After My Rebirth, My Husband Pampers Me Everyday!

Chapter 164: ABOUT HIS MOTHER

Guiying looked at him, then at the five men behind him, each one standing with that particular quality of stillness that was not relaxed and not tense but somewhere precisely between the two, then back at Tao Lingyue.

"Why?" he said.

"Mr. Xue did not share his full reasoning with me," Tao Lingyue said. "Only that he hoped you would come."

"He hoped?" Guiying said. "And if I said no?"

"Then we would relay your answer and leave," Tao Lingyue said. "You are under no obligation, Young Master Xue."

Guiying’s fingers stayed closed around his bag strap.

His uncle certainly knew how to make an entrance.

Having six burly men escort him as still say he had the option to decline.

Sensible people did not follow strangers anywhere regardless of how cleanly they presented themselves.

"I don’t trust you," Guiying said. "My uncle has never reached out to me directly. I have no reason to follow you anywhere."

Tao Lingyue nodded once, precise and small. "Mr. Xue anticipated that." A brief pause, the length of a single breath. "He asked me to tell you — if you want to know more about your mother, you should come with us."

A taxi horn sounded two streets over. The glass doors behind him slid open for someone leaving the building, letting out a brief wash of lobby air before closing again.

The Thursday morning carried on around them without adjustment.

Guiying’s grip tightened on his bag strap.

He wanted to know about his mother more than he had wanted most things in either of his lives, and this man in front of him had just placed that fact on the table between them like a key, and they both knew it.

He exhaled through his nose, slow and deliberate, and looked across at the row of black vehicles parked along the far edge of the forecourt, low and sleek, then at the matte sand beige Lexus ten metres away in the visitor bay, its black rims solid against the pale concrete, the morning light sitting flat across its wide bonnet.

"I’m not getting in your car," he said.

Tao Lingyue waited.

"You’re driving that one," Guiying said, and pointed at the Lexus.

Something moved across Tao Lingyue’s face, brief as a cloud shadow crossing a wall, before it settled back into composure. "Of course, Young Master Xue."

Guiying held out the keys and Tao Lingyue stepped forward and received them with both hands.

Guiying walked around to the passenger side, pulled the door open and got in. The leather seat was warm from the morning sun. He set his bag on his lap, closed the door and looked straight ahead through the windscreen while Tao Lingyue adjusted the seat forward, checked the mirror and started the engine with the careful economy of someone handling something that didn’t belong to him.

The Lexus rolled out of the visitor bay, through the forecourt gates and into the street.

Outside the window the city passed in fragments — a fruit stall with crates of tangerines stacked three high, a woman in a yellow coat crossing against the light, two delivery riders waiting at a junction with their helmets pushed back on their heads, a barbershop with its door propped open and the sound of a television drifting out through the gap.

Guiying sat with his bag on his lap, the beret low over his forehead, and watched it all go past without a word, because wherever Tao Lingyue was taking him, the decision had already been made the moment his mother’s name entered the conversation.

The Lexus moved through Beijing for twenty minutes before Tao Lingyue turned off the main road into a quieter district, the streets narrowing, the buildings lower and older, the morning light falling at a different angle between them.

They passed through a gate that opened before they reached it, along a private road lined with mature trees whose roots had lifted the edges of the paving in places, and came to a stop in front of a building that wore its money quietly.

No signage, no excess, just clean stone and tall windows and the stillness of a place that had no need to announce itself.

Two men in black were already at the entrance when Guiying stepped out of the car.

They bowed.

Guiying adjusted his beret, picked up his bag, and followed Tao Lingyue through the entrance doors into a wide corridor floored in dark wood.

Ink wash paintings hung along the walls, a single orchid in a celadon vase sat on a console table near the door, the air cool with the faint smell of sandalwood drifting from somewhere deeper in the building.

Tao Lingyue stopped at a set of double doors at the end of the corridor and knocked twice.

"Come in," said a voice from the other side.

Tao Lingyue pushed the door open and stepped aside.

Guiying walked in.

The room was large and simply furnished, a low table near the window with two chairs arranged either side of it, a tea set already laid out with steam rising from the pot in a thin unhurried curl. Bookshelves lined the far wall, full but ordered, and on the wall to his left hung a single framed portrait.

A woman, young, perhaps early twenties, with blonde hair that fell loose around her shoulders.

Her blue eyes caught the light in the painting the way blue eyes caught light in a room, vivid and direct.

Her bone structure was fine and distinctly French, the jaw, the cheekbones, the particular way the light sat across her face, with a softness around the eyes that suggested a different inheritance running quietly underneath the dominant one.

A small smile sat at the corner of her mouth as though it had been there a moment before the painter captured it, already on its way to becoming something more.

Guiying stopped walking.

He knew that face.

Not from memory, not from photographs that no longer existed, but from his own reflection every morning of both his lives, the same blue eyes looking back at him, the same bone structure rearranged in a slightly different configuration but coming unmistakably from the same place.

Painted and framed, hanging on the wall of a room he had never been in, in a building he had never visited, belonging to a man he had man he had never met.

"You look like her."