The Quiet Algorithm of Us

22 The Clean Ledger

The hallway draft left.

“Ledger clean,” Kai reported, tapping a single key like a judge. “Releases filed. The ancestors are cc’d.”

“Good,” said Aunt Meifang and smudged ash across two fingers like war paint and then went to bully flour into pasta as if the world owed her carbs. Aunt Lihua snipped jasmine and placed one leaf in a shallow dish at the altar: offering to the abstract notion of adulthood.

The city caught the new temperature and tuned down its static. Which is when news, being petty, delivered dessert: Yichen—handsome, greedy, bored—had broken his teeth on last week’s sneeze and this week’s silence. He’d run the wrong book into the wrong weather and pretended the sky should apologize. His fund, which loved leverage and adjectives, had blown out a seam. Position limits were now nouns. Investors evolved into questions with wire transfers attached. Yichen hid, which is not noble but sometimes wise, and the words liquidity event began circulating among people who claim to hate euphemisms.

“Should we… send flowers,” Fang Limin asked, not because he is cruel but because he is an archivist of irony.

“We will send a letter,” said Jinchao, who prefers receipts to bouquets. He dictated something to counsel that had the tonality of a velvet ceasefire and the spine of a cease-and-desist:

To Mr. Qiao:
I wish you an orderly season. I advise you to maintain distance from my household and especially my wife. Any attempts—direct, third-party, spectral—to surveil, harass, approach, insinuate, or defame will be met with the law’s boring excellence and my immediate attention. Our public posture remains polite. Do not mistake it for permission.
— R.J.

The lawyer softened the edges for court. The message remained. It went by courier, not email, because paper performs seriousness. A copy went to three investors Yichen fears and one journalist he believes admires him. That was not pettiness. That was architecture.

“Overprotective,” Miran murmured when she saw the draft, which is the kind of criticism you only get to deliver when your smile gives it away as praise.

“Corrective,” he said. “We fix bridges before they break.”

She leaned, shoulder to his arm. “And delete spreadsheets before they colonize the house.”

“Did you,” he asked, as if one human could carry that kind of dignity and not brag.

She nodded. “Ashes.xls is now Thanks.txt.”

He let the softest, most illegal satisfaction into his face for one heartbeat before he sterned it into virtue. “We will print Thanks.txt in grayscale,” he said. “Frame it above pasta.”

“Frame nothing,” she said. “Just read it sometimes. If you misbehave, I will add and subtract names.”

He bowed slightly, as if premium is a behavior applies to husbands.

The day did ordinary miracles. The Soup for Strangers pilot served out of the side kitchen with the discretion of a well-run border crossing. A forklift operator came back with a friend. A scholarship recipient stuck her head into the office to drop a note that simply said, I will come back when I’m useful. Dr. Zhao re-negotiated a price without raising her voice and wrote premium vanquished on a sticky. Fang filed six receipts and flirted with a spreadsheet. Luo Qiang wrote uneventful and drew a tiny ash bowl beside it and then erased the drawing because he is a professional. Zhou added a calendar entry titled Kitchen Laughs: 18:30 just to see if joy obeys structure (it does).

Evening rolled in like it had read the minutes. Pasta Night, moved thrice and finally here, took the courtyard with a grace that should be taught to parliaments. Aunt Meifang twirled noodles like destiny on a fork and declared, “No coriander,” to the stars. Aunt Lihua declared a toast to boring excellence and then to loud kitchens. The ghosts clinked their bowls with dignity. Capital had to be moved because it was trying to sit at the head of the table.