The rice cooker clicked off while Xu An was asking when he had last heard his brother’s voice.
Yanchuan looked at the clock above the refrigerator. Eight seventeen. Below it, a delivery receipt curled away from a magnet. He would remember both things later, though neither could help.
“Thursday, I think.”
“A voice call?”
He opened the conversation. His last reply was a thumbs-up beneath a photograph of a broken hotel kettle. On Thursday Yansheng had sent a file. On Friday he had sent, Have you had a look?
“No,” Yanchuan said. “Messages.”
Outside his Shenzhen apartment, a scooter’s alarm complained three times and stopped. It was November 3, 2026. His brother was supposed to have been home before the end of October.
“The company says they can’t reach him,” An said. “They’re saying he may have changed his plans.”
“When did you last speak?”
“Thursday evening. Before that file came to you.”
He wanted to ask whether she had called the hotel, whether she had tried his other number. She kept supplier accounts for a living. She had spent four days calling people who told her to call someone else. He put those questions away.
“Tell me what you need.”
“Check whether he sent you anything I don’t have. Save it. Don’t edit it.”
Her voice had the careful levelness he remembered from a hospital corridor when their father had hurt his hand. In the background, her son asked whether the paper bridge could stay on the dining table until tomorrow.
“Yes,” she told him. Then, more quietly to Yanchuan, “He keeps moving it out of the way for his father.”
Yanchuan sat down without taking off his work bag. He had a deadline in the morning: a comparison of cooling schedules for an electronics factory. His supervisor had asked for a cleaner chart. All day he had been removing qualifications from the caption.
The file was called coastal_acceptance_check.zip. Yansheng had worked as an industrial auditor long enough to name things without imagination. His accompanying message read: Can these two summaries both be right? Only if you have time. The supplier is arguing about the windows.
Yanchuan had read that message in a lift. He remembered deciding it deserved a proper answer. He had even marked the message unread again, as if the little blue dot could reserve a future hour. On Friday, when his brother asked a second time, he had been on the way to a meeting. He had not answered that either.
He saved the original archive in two places, recorded the message dates, then made a working copy. Three spreadsheets, a short note, two photographs of instrument labels. A test of battery equipment and its controls at a coastal logistics site in Kenya. His brother’s employer was a small Chinese consultancy; the equipment supplier was another company again. Yanchuan knew none of the people on the distribution list.
The first spreadsheet showed a smooth descent from high demand to low. The second looked untidy, but its final total was nearly the same. He enlarged the time column. One summary ended its transition at 10:14. The other treated the period as if it had begun there.
Perhaps a time zone. Perhaps an export setting. Perhaps he was staring hard enough to turn a mundane difference into a sign.
He checked the dates again. Both files described the same test, on the same day. Their neat agreement at the bottom no longer seemed reassuring.
An had gone silent. He realized she was waiting on the line.
“There’s a difference in the reports,” he said.
“Does it tell us where he is?”
“No.” The word felt brutal, but adding anything to it would be worse. “It tells us he had a question about his work.”
“Then write that down exactly.”
“An, I saw the message on Thursday. I meant to answer.”
“I know you did.”
It was worse than an accusation. She had no room for one, and he could not ask her to make room.
He did. Not fraud. Not a threat. A question about two reports. He copied his brother’s words into a document and left a blank line beneath them.
When the call ended, he opened the family chat. His father had posted a photograph of a street being repaved in Wuhan. His sister had answered with a tired face from Guangzhou. Yansheng had not reacted. Yanchuan could not decide whether that absence had always been visible or had only just acquired weight.
He took the rice out of the cooker. It had begun to dry against the bowl. For a moment he stood holding it, waiting for his phone to light up with an ordinary explanation: lost charger, bad signal, stupid argument, coming home.
Then he put the bowl down and called Du Mei.
“I need you to tell me why two sets of numbers agree,” he said. “And what they leave out.”