Coming out of the flower hall, the sunset was just high enough to rest on the tips of the ginkgo trees. Gu Lingfeng pulled the car up in front of me.



"Thank you for today."



"What for?"



"Grandpa has not smiled this much in a long time. He usually does not like to engage with people. Last time my cousin brought her boyfriend home, he made the guy kneel on the floor for an afternoon." He paused. "You, a kindergarten teacher, can handle some tea ceremony and react quickly."



I walked around to the front and pulled the car door open: "Mr. Gu, do you think only CEOs need to deal with family marriage pressure?"



He released the handbrake and pulled forward, spinning the steering wheel with one hand in a dashing manner.



"There is a banquet tomorrow. Gu Group education division is signing a batch of new suppliers. I need a female companion."



"Not going."



"There is a buffet. Salmon air-freighted directly from Norway. At the dessert station, a French chef will be doing live molten lava cake."



"What time?"



Back home I closed the door and leaned against it for a long time. The old man's last words circled around in my brain. The food at the Gu family table is not good. He was not talking about the food.



And that text message - check your industrial and commercial files, someone has tampered with them. Two days had passed, and I had not checked. Not that I did not want to, but I did not dare. Sitting at home checking my own files, that feeling is like sitting alone in a hospital waiting for a medical report. Knowing there is a problem, but not daring to open it.



Tonight would not work. If I delayed any longer, I was afraid I would not even have the strength to open it.



I took out my phone and called my mother.



"Mom, for those three Tianxing kindergartens of ours, did anyone check our equity structure during last year's industrial and commercial registration?"



"No, why?"



"Nothing. Just asking."



After hanging up, I sat down in front of the computer. In the browser search bar, the three characters "Gu Lingfeng" were still there. The search results were clean. I scrolled down a few pages and found an industry brief from half a year ago: Gu Group education division launched a strategic layout in the early childhood education field and had completed preliminary evaluations on twelve kindergartens in Chaoyang District.



Tianxing's enrollment scope happened to be in Chaoyang District.



In other words, Gu Group had their eye on the kindergartens in my area half a year before I sat across from him in that cafe.



And now, Gu Lingfeng's grandfather told me he had "simply looked into" my situation.



Simply looked into. He even knew how many years I had been practicing tea ceremony.



I stared at that line of text on the screen, a chill running up and down my spine. In this play, who actually started acting first?