THE SADDEST GIRL SINCE THE SONG DYNASTY

CONFESSIONS ON A ROOFTOP - PART III

By midnight, the pair had arrived at the subject of regret. Lady Zhao, making certain both Yenny and Trav weren't lurking within hearing distance (Yenny had never come back from his private couple's moment, and Trav could be seen near the door, still talking on his phone, none of the promised drinks in sight), confessed to Ander that she regretted not calling the barman-manager back.

"We had the same taste in music. He had amazing hands, and his face was an eight-point-five out of ten. But I also thought, he is from Shengyang, he is Northeastern. If we had a kid, she, he, whatever, would pick up his horrible accent. Maybe you can't tell, but I can tell. Everyone in China can tell. My father wants a boy, but my fortuneteller says I should have a girl even though I don't get on well with girls. Do I sound crazy to you? I don't care. But I am twenty-nine. In China, that is not an age to screw around with people with defects. I need to be serious. But he kept calling me, left so many messages saying he couldn't see the rest of his life without me. Perhaps I should have called the police. I should have called him back. I always do this. Sometimes I am just a total shit. I don't know. Are you listening, Ander?"

Lady Zhao then said it was his turn; she wanted to know what regrets Ander had. He replied saying he had too many for someone his age.

"Are they related to D'Misse?"

He said, "kind of," and "in a way," and in general stalled. Until all of a sudden Ander decided to confess. "I haven't told anyone this yet," he began. He shook his head, stroked his brow.

He explained that only a few hours before the untimely death of his romantic venture of four years D'Misse Morthaus, he had hinted to her in his trademark subtlety that there might be some irreconcilable issues with their relationship. What, exactly, he found it hard at the time to specify, and he found it just as hard now with Lady Zhao on a clear Shanghai night a year on. "I just didn't feel that it was a forever thing. You get what I mean? I mean it was fine, we were OK happy. But that whumpf, you know, it just wasn't there." Ander had meant it to be an opening salvo in a month-or-so-long process in which he would drop clues and D'Misse would come to the same amorphous conclusion as he – that they were not meant to be – and thus embrace, though ideally propose, a mutually brokered break up.