Lukas's phone lit up on the coffee table at 9:40 p.m., while he was in the shower, and I didn't look at it right away. I was finishing an email to my father about the lease; he's the one who paid the deposit, he likes to know. Outside, Shanghai had that damp September grey where you can no longer tell whether it's the sky or the air conditioning that's sweating. The screen stayed lit for a few seconds, the length of a notification, then went dark.
I lit it up again. I don't know why I'm specifying that. Yes, I do: because it was the first time I'd made a gesture I couldn't have told him about.
An orange and white icon, a heart that looks like a flame.
Tantan.
I know the app. Every girl in my year knows it, the ones who've used it and the ones who swear they never have. I didn't open it. I set the phone back exactly where it had been, screen up, the same distance from the mug. I finished my email. The water stopped running in the bathroom.
Lukas came out with a towel around his waist and his wet hair dripping on the parquet my mother chose. He picked up his phone on the way past, without looking at it, the way you pick up your keys.
"Why do you have Tantan?"
I asked it nicely. I ask everything nicely; it's a flaw my mother calls a quality.
He smiled. Almost. The smile he has when a student asks him a question he's known the answer to for a long time.
"To practise my Chinese."
And that's where it started to hurt, but not the way you'd think. It hurt because it was plausible. Lukas speaks textbook Chinese, hesitant tones, sentences too polite; he needs to talk to people who aren't me, because I understand even what he says badly, and that's not how you improve. He'd said so already, one Sunday, in Suzhou, in front of my parents: "Jenny corrects me too fast." My father had laughed.
"Look," he said.
He sat down next to me, the towel still around his hips, and opened the app in front of me. He showed me conversations. A girl explaining the difference between 二 and 两. A boy, even, who wanted to trade English for Mandarin. Another girl who'd sent him a list of restaurants in Wuhan. Corrections, emojis, "哈哈". Nothing. Really nothing. He scrolled with his thumb, unhurried, like someone with nothing to hide, or like someone who knows exactly what he's showing.
"See?"
I saw. I even felt stupid, and a little petty, which is worse than stupid. I said sorry. I think I said sorry.
He kissed my temple. "You're jealous, it's cute." Then he went to get dressed, and from the bedroom I heard the drawer that sticks, the one he's been promising to fix for two years.
I have to say who Lukas is, or you won't understand why I wanted to believe him.
I met him in Berlin, during my exchange year. He taught a conversation class to foreign students, and he talked about the city's history as if it belonged to him, with dates, street names, anecdotes about dead people nobody had heard of. I was twenty-five and I took that way of talking for culture. My mother, later, took it for good breeding. My father took it for a man who didn't earn any money, but he only ever said so to my mother.
Lukas followed me to Shanghai three years ago. He teaches English at a training centre in Jing'an, to executives who want an accent, and gives private lessons to teenagers in Pudong whose parents want an American university. He says it's temporary. He's writing a book on the German concession in Qingdao; he talks about it at every dinner, nobody has ever read a page. One day he'll be Professor Voss, at a university, with an office and students who take notes when he speaks. He's sure of it. I was sure of it too; it's easier to be sure on someone else's behalf.
The apartment is in my name. The rent too, most months. I'm not writing that to complain. I'm writing it because that evening, watching him scroll through the Tantan conversations, I thought about it for the first time: that everything we had was in my name, and that what he had was conversations.
Around midnight, he was asleep. He falls asleep fast, on his side, hand under the pillow, like a child who's never been blamed for anything.
I wasn't asleep.
What was working on me wasn't what he'd shown me. It was what he hadn't opened. While he was scrolling, at the top of the list, there was a conversation with a red dot, an unread message, and his thumb had passed over it without stopping, with the same calm slowness as for the others. I'd seen only one line, the one the app shows as a preview.
昨晚很想你。
I missed you so much last night.
You don't need to practise your Chinese to understand that sentence. It's a beginner's sentence. It's even one of the first you learn, in the textbooks, in the chapter on feelings.
I lay there next to him and did what I always do: I looked for an explanation. A student who was too familiar. A joke. A context. There's always a context. I'd give him the chance to give it to me, tomorrow, at breakfast, in passing, without making a thing of it.
Then I thought about last night.
Last night, Lukas was in Hangzhou. A private lesson, a weekend of revision for a boy taking the SAT in October, a family that pays very well. He'd sent me a photo of the hotel room, a white bed, a curtain, the nape of a building opposite. "Too much homework, love you, sleep well."
I got up without making a sound. His phone was on the bedside table, his side, screen against the wood. I didn't touch it. I want that to be clear: I didn't touch it. Not that night.
I went into the living room, opened my laptop and did something very simple, something anyone could have done for months. I opened our joint account, the one he has the card for, and looked at the previous day's spending.
Hotel, Hangzhou: nothing.
Restaurant, Shanghai, Xuhui district, 10:14 p.m.: 486 yuan.
Two covers. The hotel photo had been taken during the day, or another time, or somewhere else. The nape of the building opposite, I recognised too late: it was the one you see from our place.
I didn't cry. I closed the laptop, gently, because the lid snaps. And I made myself a promise I didn't yet know how to keep: the next time he showed me something, I would look at what he wasn't showing.
The next morning, at breakfast, he asked me if I'd slept well.
I said yes.
It was my first lie to him. He didn't notice anything. For that, too, I found an explanation.