"All right, all right. Who's that long face for? If I hadn't helped you out, would you have gotten his WeChat?"

On the drive back, Xu Ye caught Wang Manning in the rearview mirror, pouting and sulking in the back seat, and let her have it.

Wang Manning shot back at once. "When did I ever say I wanted his WeChat?"

"Oh, give it a rest. He hadn't been sitting next to you for two minutes and your face was as red as a monkey's butt. Normally you're a total chatterbox, but at lunch you barely said a word. Whatever little scheme you've got going on in that head of yours…"

Before Xu Ye could finish, Wang Manning clapped her hands over his mouth from behind.

"Shut up! Not another word!"

Xu Ye drove back to the hotel. For the next few days he worked at the company as usual, until the evening of Thursday the nineteenth, when Qingye Investment held its year-end party.

A year had flown by. Qingye Investment had grown from a handful of people to more than forty. There were plenty of new faces Xu Ye couldn't have named in full. But they saw each other at the office every day, so he'd long since gotten to know them by sight.

It had been a big year for the company. They'd made a lot of money and built a real name for themselves. So for the year-end party, Xu Ye had Zhang Xinzhou put together a very generous prize raffle. On top of that, he prepared a six-hundred-yuan red envelope for every single person.

Once the party was over, the year's work was more or less officially done. Finance had to put in two more days to get the taxes and next month's payroll squared away ahead of time. Everyone else could go home straight from the party.

There was a lot to take care of at the end of the year. Early the next morning, Xu Ye packed up and drove Chen Qingqing and Wang Manning straight to Suzhou.

Second Aunt, Zhang Ying, had been…