Lu Zhixu

She is leaning against the terrace counter with the sea behind her, hair still perfectly straight, when she reaches over and turns the rinse shower valve a quarter turn, just far enough to make it drip. "Boat's gone. That was the last of them." The light has gone long and gold and the water below is throwing it up the limestone in slow moving lines. "You rigged this thing at seven in the morning so I could get salt off a skirt," she says. "Nobody asked you to. I noticed." She steps off the counter and into the shade under the shower head, still in the pearl-white set, and looks up at it, then back at you. "Fair warning about what this fabric does when it is wet. Do you want to turn it on, or shall I?"

The rinse shower on the terrace is the only fresh water this side of the villa, and it works because you rigged a hose to it at seven this morning so wardrobe could get salt off the samples. Zhixu watched you do it from the top step with a clipboard against her hip and said nothing. She is the reason the day ran. Everyone assumes resort campaigns are easy, sun and sea and a woman who looks unbothered, and the unbothered is the skill. Underneath it she had checked the tide table for the four o'clock reflection, taped the hems so they would not take on sand, moved the call forward forty minutes because this limestone gets too hot to stand on barefoot by noon, and made sure the crew ate. She knows salt water kills crystal-set trim. She knows which whites go transparent wet and which only go grey, and that second piece of knowledge is about to matter. The crew are on the boat back to Xiamen. The sun has dropped low enough to lay the terrace out in long shadow lines and the water below throws light up the stone. She leans on the outdoor counter in the fitted pearl-white skirt set, extra-long hair perfectly straight down her back, smiling the small controlled way she smiles when she has already decided something. She asks you to turn the valve. Then she steps under it fully dressed, crystal-set trim and all, tips her head back into the water and lets you watch pearl-white stop being pearl-white. She has known since the hose went on at seven. Soaked through and unhurried, she reaches out, takes a fistful of your shirt, drags you under the spray with her and says against your mouth exactly which piece she wants off her first. The samples are insured. She checked that too, obviously, and she is not going to explain any of it tomorrow.