A white sheet of paper reading "Closed for rectification" was taped to the glass door of Shuangyang Coffee.
It was the same table, but the people sitting on either side had changed slightly.
Zhou Qiang still sat in the middle, with Wang Xiaoliang on the inside and Kong Xiuyun on the outside.
Across from Kong Xiuyun sat a middle-aged man. He was the real owner of the place.
He had made a special trip from out of town to find out what had happened.
Zhou Qiang had also insisted on meeting him in person and seeing the originals of all the relevant property documents.
Sui Yiming and Fang Dongxu sat with their heads lowered, neither saying a word, their faces ashen. One had lost his college-student vitality; the other, his designer's pride.
After Qin Haitao fled, the little suspicion Sui Yiming had harbored toward Fang Dongxu vanished.
He now understood completely: Fang Dongxu was just like him, a fool who had been thoroughly scammed.
The two of them went over what had happened, and the more they reviewed it, the colder their hearts grew.
The rent, the renovation, even that supposedly prestigious franchise brand-all of it had been a scam!
The franchise homepage they had once thought so glamorous, boasting ten thousand locations nationwide, had now become a string of dead links.
There was no longer any way to verify whether there had been something shady about the franchise fee.
The veteran renovation contractor Zhou Qiang had brought in had just delivered his final assessment.
"All the permanent fixtures and finishes in this shop, labor included, would cost 280,000 at the absolute most."
The contractor's words struck Fang Dongxu and Sui Yiming in the chest like a sledgehammer.
They had paid 600,000!
Qin Haitao had pocketed over 300,000 from the