Chapter 11

Unfortunately, Xu Wanyi didn't give her that chance. Before leaving work on Friday, she passed by the front desk and happened to see Xiao Zhou, the administrative assistant, talking to the receptionist. Upon seeing Li Ye, Xiao Zhou happily called out:

"Li Lu, there's a package for you. It just arrived and it's still warm."

"Oh, right? Thanks, Xiao Zhou."

Li Ye walked over and took the package. Looking at the sender's name, it clearly stated: Leguang Group Co., Ltd. A strange feeling washed over her. Could it be that their company sent a rejection letter specifically to refuse a lawyer's request?

It wasn't an interview. But Li Ye heard from her intern that many companies these days don't even give a result after an interview, showing no respect for job seekers. The fact that Renle only sent you a rejection letter is already quite kind of them.

Sigh, what am I thinking about? I've gone off on a tangent.

"What did you write, Attorney Li?"

Xiao Zhou was very puzzled. She knew that her team had been working hard to secure this project recently, so why wasn't Attorney Li as happy as she had imagined when Le Guang's email arrived?

Li Ye's random thoughts were interrupted by Xiao Zhou's question. She thought to herself, whatever the result, it's already a fait accompli, and we'll have to face it eventually. So she tore open the email. Inside was only a thin sheet of paper. The first line in the center read: Notification of Winning Bid for Legal Services Procurement by Leguang Group.

Li Ye felt a mix of emotions. He was overjoyed and vain at winning the bid, but also panicked about how to face Xu Wanyi. Yet, somehow, a hint of sweetness lingered deep within him.

Seeing that Li Ye had been holding the email and hadn't spoken for a long time, Xiao Zhou thought something bad had happened. Li Ye was quite tall, and she was rather short, so she couldn't see anything from behind the counter. Xiao Zhou simply took small steps out from inside and craned her neck to look at the paper.

"Congratulations, Attorney Li, on successfully securing the Leguang Group! I'll go prepare the official seal for you. Oh dear, it's Friday today! Next week! On Monday, please have Jiang Yu come and stamp the employment contract!"

Xiao Zhou felt a sense of pride. Leguang Group had a very high reputation throughout the country. The firm had such a client, especially since it was Lawyer Li who got the business. When she went out for dinner with her best friend on the weekend, she felt like she was shining with pride.

"Thank you, Xiao Zhou, I'm asking for your help again." Li Ye gave an innocent smile that was as warm as a spring breeze.

That smile is incredibly effective; Li Ye knows these girls fall for it, so he always wears it. But it's just a smile, nothing more. Selling a smile to young girls is much better than selling it to those middle-aged, greasy men; at least the girls don't have that fat smell.

After saying that, she hurried to the office. No matter what, since she had been selected, she still had to do the basic preparations. Work is work, and personal feelings are personal feelings; one thing at a time.

Halfway there, she turned and stopped in front of Jiang Yu's workstation.

"Attorney Jiang, I have a case. Come to my office for a moment."

Jiang Yu wasn't so happy about it. It was one thing for her to love her job, and it was another for Li Ye to be handsome, but he couldn't call her to a meeting five minutes before she was supposed to leave work on Friday, when she had already made plans to have dinner with her best friend, right?

But when you're under someone's roof, you have to bow your head, and Li Ye really wasn't the kind of boss who would deliberately assign work to employees before they left work. Jiang Yu had been with her for so many years and knew that she didn't care about any obedience tests. As long as you could give her the results she wanted, she didn't care whether you obeyed her or not.

So Jiang Yu sent a WeChat message to her best friend, informing her that she might be late... or even not at all. After letting out a sigh of despair, she tidied her hair, touched up her lipstick in front of the mirror next to the computer, and walked into Li Ye's office in mid-heeled shoes, looking energetic.

"Li Lu, what's the big deal? It's a Friday afternoon." That's just how Jiang Yu is; she says what she's unhappy about directly, even though she knows the outcome won't be determined by her will.

"Hmm, the beautiful chairperson of the project you really like, the one you've been talking about for days, has written to you."

After returning from Leguang Group, Jiang Yu had been gossiping with the other lawyers on her team about the group's chairman. Rumors circulated that the company was mainly run by the father and older brother, and she had initially imagined the boss to be a fat man or a slick, frivolous playboy. But when she visited, she discovered that the eldest daughter of the Xu family was the one in charge! Chairman Xu was incredibly beautiful and had an amazing presence—she was practically a domineering CEO straight out of a romance novel!

Li Ye was speechless. If Jiang Yu found out that this domineering older sister was her ex-girlfriend, wouldn't things turn upside down?

Sure enough, upon hearing this, Jiang Yu's eyes lit up, and she quickly picked up the bid-winning notice and examined it closely.

"Boss, I told you so! We can't possibly make mistakes! Once the Leguang project is completed, our position in the capital market will be unshakeable."

"Alright, Attorney Jiang, we should dream about the bright future, but we also need to take care of the present. Let's contact Wang Du first and discuss a basic working mechanism. Then let's schedule a time to meet at Leguang's headquarters in the first half of next week to refine the work plan."

Jiang Yu accepted the task and left immediately. Today's job wasn't difficult; as long as she didn't run into anyone deliberately making things difficult, she could finish it within an hour, just in time for the evening's dinner party. She thought about it; Wang Du seemed quite friendly, and she hoped he was as good as he appeared.

Three-quarters of an hour later, Li Ye received a text message from Jiang Yu: "Attorney Li, it's arranged. Next Tuesday at 10:00 AM in the conference room on the 49th floor of Leguang. Wang Du said the chairman will be attending, so please prepare well. I'm off work now, have a great weekend!" A mischievous grinning emoji followed the message.

"Okay, I have something to do on Monday and won't be at the office. When you come on Monday, prepare the contract, get Xiao Zhou to stamp it, and bring it with you on Tuesday." After typing, Li Ye pressed send and put his phone aside. It seemed this girl had plans for the evening and had left so quickly.

Li Ye poured himself a glass of wine, sat on the sofa, and looked at the bookshelf opposite him. The bookshelf was mainly made of teak, simple and heavy, and clearly very valuable. To prevent dust from accumulating, all the bookshelves in the institute had doors, with glass doors on the upper shelves and wooden doors on the lower shelves.

Her office bookshelves were filled with hefty volumes of writings by Party and government leaders, legal works, and legal journals. These were all assigned to her by the institute's administration. Putting aside those heavy political and ideological tomes, she hadn't even opened a single book, not even Wang Zejian's "Studies on Civil Law Theories and Cases" or Jhering's "Law and Struggle." In fact, she rarely even opened the bookshelf doors.

There was only one exception: the row closest to the window. But it wasn't filled with books. The lower shelf held red wine, and the upper shelf held several picture frames, mostly of landscapes, with only one photo of her and her college roommate.

Li Ye walked over and picked up the photo.

The three people in the photo are full of youthful energy, laughing innocently. She lived in a four-person dorm during college, but one girl didn't show up, leaving only three roommates: Zhuang Ke and Su Che. The three of them lived happily in the four-person dorm, enjoying a carefree life.

What's even stranger is that after she dropped out of school, no one else moved in. So her two roommates paid for a four-person room but enjoyed the benefits of a two-person room until graduation.

After graduation, Su Che went to work in Beijing, while Zhuang Ke stayed in Haixi to pursue further studies. A few years ago, he finally graduated with a doctorate and stayed on to teach at the university.

Su Che is coming to Haixi on a business trip next Monday. The three of them haven't seen each other in a long time, and Zhuang Ke is urging them to meet up for a meal. For Li Ye, these two are the only people he can truly call friends now.

Su Cheyuan is far away in Beijing, and Zhuang Ke is the only person Li Ye regularly meets in his private life. Without Zhuang Ke, Li Ye could go for months without having dinner with anyone outside of work.

Thinking about this, Li Ye saw that it was getting late. This week's work had come to a perfect end, so she packed her things and went home. However, she didn't stay idle at home on the weekend. She was working on the overall planning for the Le Guang project.

Although he hadn't yet made specific contact with the legal team of Leguang Group, based solely on the information he had gradually obtained over the past few days and the clues revealed by Xu Wanyi and their legal director Zhang during the presentation that day, Li Ye judged that this project was not only very large in amount but also very complex, and the complexity of the situation meant that there were many things to deal with.

Industry insiders know that the value of a project doesn't necessarily correlate with its complexity; sometimes, large-scale projects are actually quite simple, and lawyers often prefer these types of projects. Unfortunately, Le Guang didn't fall into this category. She reviewed her team's current personnel and workload. Her team currently consists of ten full-time lawyers and five interns, totaling fifteen people. She created an Excel spreadsheet and decided to allocate at least seven lawyers to this project, adjusting the schedules and personnel arrangements for other projects accordingly.

After doing all that, the weekend was over.

Before dawn on Monday, Li Ye woke up from her sleep. Her sleep was poor, light and short. Now she lay in bed, staring at the dim ceiling, listening to the birds chirping outside, and Xu Wanyi's face appeared in her mind.

She recalled a spring day more than a decade ago, when the two of them would lie in bed talking endlessly as dawn approached, dreaming of their future together. But reality was cruel; they eventually parted ways. Li Ye had thought they would never see each other again, yet they had unexpectedly reunited in this way. Fate was truly cruel.

Forget it, the more I think about it, the less I understand. Li Ye simply jumped up and ran to the kitchen to make herself a cup of coffee. They had arranged to meet at lunchtime. Zhuang Ke, a university teacher, didn't care about the time, while Su Che, having risen to a senior management position, could arrange his own time.

When the mealtime was set that day, Li Ye was the only one who raised a question, asking: "Can we have dinner?" Who has time to leisurely eat lunch?

The two men ruthlessly rejected their response: "You're a self-employed individual, you can do whatever you want. Neither of us said anything, so what right do you have to be unhappy about this mealtime?"

After finishing her coffee, Li Ye ran on the treadmill for an hour. Exercise is the best medicine for restoring energy and the best way to kill time. After she finished running and tidied up, it was indeed time to leave.

Zhuang Keding's restaurant is located in the old district across the river, where the houses were built in the early 20th century. The roadsides are lined with lush plane trees. The restaurant has a quiet and elegant environment with a large courtyard filled with various shrubs and flowers, which is lush and green in early summer.

In short, it's clearly Zhuang Ke's style.