Between the Morning Light on Lake Como and a True Identity

In northern Italy, on the shores of Lake Como, an estate surrounded by cypress and wisteria stood quietly in the February morning mist.

Built in the sixteenth century, the estate had faded pale-yellow walls and dark green shutters, every one of them tightly closed, like an old house fallen asleep through a long winter.

Only the curtains of the easternmost bedroom on the third floor had been drawn open a crack. Morning light squeezed through the gap and fell on a man.

He sat in an armchair by the window, where he had been sitting all night.

He was still wearing yesterday's shirt, its sleeves rolled up to his forearms, revealing a wrist tanned a light wheat color and an old platinum cufflink.

He had not slept-or rather, he did not know whether he had slept. Ever since he saw that red carpet livestream last night, his consciousness had hung somewhere in between, like a lamp swaying in the wind, brightening and dimming, dimming and brightening again.

Three devices lay spread out on the coffee table before him-a laptop, its screen displaying a news page about the Berlin Film Festival red carpet, Su Jin's face frozen at a particular moment, the hem of her silver-white gown spread behind her like a sail lifted by the wind;

An iPad, its screen showing her Instagram profile, with forty-six million followers. Her latest post had gone up last night: a nighttime photograph of the Berlin TV Tower, captioned with a single word, "Danke";

A phone, its screen lit up with a conversation in an encrypted messaging app. The last message was one he had sent: "Did you find out? Is it confirmed?"

There had been no reply. Beside the coffee table was a fourth thing, with no screen and no signal, just an old photograph.

The photograph had yellowed, its edges curling. His hands had held it so many times that a fine, oily sheen of fingerprints coated its surface.

It showed a young woman with long hair braided down her chest. Wearing a white cotton dress, she stood barefoot in a meadow, a baby in her arms.

The shape of her face was identical to Su Jin's-the height of her cheekbones, the curve of her jaw, the slight upward sweep of her brow bones.

Her eyes were amber, with an extremely fine gold ring around each pupil.

The photograph had been taken in spring twenty years ago, outside a small apartment building in Lausanne, Switzerland.

That had been the last time he saw his mother.

He was fourteen that year. His mother told him she was leaving, that the baby's father was not his father, and that she was taking his younger sister to live in another country.

He asked her where she was going, and she said she did not know.

He asked if she could take him with her, and she cried.

It was the first time he had seen his mother cry, and the last.

Over twenty years, he had searched every possible place, followed every possible lead, hired countless investigation agencies, and spent tens of millions of US dollars.

He had found his mother's grave in a small city in Yunnan. The headstone bore only her name and the dates of her birth and death, with no photograph and no inscription naming who had erected it.

He had not found his sister.

Until last night.

He sat by the window, looking at the old photograph on the coffee table, then at Su Jin's face on the laptop screen.

The same cheekbones, the same jaw, the same brow line, the same eyes.

He reached out, his fingertips touching the screen, touching her face. The screen was cold, but he did not pull away.

The door opened. A middle-aged man in a gray suit walked in, holding a phone.

"Sir, we found out. The DNA comparison results are in. There's a 99.97 percent probability-she's your sister."

He drew his hand away from the screen and laid it on his knee.

His fingers were trembling, but he did not clench them into a fist. He simply let them shake.

"Where is she?" "Paris."

He nodded.

He stood, walked to the window, and pulled the curtains a little farther apart.

Lake Como's surface shimmered silver-white in the morning light. The distant Alps were covered in snow, and the clouds around their peaks were parting to reveal the deep blue sky beneath.

"Prepare the plane. We're going to Cannes."

He paused and lowered his head, looking at his trembling fingers.

"No, wait. Wait until she gets to Cannes. Until she's on the red carpet, in front of all the cameras. I want to walk up to her when the whole world can see her."

His eyes reddened, but he did not blink. He simply let the water gather in them without falling.

"I've waited so many years. A few more days won't matter."

Two

When Su Jin woke in her suite at the Ritz Paris, the morning light was seeping through a gap in the curtains, a thin layer like honey diluted with water.

She lay in bed, watching the crystal chandelier on the ceiling refract the morning light into tiny scattered gleams, and waited for that familiar voice.

Little Golden Egg squeezed out of the air and hovered at the foot of the bed, flapping its wings more slowly than usual, like a bird that had just flown across an entire ocean, tired but still beating its wings, unwilling to land.

[Host, it's time to check in. Today is day 137. Can you guess what today's reward is?]

Su Jin did not guess. She merely rolled over and buried her face in the pillow. It carried the faint scent of gardenias, a pillow the hotel had specially changed for her.

She had stayed at so many hotels, but only the Ritz remembered that she liked gardenias.

[Ten, nine, eight, seven...]

Eyes closed, Su Jin listened to the numbers drop one by one. She counted from one to ten, then from ten back to one, as if counting a flock of invisible sheep.

[Three, two, one-ding!]

[Congratulations to the host on completing the 137th daily check-in!]

[Today's check-in reward: a special bespoke collection from Mulliner, Bentley's personal commissioning division. Seven limited-edition Bentleys in seven exclusive colors have been delivered to a garage in the 16th arrondissement of Paris.

All models are Bentayga EWB Mulliners. Each has a globally unique color, and the paint formulas have been destroyed. The colors are as follows: number one, Lake Como Morning Mist-an extremely pale gray-blue, like the lake's surface at the last moment before sunrise, with extraordinarily fine silver mica flakes hidden beneath that sparkle in the sunlight.

Number two, Maine Holly-dark green, but not a bright green. It is the color of holly leaves weighed down by snow all winter night, a deep, somber green with a touch of black at the edges.

Number three, Morocco Terracotta-ochre, like clay baked by the sun in the desert for a thousand years. Its surface has a matte sheen that does not reflect light, but absorbs it.

Number four, Capital Maple Leaf-not the vivid red of autumn maple leaves, but the red of leaves about to fall, their edges already turning brown while their centers remain red, with a silvery-gray sheen after being touched by frost.

Number five, Iceland Black Sand Beach-pure black, but not an ordinary black. Extremely fine glass particles have been mixed into the paint, refracting an exceedingly faint white light like sea foam when light strikes it.

Number six, Tuscany Cypress-dark green, unlike Maine Holly. This green is warmer, like the golden-tinged green on the surface of cypress leaves after an entire summer under the Tuscan sun.

Number seven, Yunnan Camellia-white, but not pure white. It is the white of petals with a faint touch of pink at their edges and pale yellow at their center.]

After listening, Su Jin lay in bed for a long time.

Outside the window, the morning light turned from honey-colored to pale gold, then from pale gold to white. She rolled onto her back and looked at the crystal chandelier on the ceiling.

"Seven cars," she said.

[Seven cars. One in each color. You can choose one to drive to Cannes.]

Su Jin sat up, her hair loose and the neckline of her robe slightly open, revealing part of her collarbone.

She rubbed her eyes like a cat just waking up-first the left, then the right. Then she lowered her hands onto her knees and gazed at some indefinite point ahead.

"Yunnan Camellia. The white one," she said.

[Won't you look at the other colors? The Lake Como Morning Mist one is lovely too. Gray-blue, and it would go very well with your dress today-]

"The white one," she repeated, throwing back the covers and placing her bare feet on the carpet.

Three

Today, Su Jin wore a cream-white Khaite slip dress, long and made of silk satin. It was not the kind of satin with a blinding shine; it had been given a matte finish, a sheen like light filtered through frosted glass.

The dress was cut with extreme simplicity, consisting of two slender straps and a panel of white satin falling from her chest to her ankles, without a single ornament. But the cut at the side was its most exquisite feature: below the waist, the fabric was drawn in and then let out, forming a deep curve along her side. It was almost imperceptible without a close look, but as she walked, the curve opened and closed with her steps, like a door breathing.

Her hair hung loose, the ends slightly curled, the February wind in Paris blowing it into a somewhat untidy curve.

She wore no makeup, and under Paris's gray-white daylight, her skin had a soft, luminous whiteness with a pearly sheen.

Her feet were bare; she had not put on shoes yet.

She stood before the mirror in the dressing room and took a pair of Buccellati pearl earrings from her jewelry box. The pearls were tiny, the size of grains of rice, each irregularly shaped, and they swayed gently from her earlobes.

She looked at herself in the mirror, then took them off and changed to another pair-Van Cleef & Arpels Alhambra studs, four-leaf clovers of white mother-of-pearl that glimmered with a soft, rainbow iridescence under the light.

She put them on, then took them off again and returned them to the jewelry box.

In the end, she wore no jewelry at all, her earlobes, neck, and wrists bare, with only the cream-white dress and her long, loose dark brown hair.

She came out of the dressing room carrying a pair of white Roger Vivier flats with square buckles, then bent down to put them on by the elevator.

Fang Ying followed behind her. "President Su, the car is in the garage. The white one."

Su Jin nodded and stepped into the elevator.

The garage in the 16th arrondissement of Paris was on a quiet lane. Its frontage was small, with a gray iron door and no sign.

Fang Ying pressed a button on the remote, and the iron door slowly rose.

The garage was dark inside, with only a warm yellow light glowing at the far end.

The seven cars were parked side by side beneath the light, like seven horses of different colors standing quietly in a stable, waiting to be ridden out for a run.

Su Jin walked past them-Lake Como Morning Mist, its gray-blue paint shimmering under the light with exceedingly fine silver specks, like fragments of moonlight on a lake.

She stopped in front of the last car.

Yunnan Camellia. The white paint was not a cold white, but the white of petals with a faint touch of pink at their edges and pale yellow at their center.

Light spilled down from the lamp overhead onto the body of the car, was absorbed by the paint, and released again in a softer, warmer way, like someone turning on a lamp late at night, its light gentle on the eyes but enough to illuminate the whole room.

Su Jin reached out, her fingertips touching the door handle.

The metal was cool, but she did not pull away. She opened the door and got in.

The interior was upholstered in light beige leather, and the seats were stitched by hand. The stitches were evenly spaced, but a close look revealed the slightest differences in their size-a hallmark of Mulliner customization. Machine stitching was perfect, but hand stitching bore the traces of a person.

She gripped the steering wheel. Wrapped in leather, it felt smooth and warm, its thickness just right.

The dashboard was dark walnut, its grain gleaming deep brown under the instrument lights.

She started the engine. It was so quiet it could barely be heard, but the car gave a slight shudder, like a horse snorting awake. She put it in gear and pressed the accelerator.

The car slowly emerged from the garage and turned into a lane in the 16th arrondissement of Paris.

Outside the window, Paris was slowly waking in the morning light-a bakery opened its doors, its owner carrying wooden crates of croissants outside; a woman in a trench coat led a small brown dog across the street, and the dog stopped to sniff beside a lamppost before running on again;

In the distance, the Eiffel Tower had turned pale gold in the morning light, its tip disappearing into a thin mist.

Su Jin held the steering wheel with one hand and rested the other against the car window, her fingers at her temple, her gaze on the road ahead.

The cream-white skirt slipped down from her knees and spread across the passenger seat, its satin fabric gleaming softly in the morning light like the surface of water.

She drove slowly, not because she was afraid to drive fast, but because she did not want to.

She wanted to keep the car running a little longer, to make the journey a little longer, to let the Paris morning linger outside her window for a few more minutes.

But every road had an end.

She stopped outside Shen Nian's studio, turned off the engine, and pushed open the car door.

Shen Nian was already standing in the doorway, wearing a work apron covered in paint and holding two cups of coffee.

She saw the car and paused, then looked at Su Jin. "What color is that?" Su Jin took a coffee from her. "Yunnan Camellia." Shen Nian glanced at the car again, then nodded. "Beautiful."

Su Jin took a sip of coffee and leaned against the car door. "Let's go. We'll be late for the auction."

Four

The auction was held at the Paris Hôtel Drouot, an old nineteenth-century building with gray stone walls and gold lettering carved above the entrance.

The hall was packed-white-haired old collectors, art advisers in suits and dress shoes, auctioneers in white gloves, and several Asian faces holding numbered paddles. Judging by their clothes and bearing, they seemed to be bidding on behalf of collectors from the mainland and Hong Kong.

Su Jin and Shen Nian sat near the aisle in the third row.

Su Jin wore a cream-white Khaite slip dress, while Shen Nian wore a black Isabel Marant cotton shirt and dark blue jeans. Sitting together, they looked like two people from different worlds, but their gazes as they watched the auction platform were the same-focused, quiet, and devoid of any extraneous emotion.

The auctioneer was a Frenchman in his sixties, his hair completely white, wearing gold-rimmed glasses. His voice was even as he spoke, but each time he called a number, the fall of his hammer was as crisp as a knife cutting through something.

The first lot was a blue-and-white Qianlong-era presentation vase from the Qing dynasty, decorated with a scrolling lotus pattern, with an opening bid of 120,000 euros.

Su Jin did not raise her paddle.

The second was a set of huanghuali brush pots from the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, with an opening bid of 80,000 euros. Again, she did not raise her paddle.

Beside her, Shen Nian asked quietly what she wanted. She said to wait.

When the third lot was wheeled out, Su Jin sat up straight.

It was a set of mid-Qing kingfisher-feather phoenix hair ornaments inlaid with gemstones. Such ornaments were worn by noblewomen at formal occasions during the Qing dynasty, made on a silver-gilt base, with kingfisher feathers pasted on piece by piece to form the background, then set with pearls, tourmalines, coral, and jadeite.

The kingfisher feathers in this set were exceptionally well preserved, gleaming an eerie blue under the lights on the auction platform, like the scales of a deep-sea fish.

Above the feathers, nine phoenixes were woven from gold wire, each holding a pearl in its beak. The pearls grew smaller from the center toward either side. The central one was the largest, the size of a little fingernail, and glowed with a faint pink halo.

Dozens of tourmalines and rubies were set into the phoenixes' wings and tail feathers, their colors grading from deep red to pale pink, like the progression of a setting sun sinking below the horizon.

The auctioneer announced the opening bid: 280,000 euros.

Su Jin raised her paddle.

An Asian bidder across the room raised a paddle too.

The price jumped from 280,000 to 350,000, from 350,000 to 420,000, and from 420,000 to 500,000.

Each time Su Jin raised her paddle, she did so unhurriedly, as if buying a bottle of milk at a supermarket, with no need to hesitate or grow excited. The bidder opposite stopped at 520,000.

The auctioneer's hammer came down on the table, the sound as crisp as a twig snapping.

Su Jin turned to Shen Nian. "Help me see which pearls need replacing." Shen Nian stared at her. "You're going to wear it?"

Su Jin nodded. "If I'm not going to wear it, why buy it?"

The final lot was a set of eight peachbloom-glazed scholar's implements, made by an imperial-kiln craftsman in the late Qing dynasty and bearing the reign mark "Made in the Guangxu reign of the Great Qing."

The peachbloom glaze was not uniform. Its shades varied, like the skin of a ripe cowpea-some areas were red enough to turn purple, some had pink showing through the red, and some bore small patches of extremely pale green, like little accidental marks left where the copper had not fully oxidized while the glaze was fired in the kiln.

The eight implements were arranged in a custom-made rosewood box-a brush washer, water pot, seal-paste box, brush rest, paperweight, incense holder, inkstone dropper, and inkstick rest.

None was large; even the biggest, the brush washer, was only as wide as an adult's palm. Yet the glaze shifted under the light with a soft luster, possessing a texture like jade that had been handled for a very long time.

Su Jin picked up the brush washer and turned it over to look at the mark on the bottom. Her fingers passed gently over the glaze. It felt as smooth as a pebble washed by water for a hundred years, but the smoothness was not flat; it had minute undulations, a smoothness that breathed like the pores of skin.

She put the brush washer back in the box and looked at the eight small objects, silent for a long time.

Shen Nian said quietly beside her, "They can't fire a glaze like this anymore."

Su Jin turned to her. "Why not?"

Shen Nian thought for a moment. "The formula was lost. Copper is the coloring agent in peachbloom glaze, and copper is extremely unstable at high temperatures. The slightest difference in temperature or atmosphere changes the entire color.

"The craftsmen at the Qing imperial kilns experimented for decades before mastering the technique of 'seeking constancy amid change'-letting the copper develop its own color in the glaze, letting it develop as far as it would, without controlling it, but without losing control either.

"That technique isn't a matter of a formula. It's a matter of feel. That feel was passed down from craftsman to craftsman, generation after generation, until the chain broke."

Su Jin looked at the peachbloom set, at the faint reign mark carved in regular script on the bottom of the brush washer: "Made in the Guangxu reign of the Great Qing," six characters in three lines. Every stroke had been carved so shallowly it was almost invisible, but when the light struck at a certain angle, the strokes suddenly emerged, like stones sunk at the bottom of water, visible only when it was clear.

Her fingers lingered on the edge of the box. "What if I wanted to fire them again?"

Shen Nian looked at her. "You want to reproduce peachbloom glaze?"

Su Jin shook her head. "Not reproduce it. Bring it back to life. Not just this one thing-all of them. The things whose lineages broke, that were lost, that no one remembers how to make-bring them back. With today's technology, with MIT's labs, with materials science, computer vision, and thermodynamic simulations.

"Not feel, but data. Turn the feel those craftsmen passed down for hundreds of years into formulas, into algorithms, into something reproducible, something that won't be broken off or ever lost."

Shen Nian looked at her and remained silent for a long time.

The auctioneer's hammer fell, striking the table. "Four hundred and twenty thousand euros, sold. Congratulations to this lady."

Su Jin closed the box and placed it on her knees.

Shen Nian watched her hand, watched her fingers press against the lid of the rosewood box, her knuckles slightly white.

"Are you really going to do it?"

Su Jin nodded. "I am," she said.

She said nothing else. She simply held the box in her arms, sitting in a chair in the auction hall and watching the next lot being wheeled off the platform, her gaze as quiet as if she were waiting for a guest who had promised to come a long time ago but had not yet arrived.