Chapter One: The Username

Now it was someone's username. The account had an overexposed white avatar, no follows, one follower, and one post from two minutes ago. “She said on the Nanqiao platform that she would answer after the last train left.” The photograph showed rain, an old transit shelter, and half a blue umbrella with faded red string tied to a rib. Cheng knew that umbrella. Or, at the first glance, he knew he should know it. Something retreated inside his mind. He remembered dating a woman in university, remembered that she took two sugars, remembered water filling his shoes at Nanqiao. Her name, face, and answer were simply gone—not blurred, but cleanly excavated.