"Dad!"

Zhang Ruowei rolled her eyes. "Is there something wrong with you?"

Zhang Zhao knew the moment it was out of his mouth that he had asked the wrong thing, but seeing his own daughter turn on him like that, all he did was hold on to his water glass and turn away the other way, exactly like an overgrown child making a point of his displeasure.

Zhao Ming pulled two tissues out awkwardly and wiped the water off the floor, then looked at Zhang Ruowei with enormous grievance, entirely unsure what he was supposed to say.

Fortunately Tao Meihua stepped in about then and rescued him.

She sat down beside Zhang Zhao and picked the thread back up. "Are you from here?"

"Mm. My dad's Shanghainese, my mom's from Sichuan and Chongqing. I've got my own place in Shanghai too."

"It's not that I look down on out-of-towners. It's that Ruowei is the only daughter we have, and I don't want her too far away from us later on. You see what I mean?"

Zhao Ming finally let out a breath. He smiled and nodded.

"What do your parents do?"

"My dad retired a long time ago. My mom's never really worked."

Zhang Zhao had worked abroad for years and might not understand his daughter especially well, but Tao Meihua had spent far more time with her, and she could see things in the way the two of them were together that her husband could not.

The unconscious way her daughter's eyes met Zhao Ming's, for instance. The small nervousness she had shown while the questions were being asked. All of it said that whatever was between the two of them was already well past ordinary.

Tao Meihua knew her daughter had been hard to please since she was small, so on character and quality Zhao Ming had clearly passed already.

From his clothes and the way he spoke, you could also tell his family was comfortable enough.

But this was marriage, in the end.

It was, in the end, about her daughter's happiness for the next several decades.