#Chapter One: Forty-Two People Asked Me at Once
On the seventh day after my girlfriend's death, all forty-two people at the office turned to look at me at once.
“Why aren't you wearing the ring I gave you today?”
Forty-two mouths spoke in her voice.
For several seconds, my mind went blank.
It wasn't that I didn't understand. My body simply refused to acknowledge that I did. First came a sharp ringing in my ears. Then my heartbeat, each thud heavier than the last, as if someone were pounding on a door from inside my chest.
I grabbed the edge of the desk. My fingers had no strength. The first time, I missed completely and knocked over the glass of water on the desk.
Water spread across the keyboard.
No one looked down.
The copier kept spitting out paper.
The coffee machine in the break room had just finished grinding the beans and let out a short burst of steam. The team leader by the window held her cup in midair. The intern still had half a sandwich in his mouth. Even the customer-service rep apologizing to a client on the phone was frozen at “We’re really very sor—”
Everyone was looking at my right hand.
I wasn't wearing the ring.
The silver ring was in the inner pocket of my coat, beside the white towel I had brought back from Lin Xu's funeral yesterday.
Four words were engraved on the inside.
Don't lose it.
She had chosen the engraving. The clerk had smiled and asked if we wanted to replace it with our anniversary or our names. Lin Xu had looped her arm through mine and smiled sweetly.
“No need,” she said. “His memory is terrible. I need to remind him.”
I used to think it was just a not-so-funny joke between couples.
Until she discovered that I took off the ring when I showered, then stood barefoot outside the bathroom door and knocked for forty-seven minutes straight.
Every knock had exactly the same force.
“Yanchuan, put it back on.”
“Yanchuan, I know you can hear me.”
“Yanchuan, don't make me take the door apart.”
Now, less than twenty-four hours after her cremation, forty-two people at the office were looking at me with the same expression.
I had to be hearing things.
I had barely slept last night, and I had taken two painkillers at the funeral. Doctors had said grief could cause hallucinations. Articles online said the same thing. As long as even one of them spoke another sentence in their own voice, this collective auditory hallucination would end.
I repeated that over and over in my head, but I didn't dare actually call anyone by name.
Guo Zhicheng, on my right, moved first.
He was fifty-three, the most senior employee in General Affairs, and normally spoke with a heavy nasal tone. Now he set down his stapler, but his voice was bright and clear, like that of a twenty-six-year-old woman.
“Where's the ring?”
My stomach clenched hard.
This wasn't a hallucination.
The others said nothing.
But their eyes all shifted toward my coat pocket.
I took one step back.
Forty-two heads tilted slightly in the same direction.
I took another step back, and my calf hit an office chair. The chair wheels slid backward. I lost my balance and caught myself with my palm in the water I'd spilled. The keyboard let out a string of error beeps.
Someone laughed.
I looked up at once, but I couldn't tell which mouth it had come from.
It was so synchronized, as if someone had pulled strings hidden inside their spines all at once.
“Do you guys... know Lin Xu?”
No one answered.
The part-time student sitting in the very back suddenly smiled.
It was the smile Lin Xu wore only when she caught me lying. The corners of her mouth lifted first, while her eyes didn't change at all.
“You're pretending to be stupid again,” all forty-two of them said.
The overlapping voices were thin, not the deafening sound I expected. Instead, they sounded like one person whispering softly beside both my ears.
My back hit the desk.
The phone on its surface vibrated once.
The screen lit up with a message that could no longer be delivered.
**Lin Xu: Put the ring back on.**
The sent time read 9:17 a.m.
Lin Xu's phone had been placed in her coffin with her yesterday. That had been her mother's decision. She said Lin Xu had never been able to part with the phone while she was alive, and taking it with her would keep her from feeling uneasy on the journey.
I threw the phone away.
It hit the desktop and stopped after striking the monitor stand. The message was still glowing, and the sender's profile picture was a photo Lin Xu had taken at the beach last year. She stood among the waves, reaching a hand toward me, smiling as if she were waiting for me to take it through the screen.
“Impossible.” I heard my own voice shaking. “She's dead. I watched them push her in.”
I stared at the message, and the forty-two people stared at it too.
“See?” Guo Zhicheng looked pleased. “I knew you weren't deliberately trying to make me angry.”
He held out his hand.
“Give it to me.”
I didn't hand him the phone.
Someone on my left suddenly touched my shoulder.
“Yanchuan, you look awful.” Cheng Xiaoqing from the Planning Department lowered her voice. “Why don't you go outside for a bit? I'll call you a cab.”
Her voice was her own.
The other forty-one people in the office turned to look at her.
Cheng Xiaoqing's hand was still on my shoulder. She sensed that something was wrong and her fingers stiffened.
“What is it?”
Guo Zhicheng asked, “Why did you touch him?”
“He doesn't look well.”
“So that means you can touch him?”
“I just—”
“He doesn't like people touching his shoulder,” said the accountant by the door.
“Especially the left one,” the intern added.
“He injured it playing basketball in eighth grade,” said the customer-service supervisor.
“It aches before it rains,” said the cleaning lady.
“When I gave him a massage, he only let me use three fingers,” all forty-one of them said in unison.
Cheng Xiaoqing's face went white.
Only Lin Xu knew that.
Even I had almost forgotten.
The hand on my shoulder immediately withdrew. But the forty-one people were still staring at her like animals that had already caught the scent of blood and were waiting for instructions.
Cheng Xiaoqing looked at me for help.
I wanted to tell her to run, but my lips were so dry they stuck to my teeth. The three people nearest her had already stood up. They didn't clench their fists or shout. They simply and quietly blocked her path to the door.
“She didn't mean to,” I said.
No one moved.
“She wasn't trying to take me away.”
This time, everyone's shoulders relaxed at once.
The customer-service rep smoothly resumed the apology that had paused over the phone. The intern lowered his head and took another bite of his sandwich. The team leader sipped the coffee that had been resting against her lips. Someone beside the copier pulled out the documents and complained about a paper jam, as if nothing had happened.
Only Guo Zhicheng was still holding out his hand.
“The ring,” he reminded me.
I took the silver ring from my pocket.
Forty-two pairs of eyes turned toward me again.
The instant I slipped the ring onto my ring finger, forty-two satisfied sighs sounded throughout the office in unison.
My stomach churned.
I rushed into the bathroom and fell to my knees before the toilet.
There was nothing in my stomach. All I could bring up was a little acid. I splashed cold water on my face. In the mirror, my eyes were red and my lips were still trembling. I didn't dare look at the stalls behind me, and I didn't dare close my eyes. I was afraid that when I opened them again, Lin Xu would be standing in the mirror.
Someone knocked lightly three times on the door.
“Yanchuan?”
It was Guo Zhicheng's hoarse voice.
I didn't answer.
“Did you throw up?” The second sentence came in Lin Xu's voice.
I clamped both hands over my mouth.
“Open the door. Let me take a look.”
The knocks continued at the same intervals, one after another, exactly matching the rhythm of the knocks she had once made outside the bathroom.
I took the cleaning passage on the other side of the bathroom and circled back to my desk. The knocking outside didn't follow me. Guo Zhicheng was already sitting at his desk, checking purchase orders as if he had never left.
The first time Lin Xu put it on me, she had held my hand the same way, refusing to let go for a long time.
She said that as long as I wore it, other people would know who I belonged to.
“All right,” Guo Zhicheng said in his own voice. “Back to work.”
He returned to his seat, put on his reading glasses, and began checking the purchase orders.
9:19 a.m.
From the moment all forty-two people spoke at once to the moment everything returned to normal, two minutes had passed.
I stared at the time in the lower-right corner of my computer screen and checked it at least five times.
Two minutes.
And yet the back of my shirt was already soaked through.
Standing there, I understood for the first time that Lin Xu's last words before she died had not been a curse or something she'd said in anger.
That night, she had stood beneath my apartment building in the rain, refusing to let me close the car door.
I told her we should take some time apart.
She looked at me through the car door, with no tears in her eyes.
“You can break up with me.”
She straightened my crooked collar, her movements even gentler than usual.
“But you can't tell me to leave.”
Twenty minutes later, she was hit by a truck that ran a red light.
The police called it an accident.
I had kept telling myself the same thing.
“Gu Yanchuan.” Manager Fan stood in the office doorway and rapped hard on the glass twice. “Your bereavement leave ended yesterday. Come in and give your report in ten minutes. The client isn't going to stop pressing us about the deadline because of your personal problems.”
After saying that, he went into his office.
No one looked up.
My first thought was to run.
Leave my phone, wallet, and coat behind. Run down the emergency stairs and find a hotel where no one knew me. I had even stood up before I noticed the three coworkers nearest the exit looking up at the same time.
They didn't stop me.
They only watched.
I sat back down.
The three of them lowered their heads at once.
I couldn't tell whether they were waiting for me to run or waiting for me to ask them for help.
Ten minutes later, I walked into the manager's office with my materials.
Manager Fan didn't ask me to sit. He threw the proposal onto the desk.
“Bereavement leave isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card. You're behind schedule this week. Stay tonight and finish it.”
Outside the glass wall, all forty-two people were working.
“I want to go home tonight,” I said.
“Who doesn't?”
“I just finished burying Lin Xu yesterday.”
Manager Fan frowned impatiently. “The dead are dead. The living still have to work.”
The keyboard sounds outside the glass wall stopped.
Not gradually.
They vanished in the same second.
Manager Fan heard it too. He turned to look outside.
Forty-two faces stared at him through the glass.
I remembered the way Cheng Xiaoqing had been surrounded.
The fear didn't disappear. Instead, it crawled from my stomach up into my throat. I knew what might happen next, and I knew that if I said the wrong thing, the forty-two people outside might actually hurt Manager Fan.
I should have explained.
I should have said that he was only being a jerk about work, that he wasn't trying to take me away, and that he hadn't touched me.
But Manager Fan rounded the corner of the desk, grabbed my wrist, and pulled me out of the chair.
“Get out there and finish the report.”
He had grabbed me right below the ring, his thumb pressing the silver band into my bone.
The sudden pain made me recoil, but I couldn't break free. The words rushed out before I could think.
“He won't let me go home,” I said to the people outside.
All forty-two people stood up at once.
The scrape of chair legs across the floor merged into one long, piercing screech.
Manager Fan took a step back. “What are you doing?”
No one answered him.
Guo Zhicheng pushed open the manager's door and placed a blank leave form on the desk. The accountant handed over a pen. The HR supervisor stood in the doorway and calmly read out the company's bereavement-leave and paid-time-off policies.
“Sign it,” Guo Zhicheng said.
Manager Fan glared at him. “Are you insane?”
Guo Zhicheng didn't get angry. He simply removed his reading glasses and slowly wiped them with the hem of his shirt.
“Yanchuan is going home today.”
“This is a company, not your—”
Smack.
Every computer screen in the office went dark at once.
The IT employee held the remote control for the main power supply in his hand. He smiled at Manager Fan.
“No one needs to work now.”
Manager Fan finally picked up the pen.
The forty-two people watched in silence as he signed. With every stroke of the pen, the smiles on their faces grew a little wider.
I took the leave form.
This was the first time I'd used Lin Xu since her death.
It couldn't count as using her deliberately.
I was just afraid. I only wanted to leave. It wasn't until the signed leave form actually landed in my hand that I realized what I had said and what I had made the forty-two people do for me.
It was also the first time I understood what it felt like to be loved this way.
Disgusting.
But undeniably convenient.
When I left the office, the forty-two people didn't follow me.
They waved from behind the floor-to-ceiling windows. Some continued to use their own faces; others briefly wore the smile Lin Xu had had while alive. The forty-two faces were all different, yet I could tell exactly which moments were hers.
Before the elevator doors closed, they mouthed to me in unison:
Be careful on your way home.
The elevator began descending. I immediately pressed the button for the first floor, then hit the door-close button more than a dozen times.
When we reached the eighth floor, the elevator doors still opened automatically.
An unfamiliar woman stood outside.
I shrank into the corner of the elevator, nearly pressing the emergency call button. She simply lowered her head and walked in, glanced at the floor display, and said nothing to me.
But I watched her mouth the entire ride.
It wasn't until she got off on the third floor that I realized I'd been holding my breath the whole time.
The lobby on the first floor was playing a lighthearted midday news broadcast.
The security guard swiped me through the gate. A delivery driver came in carrying a paper bag. Two real estate agents were introducing nearby rental prices to clients in the seating area. Everyone was busy with their own lives. No one was looking at me.
I relaxed a little.
Then the security guard said, “It's raining outside. How come you didn't bring an umbrella?”
I stopped walking.
He didn't look up, still stamping the visitor log.
“You'll get wet, and your head will hurt again tonight,” the delivery driver said.
The two real estate agents turned their faces toward me at the same time.
“You never take care of yourself.”
Outside the glass doors, everyone on the entire street stopped.
The motorcycle riders kept one foot planted on the ground. Office workers holding umbrellas stood in the middle of the crosswalk. The bus driver kept both hands on the steering wheel. Through the afternoon rain, dozens of blurry faces turned one after another toward the building entrance.
Toward me.
I turned and ran.
My shoes slipped on the marble floor, and I knocked over the umbrella stand by the entrance. A dozen wet umbrellas scattered across the ground. When the security guard reached out to steady me, I flung his hand away as if I'd been burned.
“Don't touch me!”
Everyone in the lobby stopped at once.
I regretted it immediately.
The security guard's hand remained suspended in midair. A wounded expression slowly spread across his face. It wasn't his expression. Whenever Lin Xu was rejected by me, she would first look at me in that same quiet way, then ask if someone had taught me bad habits.
“I'm sorry,” I said, gasping. “I wasn't yelling at you. No one taught me that.”
Only then did the security guard lower his hand.
My phone began to vibrate.
It wasn't a call.
An app I had deleted seventeen times appeared on my home screen by itself.
A pink icon, a white heart, and the name “Together.”
While she was alive, Lin Xu had used it to check my real-time location, my phone's battery level, and every place where I stayed for more than ten minutes a day. I changed the password, so she used my face to unlock it while I was asleep. I changed phones, so she brought me a new one the next day and said couples shouldn't keep secrets from each other.
After her death, I personally canceled the account.
Now the app opened on its own.
The map was packed with densely clustered, blinking red dots.
Forty-two at the office.
One hundred and six in the building.
One thousand three hundred and seventy in the surrounding neighborhood.
The red dots were still spreading outward.
At the top of the page, where it had originally displayed “Couples Location Sharing,” two new lines of text had appeared.
**Current guardians: 12,417**
**Heading to your home: 12,416**
One was missing.
I stared at the number, my fingers so cold I could barely hold the phone.
The twelve-story building's lobby had air-conditioning, but sweat covered my forehead. Every time the number of red dots increased, the phone gave a faint buzz. Soon the vibrations merged into one continuous tremor, like a heart beating faster and faster in my palm.
The app suddenly displayed a door-lock notification from my residence.
**Family member Lin Xu has unlocked the door for you.**
Impossible.
Lin Xu didn't have access to my door lock.
At least, she hadn't before she died.
I ran into the rain and flagged down the first taxi I saw. The driver didn't say a word the entire way. When I urged him to drive faster, he flashed Lin Xu's familiar smile at me in the rearview mirror.
“Don't rush,” he said. “I'm waiting for you at home.”
I reached for the door handle.
The door was locked.
“Open the door.”
The driver ignored me and continued down the road at sixty kilometers per hour.
“Open the door!”
I slammed my shoulder against the door twice and pulled out my phone to call the police, but the screen showed only the map covered in red dots. The phone icon, emergency dialing, even the power-off button had all disappeared.
The driver looked at me through the rearview mirror, his expression so gentle it made me want to throw up even more.
“Whenever you get scared, you try to jump out of the car,” he said in Lin Xu's voice. “So I locked you in.”
The central lock clicked open only when the car stopped in front of my apartment building. I practically fell out of the car and forgot to pay the fare. The driver didn't chase me. He only lowered the window to remind me to slow down and not hurt my knees again.
By the time the car stopped outside the apartment building, the rain had already eased.
The entire building was dark.
But residents from every floor stood on their balconies, silently watching me walk through the front entrance.
The elevator was stopped on the seventh floor.
My apartment door was ajar.
There was no light in the entryway. Only the cold glow of a phone screen seeped from deep inside the living room. From behind the crack in the door came the sound of slippers scraping across the floor. One step, then another.
Those slippers were Lin Xu's.
Pink, and too small for me. I had never worn them.
The footsteps stopped behind the door.
A pale hand reached out from inside and gripped the doorknob.
The same silver ring as mine was on its ring finger.
The door slowly opened inward.
I tried to back away, but my legs seemed to have forgotten how to move.
Seven days ago, when Lin Xu had collapsed in the rain, it had been this same hand. There had been blood under her fingernails, and her index finger had been bent at an unnatural angle, yet it had still clutched my pant leg tightly.
Now that index finger had been set back into place.
It was just facing the wrong way.
From the darkness, Lin Xu spoke in the voice I could never mistake for anyone else's:
“You're back.”
“Were you a good boy today?”