Chapter Two: The Blank Book of Vows

She called Tang Li. “What's in the studio refrigerator?” “Champagne, face masks, and low-fat milk two months past its date because you refuse to throw it away.” “How many bottles do I normally buy?” “One. Why?” Lin Wan hung up and rushed to the study. A black sentence now occupied the first page: Zhou Xubai remembers to buy two bottles of milk every day. Not tomorrow. Not once. The book had revised her careless experiment into a domestic habit, then supplied evidence for it. An eraser did nothing. When she struck the sentence through with the strange pen, ink bled across the page. Glass shattered in the kitchen. Xubai stood before the refrigerator with three broken bottles at his feet. He stared at the whole milk in his hand.