The message reached An while she was buying pears.
I am safe. Need some time. Don’t contact the site. I will explain.
She abandoned the basket beside the scales and called the account. It rang until it stopped. She called again, then called Yanchuan.
By the time he answered, she had already sent three questions: Where are you? Can you call? Is someone with you?
He read the message standing in the lobby of his office. Around him, people were scanning delivery codes and collecting lunches. A man laughed at something on his screen. Yanchuan wanted to strike the phone out of the man’s hand.
“That’s his account?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He felt an enormous, shameful relief. For a few seconds the last week rearranged itself into an embarrassment they would survive. His brother had been selfish, overwhelmed, angry. They would forgive him after shouting at him. Yanchuan was already imagining the shouting.
Then An said, “Why won’t he call?”
He read the words again. They contained no fact that only Yansheng could have supplied. But his brother did sometimes write abruptly when tired. Yanchuan had whole months of evidence that ordinary messages could be impersonal.
“It could be him,” he said.
“And it could be someone with his phone.”
“Yes.”
Her breathing changed. He wished he had been slower with his own relief, as though hope were a resource he had spent before she had a chance to use it.
An went home without the pears. She saved the conversation as it stood and forwarded the new development through the established case contact. The response acknowledged it and asked them to preserve further messages. It did not cancel the report.
Yanchuan asked Mei whether they could learn anything from the wording. She looked at him for a long moment.
“You mean, can I find a machine that says it sounds like him?”
“I mean anything useful.”
“Four short sentences give you very little. If I put a percentage beside them, you’ll have a percentage beside very little.”
She sat with him anyway. They compared what the message claimed with what it actually supplied. Safe was a claim. Some time was no deadline. Don’t contact the site was a request whose consequences were immediate, whether the sender was his brother or someone else.
“Don’t reply with the details you’ve found,” Mei said. “Ask for a call. Let the people handling the case know what happens.”
He had been about to mention the fourteen minutes. He deleted the draft.
At An’s apartment that night, the paper bridge had been repaired with red tape. Her son had made a parking place at one end. He asked whether his father was still in Kenya.
“That is where we last knew he was,” An said.
“Is it far?”
“Farther than Wuhan.”
The boy considered this and pushed the bus to the edge of the bridge. “Grandpa came back from Wuhan.”
Yanchuan bent to pick up a fallen wheel, grateful for something that let him hide his face. An told the boy it was time to wash his hands. She did not correct the geography of his hope.
After dinner, another message appeared. Please trust me.
Yanchuan was beside her when it came. He watched her type, I want to. Let me hear you.
The reply did not arrive. For twenty minutes they sat without speaking. The screen dimmed. An touched it awake, then put it face down on the table.
“If it’s him, he’ll think I’m accusing him.”
“You’re asking him to call his wife.”
She rubbed her forehead. “I know what I’m asking.”
He remembered the broken kettle photograph, his useless thumbs-up. Perhaps his brother had asked for help and received a symbol. Perhaps now he was making an equally ordinary request and they were turning it into evidence. Yanchuan could feel himself being pulled between two stories, each complete enough to be dangerous.
An stood and began clearing the table. He joined her. She washed, he dried. Their phones remained within reach, and every noise in the apartment seemed briefly to belong to them.
At eleven, Luo called. He had heard about the messages and sounded relieved.
“Then we can all take a breath,” he said.
“You can continue obtaining the hotel record,” An replied.
Yanchuan put down the dish towel. The breath he had taken in the office lobby had not brought his brother home. Tomorrow he would still need to ask for leave.