After the recording ended, I didn't dare speak again.
The person in the speaker hadn't continued talking, but I could still feel his voice lingering in my throat.
Steady.
Crystal clear.
More like Gu Yanchuan than I did right now.
I raised a hand to touch my neck. The skin beneath my fingertips pulsed, and my Adam's apple moved when I swallowed. This was my body, but I suddenly wasn't sure whose voice would come out the next time I opened my mouth.
"Mr. Gu?"
The duty officer called to me.
My shoulders jerked up.
Several people filling out statements in the police station looked up at once.
Only for a moment.
Someone quickly lowered their head and continued filling out the form. Someone else looked away and turned their attention back to the TV news. No one wore Lin Xu's smile, and no one pointed at my ring.
I kept staring at them until my eyes were dry and aching.
"Did you make this call?" the duty officer asked.
I shook my head.
The movement was too abrupt, and a low buzzing started up in my ears again.
"Are you sure?"
I opened my mouth, but no sound came out.
The glass door was still propped open. Rain drifted sideways into the covered entryway, and passing scooters sent water splashing onto the roadside. That door, left open, was the only thing in the entire police station that still listened to me.
I didn't want to let my voice take it away too.
Lu Bo'an pulled a blank sheet of paper from the desk and pushed it toward me with a pen.
He didn't tell me, "You can write," and he didn't rush me.
I gripped the pen.
My fingers shook so badly that the tip kept striking the paper, leaving three separate black dots.
**It wasn't me.**
I wrote.
The letters were horribly crooked, and the final stroke dragged out far too long.
After reading it, the duty officer pulled up the incident report again.
"At 1:42 p.m., the call came from your number. The caller said his name was Gu Yanchuan and was able to provide the last four digits of his ID number, his address, and his workplace."
I wrote on the paper:
**I was in a taxi at the time.**
After thinking for a moment, I added:
**The phone was in my hand, but I couldn't make a call.**
The second line looked even worse than the first.
"Where's your phone?"
I pointed outside, then pointed in the direction we'd come from.
Lu Bo'an took the pen and wrote "apartment security guard" in his notebook, then had me confirm it.
I nodded.
The duty officer picked up the phone on the desk.
When the receiver left its base, I recoiled so hard that the legs of my plastic chair scraped across the floor. The woman filling out a statement beside me looked over again.
"I'll contact the apartment management office first and confirm whether the phone is there," the duty officer said.
He was waiting.
It took me a few seconds to realize he was waiting for my consent.
I nodded.
He dialed.
Every ring sounded like something knocking against my chest from the inside.
Someone answered on the third ring.
"Hello, this is the management office at Qingchuan Apartments."
The speakerphone wasn't on, so I could hear only the man's muffled voice leaking through.
The duty officer identified himself and asked about my phone.
He listened for a while, then looked at me.
"The manager says the phone is definitely with him, sealed in a clear plastic bag. It wasn't taken from you until 2:06 p.m."
At 1:42, a call had been made from my phone to the police station.
At 2:06, the security guard had taken the phone away.
For those twenty-four minutes in between, the phone had been on me the entire time.
I remembered.
I had been locked in the back seat of the taxi, my thumb pressing the unresponsive power button. I'd turned the screen face down, while the red dot on the map kept multiplying. The driver had looked at me in the rearview mirror and said that whenever I got scared, I wanted to jump out of the car.
I hadn't made a call.
At least, I didn't remember doing it.
That thought was more terrifying than "It wasn't me."
I lowered my head and looked at the words on the paper.
What if the voice in the recording really was mine?
What if, sometime during those twenty-four minutes, I'd sat up straight and reported my information in a perfectly steady voice, then forgotten the entire memory afterward?
My hands began to turn cold.
The pen slipped from my fingers.
Lu Bo'an bent down to pick it up. He didn't put it directly back in my hand, only set it on the desk.
"Don't send the phone over yet," he told the duty officer.
"Why not?"
Lu Bo'an glanced at the police-car driver standing near the glass door.
"Preserve it as is for now."
The driver folded his arms, his expression already back to the impatience of an ordinary police officer.
"What exactly are you suspicious of?"
Lu Bo'an didn't answer. Instead, he asked me, "Are you willing to watch some footage from inside the car?"
I stared at his mouth.
He hadn't called me by name, and he hadn't moved closer.
I didn't know whether I wanted to watch it.
If I didn't, I'd never know whether what happened in the police car had been something only I heard.
If I did, the footage might tell me that even the person I'd just been couldn't be trusted.
I looked toward the open glass door, then finally gave a small nod.
Lu Bo'an turned the monitor beside the duty desk toward me.
The footage began when the police car pulled away from the apartment.
On-screen, I was curled up in the back seat, my hair and shirt soaked through. At some point, the towel had fallen by my feet, a clump of white cloth ground dirty underfoot. My face was even paler than it had looked in the mirror. My lips kept moving, but there were several stretches with no sound at all.
The driver pressed the central lock.
I remembered what he said next:
"Don't be scared. I'll stay with you all night."
But the voice coming through the footage was the man's own.
Low and tired, with nothing about it that sounded like Lin Xu.
I grabbed the edge of the desk.
"Back it up," Lu Bo'an told the colleague operating the mouse.
The footage fast-forwarded to the moment I took off the ring.
The car had stopped at a red light. In the back seat, I was desperately tugging at the silver ring, while the driver called for Lu Bo'an to help me put it back on.
On-screen, Lu Bo'an turned around and reached toward me.
"Put it back on, and it won't hurt anymore."
It was still the man's voice.
But that pause, that trailing intonation, even the three fingers that curled slightly as he reached out—all of it was exactly like Lin Xu.
Lu Bo'an stared at his on-screen self.
"I don't remember saying that."
The driver snorted.
"The car was such a mess. What's weird about not remembering one sentence?"
Lu Bo'an raised his right hand.
He was still holding the note he'd crumpled earlier in his palm.
When he slowly unfolded it, there was only one sentence on it.
**Did I just speak like a woman?**
"I wrote this too," he said. "I don't remember why I wrote it."
The police station fell silent.
The TV beside us was still broadcasting the news. The anchor's lips opened and closed, but the voice suddenly seemed very far away.
The duty officer looked at me, then at Lu Bo'an.
"Let's confirm the death first," he said.
Those four words made my stomach clench.
I wanted to tell him there was no need to confirm it.
I'd seen the corner of Lin Xu's forehead. I'd seen her broken fingers. I'd watched them push her coffin inside. Yesterday, everyone had told me to take care of myself. I even remembered Lin Xu's mother crying so hard beside me that she could barely stand when the crematory door closed.
But I didn't dare use my voice to say that I remembered.
Lu Bo'an took back the blank sheet of paper and wrote on it:
**Lin Xu's full name and date of birth.**
I wrote them for him.
He didn't let me look at the search screen. He only turned his chair slightly away and quietly confirmed the information with his colleague. The few minutes were short, yet every keystroke in the police station felt like it was changing something for me.
"Date of death: seven days ago," Lu Bo'an said. "Traffic accident. The cremation was completed yesterday."
I didn't feel relieved.
Even after her death was confirmed, she was still everywhere.
That was worse than the possibility that she hadn't died.
"The family left contact information," the duty officer said. "Do you need us to call them?"
I shook my head immediately.
The motion was too forceful, and my vision went black for a second.
Yesterday, Lin Xu's mother had held my hand and told me to visit her often from now on. She said I was what Lin Xu worried about most and told me not to pack away her things so soon.
I didn't know whose voice she would use if she answered the phone.
Lu Bo'an didn't call her.
Instead, he called the crematorium's official number and asked only about the property records the police needed to verify.
This time, he didn't turn on the speakerphone.
I could only watch him listen and write in his notebook.
Remains.
Identity confirmed.
Cremation completed.
Ashes collected by the family.
When he reached the end, his pen stopped.
"The phone?" he asked the person on the other end.
My back slowly tensed.
Lin Xu's phone had been placed in the coffin with her yesterday.
Her mother had put it there herself. A white phone case, with a Polaroid of the two of us stuck to the back. In the picture, I wasn't looking at the camera, but Lin Xu was smiling brightly.
She'd said that if she took her phone with her, she wouldn't lose track of me.
Lu Bo'an asked again, "Who picked it up?"
The person on the other end spoke at length.
After hanging up, he didn't look at me right away.
"Lithium batteries can't go into the cremator," he said. "The staff removed the phone before placing the coffin inside and returned it to the family according to procedure."
I picked up the pen.
**Her mother.**
Lu Bo'an shook his head.
"No."
He asked his colleague to print out the property pickup form sent by the other party.
The printer behind the desk started up.
The rollers turned, and the paper slowly emerged. The sound was just like the copy machine at the office, making me remember that morning when the forty-two people at the office looked up at once.
Lu Bo'an took the paper but didn't hand it to me immediately.
"First, tell me where you were yesterday at 4:22 p.m."
I wrote:
**At the crematorium.**
I'd just walked out of the lounge with Lin Xu's mother. Someone had handed me a white towel. I stood at the end of the hallway, staring at a closed gray door. Everything after that was blurry. Someone told me to sign something. I might have signed it.
Might have.
Lu Bo'an placed the pickup form in front of me.
The item column read: one white cell phone.
Pickup time: 4:22 p.m. yesterday.
Name of recipient: Gu Yanchuan.
At the bottom was a signature.
The first character slanted to the right, and the last stroke always unconsciously hooked upward.
It was exactly like the handwriting I'd just put on the paper.
I stared at the signature as my right hand began to shake.
The ink lines on the paper gradually blurred into a single black crack.
I tried to pull my hand back, but my elbow struck the corner of the desk. Pain shot violently through my right shoulder. I couldn't cry out; I could only bend over and dry-heave. My stomach had been empty for a long time, yet my throat kept clenching, as if the calm version of me from that phone call were reaching out from inside and squeezing it.
Someone reached out to steady me.
I practically fell out of the chair, my back hitting the table leg as I covered my mouth with both hands.
Don't touch me.
And don't let me speak.
Lu Bo'an immediately stopped the person. But when he looked down at me, I saw those three slightly curled fingers from the police car again.
I didn't dare accept his help either.
A few seconds later, I braced myself against the edge of the desk and hauled myself back up. My palms were slick with sweat, and the pickup form now bore the damp imprint of my hand.
The silver ring on my ring finger trembled with it, tapping against the desk again and again.
The phone wasn't in the coffin.
It wasn't in Lin Xu's mother's hands either.
I had collected it myself.
But I had no memory at all of where I'd taken it.