Chapter Two: The Woman Missing from the Recording

] Tuesday, 12:06: [She sat at the table behind you.] Thursday, 7:30 p.m.: [She waved before the elevator doors closed.] He forced himself to remember and found only smears of red—sometimes a billboard, sometimes a delivery rider’s helmet, sometimes perhaps an umbrella. At three in the morning, he typed into Lacuna’s blank window. “Who are you?” No answer. “Who is she?” The cursor blinked for several seconds. [Retrieval requires an entry point.] “What kind?” [An error that survived.] The next morning, Zhou Cen dropped a stack of expense forms on Lin’s desk. “Save me. Finance says if these come back again, I have to eat them.”