the front row nodded instinctively, then immediately lowered their head and pretended to look at their laptop. The person beside them gave them a light nudge with an elbow.
Zhou Yuwei didn't stop. She drew a second layout beside it, layering the headline and subhead together, with the two colors separated by only one level of brightness. She drew quickly, but not a single stroke was careless.
“For the second version, the hierarchy between the headline and subhead was created through different shades in the same color family.”
Beside the layout, she added a smaller grayscale version. The two color blocks were clearly a shade apart in the color version, but when converted to grayscale, they almost merged into one.
“On the third day, I looked at it in grayscale and realized that people with color blindness wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between the two levels at all. To them, it was one gray block.
“The reading order of the entire layout depended on that hierarchy. Once the hierarchy collapsed, the whole proposal collapsed with it.”
She crossed out this version too, with more force than before. The whiteboard marker was nearly out of ink, leaving lines that broke and stuttered.
“So I scrapped the whole thing and started over. The headline and subhead would be distinguished by weight, not by differences in color intensity.”
The conference room went completely silent. Even the keyboards stopped.
Someone quietly pulled out their phone and took a picture of the whiteboard. The shutter clicked once, and then a second person took out their phone too.
The two coworkers who had been bent over their notes glanced at each other. Neither said a word before lowering their heads and continuing to write.
Zhou Yuwei turned to the remaining half of the whiteboard and quickly drew a third layout. The colors were rich and the arrangement refined, far more attractive than the first two versions. She stopped halfway through, the marker hovering in midair for two seconds.
“The third version was the prettiest of the three.”
Her tone didn't change.
“But I crossed it out myself halfway through.”
She turned the marker sideways and drew one long line that wiped out the entire half of the whiteboard.
“This version would cost twenty percent more to print. It would require an extra embossing process, and the paper would have to be replaced with specialty stock. It would photograph well, and the client would love it at first sight. But what actually gets used on-site is material that store employees have to replace every day. Specialty paper frays easily when it's torn off.
“If something is too beautiful for anyone to maintain, it'll be ruined in three months. Once it's damaged, it looks worse than if it had never been made. Making the client gasp at first sight isn't as important as getting the people on-site willing to keep replacing it.
“So this version stayed in the drafts. It never made it into the final proposal.”
She set down the marker and put the cap back on. A little ink stained her knuckles, but she didn't wipe it off. She turned toward the screenshot boxed in red on the projection screen and said nothing more. She didn't explain who had drawn any of the three versions.
The cameras kept clicking.
The planner in the front row lowered her head and wrote rapidly in her notebook. Halfway through, she stopped and looked up to confirm the three crossed-out layouts on the whiteboard before lowering her head again. She wrote more seriously than she had during any agenda item at a morning meeting.
Someone leaned over and whispered into the ear of the person beside them. The voice was too low to make out, but both of them were staring at the whiteboard.
In the corner, a coworker who was usually the quietest couldn't help moving two steps closer, trying to get a clearer look at the little grayscale image beside the second version.
Ke Minghan stood beside the projection screen, his lips moving once. The questioning outline he'd spent all night preparing was spread across his hands. The first question was about the finished product, and the second was also about the finished product. The third was supposed to ask whether the timeline held up. But there wasn't a single finished product on the whiteboard—only three failed versions that had been crossed out. None of his questions could get there anymore.
He lowered his head and flipped through the pages once, then flipped back to the first page. His fingertip stopped on the title line. In the end, he could only squeeze out, “Got it.”
Yin Che sat at the other end of the long table, the pencil in her hand never moving.
Only after the room's attention had returned to its usual places did she move her gaze from Zhou Yuwei to Ke Minghan.
“Assistant Manager Ke,” she said, “did you forget to standardize the fonts in the meeting minutes you just took?”
Ke Minghan lowered his head and glanced at his screen. The live meeting record had two different fonts mixed together in the title and body text.
He opened his mouth to explain that an assistant had typed it, but swallowed the words before they came out. He only managed, “I’ll fix it later.” When he sat back down, his movements were stiffer than usual, and he casually shoved the printed question sheet to the bottom of his folder.
Yin Che didn't look at him again. She turned to the proposal form beside her and checked off one of the items. An update notification popped up in the system's collaboration window. The loading circle spun twice before stopping, and the signature field automatically filled in three characters: Zhou Yuen. The font was the system default, square and rigid, without a trace of warmth.
“This section is yours.”
Her tone was as flat as before.
“Give me the first version by next Wednesday.”
Zhou Yuwei stared at those three characters for two seconds, the light from the screen reflected in her eyes.
It wasn't the first time she'd seen that name appear where she was supposed to stand. But it was the first time those two seconds had felt so long—long enough for her to hear the sound of her own breathing.
She answered, her voice steadier than she'd expected, and tightened her grip on the whiteboard marker just a little.
When the meeting ended, the coworkers filed out in groups of two or three. Someone passed by her and murmured, “That was seriously badass.” She lowered her head in acknowledgment but didn't respond.
Someone was still standing in front of the whiteboard, taking another picture of the three crossed-out layouts with their phone.
Ke Minghan packed up his laptop and brushed past her without slowing. His voice was so quiet that only she could hear it.
“Zhou Yuen,” he said, “your sister's name is Zhou Yuwei, right?”
He headed for the door without even looking back. The sound of his dress shoes on the carpet grew fainter and fainter until it was drowned out by the elevator chime at the other end of the hallway.
Zhou Yuwei stood where she was, still gripping the whiteboard marker. Her knuckles had gone white around the cap. She didn't move.
The conference room lights were still on. The screenshot on the projection screen had been replaced, and the display had returned to the Clearstone Integrated Marketing desktop. The three crossed-out lines remained on the whiteboard, and the smell of ink had yet to fade. She stood before the half-erased board, unable to say a word.