Chapter Two: The Woman Everyone Forgot

She pushed it across the table, along with a sheet listing times, changes in the pictures, and the sequence in which Qiao had been forgotten. There was no talk of ghosts, only observable facts. Wen read the final line. “No new photographs before midnight?” “To avoid another prediction.” “The brand took more than eight hundred this morning.” Wen gave a humorless laugh. “A person who survives by being photographed cannot stop being photographed.” That afternoon, Tang obtained previews from the brand library. Claiming to investigate a leak, she shut every blind in the office. The three women reviewed the images until Jianwei found one in which Wen stood beside a giant perfume bottle, flawless except for tiny white rectangles in both pupils—doors