An Hour After Her

Song Yiran started the piano two months after her cousin, with the same teacher, on the same day, an hour after her. Then drawing, the mathematics olympiad, oil painting, the entrance exam for the Hangzhou Academy, failed by three points and taken again a year later. Since childhood she has kept a notebook with two columns: the date Qiao Yin started, the date she followed. She is twenty-seven, she teaches drawing to children, and she has a cousin whose photographs arrive every Sunday at 9 p.m.: the villa, the husband, the lake.

Then Yin calls, for the first time in years. She wants a portrait of her husband for his fortieth birthday. She is paying. She sets the sittings, Tuesday and Thursday evenings, in his office, when he has nothing else on. Yiran says yes. She believes it is the first time her cousin has come to her. Qiao Yin, for her part, has never started anything except in order to be able to stop. And she knows that her cousin has never once refused her a thing she had started.