#include <family.h>

Shen Jingxi was convinced she’d wronged some deity in charge of bathroom allocation in a past life.

Seven-fifteen a.m. She stood in the bathroom doorway holding two towels, a tube of kid’s toothpaste, and the last shreds of her patience. Someone had drawn a lopsided dinosaur on the mirror with body wash, and the suds were still sliding down in slow, gloopy trails.

“Yanqiu, the mirror is not your canvas.”

Her younger son squatted beside the sink, chin tilted up to admire his masterpiece with deep satisfaction. “But Mom, look. It’s a T. rex.”

“That’s not what a T. rex looks like.” Yanhe, the older twin, stood nearby with a toothbrush parked in his mouth, delivering this verdict with the weary authority of a retired paleontologist. But then he reached over and added two strokes to the dinosaur’s back — wings.

“T. rexes don’t have wings,” said Jingxi.

“Mutant variant,” Yanhe said, face unchanged.

She took a deep breath. Seven-fifteen in the morning, and her bathroom contained a flying body-wash T. rex. This was normal. This was her life.

The bathroom choreography for a family of four was a small-scale military operation: Yanqiu washing his hands meant water flicked across every reflective surface within a meter; Yanhe’s toothpaste foam inevitably dripped into his brother’s slippers; and Jingxi threaded between them, trying to reach the sink without stepping on anyone — a spatial optimization problem with no clean solution.

By the time they emerged, breakfast was already on the table. Toast, fried eggs, a small dish of pickled cucumbers, leftover miso soup from the night before. Cheng Anyuan sat in his usual spot behind the table, chopsticks in hand but motionless — he was looking at his phone. The screen was packed with dense rows of English text.

“Anyuan. Eat.”

“Mm, one sec.” He didn’t look up.

She’d long stopped trying to determine whether “one sec” meant thirty seconds or three minutes. The boys clambered onto their chairs. Yanqiu immediately lunged his chopsticks toward the fried eggs. Yanhe quietly nudged his own egg a little farther away — he knew his brother would grab for it.

Jingxi sat down and was reaching for a dish when two pieces of braised pork appeared in her bowl. She looked up. Anyuan’s chopsticks had already retreated; his eyes were still glued to his phone, his face the picture of innocence, as if nothing had happened.

She watched him for a second. He pretended to chew something he hadn’t actually picked up yet.

She looked down and ate the pork. The corner of her mouth twitched upward, then quickly flattened.

---

Yanqiu had materialized in the study at some point nobody could pinpoint.

Jingxi was passing by with two glasses of water when she caught the scene: her husband in that ergonomic chair — the one that cost she-didn’t-want-to-know-how-much — with both monitors blazing. The left screen showed incomprehensible lines of colored text on a dark background. The right screen had a chat window. Yanqiu was draped over the armrest, face practically pressed against the monitor.

“What are you doing?” She set the water down, nudging the glass away from the cluster of sticky notes near the beef jerky zone. Seven or eight notes dotted the desk — some in English, some covered in arrows and boxes — all of it hieroglyphics to her.

“I’m tuning the Agent’s last module.” Anyuan didn’t turn around. His fingers flew across the keyboard, the mechanical keys rattling like a crew of miniature woodpeckers on deadline.

“There you go again with your tech stuff.” She leaned against the doorframe, watching the back of his head.

He finally turned around, eyes bright in a way that wasn’t normal. She recognized that brightness — he’d had the same look the time he discovered some “open-source framework,” like a kid who’d found buried treasure.

“Come look at this.” He waved her over. “This one’s actually incredible, let me explain —”

“Uh-huh.”

“So the underlying architecture is RAG — that’s Retrieval-Augmented Generation — basically what it does is —”

“Mm.”

” — I’ve loaded in all our insurance policies, important household documents, and a bunch of practical knowledge, and it can search for the most relevant sections based on your question, then answer in plain language —”

Her brain had auto-shut-down somewhere around “Retrieval.” She knew her expression was sliding from “polite listening” to “astral projection,” but she couldn’t help it. Every time he talked tech, he turned into a recording on fast-forward, and she was a player without a skip button.

“Are you even listening?”

“Yes!” She nodded earnestly. “You were just saying… that… the artificial-whatever thing is really cool.”

Anyuan’s expression looked like a latte someone had poured soy sauce into.

“Okay, okay.” She raised both hands in surrender. “I genuinely cannot understand this. Stop torturing me.”

He was silent for two seconds, then sighed. Not an angry sigh — a “right, I should’ve known” sigh.

“Look, I designed it to be really simple.” His voice softened. “It’s just a chat box. You type something, it answers. Like texting on LINE. You’ll definitely use it when the time comes.”

“When the time comes? What time?”

He opened his mouth as if to say something, but in the end just smiled. “Just… when you need it.”

“Huh, you never finish a sentence properly —”

“Dad, why did the dinosaurs go extinct?”

They both turned. Yanqiu had climbed onto the chair at some unknown moment, his fingers stabbing at the keyboard. A string of gibberish had appeared in the chat window. He looked up at his father, fully righteous: “I wanna ask about dinosaurs.” Anyuan laughed, deleted the gibberish, and typed in the question for him. Three seconds later, the Agent began its reply — steady tone, clear structure, tracing from the asteroid impact sixty-five million years ago through climate change, and closing with: “However, some scientists believe that the T. rex’s descendants are actually alive today — they’re the pigeons you see in the park.”

Jingxi looked at the screen, then at her husband.

Anyuan’s expression was complicated. He’d spent three months building this system. His wife’s eyes had glazed over. His five-year-old had picked it up in three seconds.

”…At least someone can use it,” he said.

Yanhe had appeared in the doorway at some point — no one saw him arrive. He leaned in, glanced at the screen, and delivered his assessment without a trace of expression: “T. rexes couldn’t fly in the first place.”

---

One forty-two a.m. The apartment was as quiet as a hard drive saving to disk.

The study was lit only by two monitors and a desk lamp no one remembered turning on. Anyuan’s coffee had gone completely cold; a ring of dried brown residue traced the rim. Beside the keyboard sat a capsule-machine figurine Yanqiu had given him — a lopsided Shiba Inu — its plastic eyes catching the blue glow of the screens.

He was writing a Prompt.

The cursor blinked on and off. The passage on screen had grown long. His fingers paused now and then — not searching for words, but thinking about her. How she’d phrase a question. How she’d react when she didn’t understand. Where she’d most likely get stuck.

# Insurance Knowledge Base — Response Style Config
# User is a non-specialist with zero familiarity with insurance/financial jargon
# All responses must use everyday conversational language, no technical terms
# If a technical term is unavoidable, immediately follow with "in plain English, that means ___"
# Give one option or recommendation at a time — don't dump a list on her
# She needs time to make decisions — don't rush her

He stared at the last line for a few seconds, deleted “don’t rush her,” and retyped:

# She'll hesitate. That's not a flaw. Give her space

Then he switched to another file. This one was longer, more structurally complex — the configuration for a time-delayed trigger system. He filled in conditional checks after several dates. If the trigger date arrived but no one had used the system, it would stay silent. If someone had used it, only then would it send. He didn’t want a message talking to itself in an empty room.

Above one of the trigger conditions, he wrote a comment:

# If she's made it to this step, she's braver than I thought

He leaned back in the chair and took off his glasses, rubbing his eyes. The text on the screen dissolved into fuzzy clusters of light — each one a piece of his understanding of that woman. Ten years. Ten years of watching, ten years of her muttering, ten years of “there you go again with your tech stuff.” He remembered all of it. He didn’t know how to say it out loud, so he’d written it into code.

He put his glasses back on and hit save.

The hallway outside the study was silent. He knew she was asleep, and so were both boys. At this hour, their thousand-square-foot apartment was like a quiet ship, and he was the only one still awake, sitting in the engine room making sure every pipe was properly connected.

He didn’t see it as a sacrifice. He saw it as a given.

Five-thirty a.m. The sky wasn’t fully light yet.

Anyuan closed the laptop. His backpack was already by the front door — he had a client meeting out east today, a day trip to discuss a project. He put on his shoes, hand on the doorknob.

He looked back.

The living room was still dark. Crayons from last night sat uncollected on the dining table. A sofa cushion leaned at an odd angle. A dinosaur encyclopedia lay open, facedown on the coffee table. From the direction of the kitchen came the low hum of the refrigerator.

She was asleep in one of the rooms somewhere inside. Her hair would be a mess, for certain. Yanqiu would have kicked off his blanket. Yanhe would be clutching that rabbit plush, the one washed so many times it had lost its shape.

This home.

He looked for two seconds. Maybe three. No one saw him looking.

Then he turned, opened the door, and walked out.

The door closed softly behind him. The latch clicking into the frame made a small sound — like a sentence left unfinished.