Chapter Five: A Stranger’s Relics

Wen Yu did not remember Xia Mi, but he remembered how to love her. As Tang Li led her from the lighthouse, he instinctively shielded Xia Mi from falling stone. When she coughed, his hand went to his coat pocket for a mint, then found nothing. “Sorry,” he said. “I keep feeling I should carry those.” He had formed that habit when helping her quit smoking. In this reality, Wen Yu was still a marine acoustics researcher, but he had never met Xia Mi. He had neither gone to Norway nor boarded White Whale. For two years, he had monitored the abnormal sound field beneath the old lighthouse for He Chen. The wedding invitation was gone. In every photograph, Xia Mi had been replaced by scenery, a colleague, or a blaze of white overexposure.