She had spent years assuming Ji Yuzhe was cold.
It wasn't that she'd had strong evidence for it. He'd been composed, mostly. Reserved. He moved through rooms without taking up more space than he needed to, said exactly what was necessary and nothing beyond it. She'd read that as distance, as a kind of deliberate unavailability, and had filed it away without examining it further.
Watching him with the twins, she was starting to understand she'd been wrong.
He laughed at Yilin's stories. Actually laughed — low, unguarded, the sound of someone caught off guard by something funny rather than deciding to perform amusement. He listened to Xuan with a patience that wasn't strained. He asked questions. Follow-up questions, the kind that showed he'd been paying attention to the answer before.
