Chen Qingqing bought a great many drawing supplies.

Out of the stationery shop, the two of them drove to the hotel. The moment they were in the room she couldn't wait — she spread the drawing paper out on the coffee table by the sofa and arranged the supplies one by one beside it.

Once everything was ready she handed Xu Ye her phone. "Pick a photo and I'll draw it."

Xu Ye typed in the passcode and opened the album, and a dazzling spread of photographs came up. Chen Qingqing wasn't much for selfies, and when they went out she didn't take stacks of scenery shots the way Zhang Ruowei and the others did — so fifty percent of what was in it was pictures he had taken and sent her, and more than fifteen percent were photos she had taken of him without his knowing.

"Why do you have this many bad photos of me, taken on the sly?"

"You're not allowed to delete them!"

"Don't worry, I won't." Xu Ye scrolled through at random, and in the end he still thought the two pictures of them together from New Year's Eve last year were the best, and the ones that meant the most.

So he opened the one of himself giving her a bear hug from behind, set the phone on the coffee table and said, "Draw this one."

Chen Qingqing glanced at it, saw which one it was, and smiled too.

She was the same as him.

She liked that photo very much herself. The other one — the two of them standing together with their heads tipped — was still the lock screen on both their phones, and neither had ever changed it.

She set the phone to the left of the paper, studied it carefully for a while, then picked up a pencil and began marking the points and laying out the composition.

But the sofa seat was a little high, and drawing meant bending her whole back over. She found it hard going, so she simply put a cushion on the floor and…