The building first appeared as a delivery charge.
An found it while reconciling the contractor’s response to the transport inquiry. A service supplier had billed for replacement cooling parts delivered to an annex. The address differed from the logistics site’s reception address. The account code matched the one on the envelope’s return trip.
She sent Yanchuan the two references, then called before he could answer.
“Don’t book anything.”
He looked at the browser tab he had just opened.
“I’m looking at a map.”
“That’s how you book things.”
It was the last week of December. Shenzhen’s office towers wore seasonal lights that made him feel late for an event he had not intended to attend. His approved leave had ended a month earlier. He had been measuring the distance to Kenya in the cost of another absence.
He closed the map and asked where the invoice had come from.
The contractor had disclosed a small set of charges to explain the transport account. The cooling-parts line had been included because it shared the reference, perhaps by mistake. An had not sought out unrelated accounts. She had asked why a service supplier appeared in a staff-travel reconciliation.
The reply said the service office also handled local procurement. That was reasonable. It did not explain why the acceptance package described the associated facilities only as excluded premises.
Amina obtained an authorized clarification of the feeder label. It supplied the annex’s site code. The code matched the delivery note. Three documents now referred to the same facility by three different descriptions.
“What is there?” Yanchuan asked.
“A service compound,” she said. “Workshop space and storage, as far as the operator’s records show. I haven’t inspected it.”
“Could he have gone there?”
“He could have gone to many places. We have a reason to ask about this one.”
He pressed his palm against the edge of the desk until it hurt.
They prepared a packet for the case inquiry: the account references, the dispatch order, the feeder clarification, the report’s exclusion. Wanjiru arranged the covering explanation. It asked whether records associated with that facility had been included in the checks already made, and who could confirm its staffing during the relevant period.
No one put a photograph of Yansheng beside a photograph of the building. No one said the envelope had contained his report. The omissions felt almost unbearable to Yanchuan. They were the things a reader would want to know. They were also things he did not know.
The acknowledgment arrived while he was helping An carry groceries upstairs in Guangzhou. Her son was ahead of them, trying to balance a long parcel across his arms. Inside was a bridge kit Jianming had sent for the holiday.
An read the message on the landing. The information had been added to the inquiry and would be examined. There was no date for the next answer.
“They have it,” she said.
Yanchuan shifted the bags cutting into his fingers. “That’s all?”
“For today.”
Her son called down to ask whether someone could open the door. An put the phone away and found her keys.
They built the bridge after dinner. The kit came with slender wooden members and instructions that assumed a perfectly level table. One support rocked because a screw head stood proud beneath the base. The boy wanted to glue everything down. Yanchuan helped him find the screw instead.
When the first toy bus crossed, An was in the kitchen. Her son called for her and insisted they repeat it so she could see.
Later, after the boy slept, she asked Yanchuan to show her the compound on the map. He moved the screen between them. A roof, a yard, the geometry of other people’s work. There was no way to look at it without imagining a window that could not be seen from above.
“I’m afraid of finding him,” An said quietly.
He turned toward her.
“And I’m afraid of not finding him. I don’t know what to do with both.”
He had no sentence that could help. They sat until the screen dimmed, then she touched it awake.
Before bed he checked that the submitted packet contained no inference labeled as fact. The annex was the first place they had identified through several independent records. It belonged in the inquiry. What it might hold was still a picture his mind made when the room grew quiet.