Luo arrived with fruit and a statement prepared by someone else.
They met in Yanchuan’s hotel lobby. A television above the reception desk showed a chef folding dough while Luo arranged three pages on a low table. He had flown in to meet the local partner and, he said, to support the family directly.
“You should not have had to do so much yourself.”
Yanchuan moved the fruit so An could see the pages through the video call.
The statement described an employee under considerable pressure. Yansheng had worked extended hours, disagreed with a supplier, missed a flight, and subsequently asked for time alone. The company could not rule out a voluntary absence.
All of those sentences could be true. Together they made Yanchuan want to tear the pages in half.
“Did he tell you he wanted time alone?”
“The messages to his wife—”
“Have not been authenticated,” An said from the phone.
“I understand your concern.”
She asked him to change the wording. Luo took out a pen but did not write.
He told them about a late-night conversation before the assignment. Yansheng had said he was tired of being sent out to sign things other people had promised. Luo remembered the words because they had argued. There had been a fee dispute. Yansheng had asked for fewer trips the following year.
An looked away from her camera. Yanchuan saw an unfamiliar hurt pass across her face: the discovery that her husband had discussed an unhappiness she had only partly known.
“Send us the correspondence,” she said.
“Some of it concerns other clients.”
“Then provide what you can and tell the investigators what else exists.”
Luo agreed. He seemed relieved to have a task.
After he left, Yanchuan carried the fruit upstairs. He opened a public post form and typed the company’s name, the missing interval, the false checkout. He wrote that they were building a story to make a missing man inconvenient rather than endangered.
He attached the statement. In the corner of one page was An’s address, copied from a personnel record.
He removed the attachment. Then he called Mei.
“Tell me not to post this.”
“Read it.”
He did. Halfway through, his anger began to sound rehearsed.
Mei asked which sentences he could establish. There were several. She asked which connected the reporting defect to the disappearance. He had none that could carry the claim he wanted to make.
“They get to imply whatever suits them,” he said.
“Ask for the source of the implication. You’re good at that when it isn’t your brother.”
“And while I ask?”
“I don’t know.”
Her refusal to offer comfort made him furious. It also prevented him mistaking comfort for a plan.
An called later. She had read the disclosed messages between Yansheng and Luo. Her husband had indeed wanted to travel less. He had also asked which colleague could cover a December visit. The exchange contained dissatisfaction and an expectation of still having a job.
“He could have left,” she said.
Yanchuan sat down. “Do you think he did?”
“I think if we make loving us a reason he couldn’t leave, every bad day in our marriage becomes evidence against him.”
Below the window, someone was trying to start a motorbike. Each attempt ended in a cough.
“I haven’t posted anything,” he told her.
“Good. I want a public appeal we can stand behind tomorrow.”
They drafted it together: photograph, last confirmed contact, case reference, a channel for information. No child, no technical accusation, no account of their private arguments. The uncertainty made it shorter than the statement Luo had brought.
Before they finished, An asked whether he could send her the photograph of the broken kettle again. She wanted the original message, including the date.
He sent it. She replied with an older photograph: Yansheng asleep on their sofa, his son’s sock resting on his shoulder. Under it she wrote, He was tired here too. It wasn’t all terrible.
Yanchuan put the unpublished accusation in a private folder. Then he corrected the company statement, marking the claims whose sources were still missing. He sent that version to Luo and the case contact, and went downstairs to share the fruit with the night receptionist.