Zhao Ming drove over to the conservatory before eleven.

He waited in the car over half an hour before Zhang Ruowei came out of class.

None of the girls had umbrellas, so Zhao Ming pulled the car up right in front of them and called them in. He dropped Chen Qingqing, Jiang Yu and Shen Xinyi back at their dorm first, then turned around and headed for the company with Zhang Ruowei.

They had settled on lunch today back on Monday.

Zhao Ming had warned her ahead of time that his uncle might want to meet her.

Zhang Ruowei had already braced herself. She didn't think about it much — she just watched the rain bead up and run down the window.

Some people grow up early and some grow up late.

Zhang Ruowei was plainly the first kind.

Her dad didn't get the chance to work overseas until around the time she started middle school. Before that, money at home was tight. It was only later, as he kept getting promoted and his pay kept climbing, that things slowly got better.

In middle school, to buy clothes she liked, she had gone two months at a stretch eating cheap and spending nothing, then walked into a store with a wad of small bills and haggled with the salesgirl.

Later, in high school, boarding on campus, she happened to catch her history teacher — a mild, soft-spoken man — cheating with another teacher at the school. It took six months to come out. The teacher's wife turned up at the school and made a scene, and for a while the whole place talked about nothing else.

Zhang Ruowei could not make sense of it. How could a man that gentle do something like that? The woman he cheated with wasn't even as pretty as his wife, and she was nowhere near as good to him.

After that, Zhang Ruowei came away with something she never stopped believing — a woman's looks are a wild card in Fight the Landlord. Paired with any other card they're a bomb. Played on their…