Chapter One: Debt and the Nightingale

The bar was closing, and Shen Yan was playing a song with no ending. At 2:17 a.m., the last customer turned an empty glass upside down on the piano. Outside, rain smeared the neon into pools of red and blue. Beside the music stand, messages from Shen Yan's creditors lit his phone one after another. Three days. Four hundred and eighty thousand, principal and interest. He did not read it twice. His fingers slid from E-flat to C, then stopped before the final two measures that had always been missing from his mother's piece, *The Returning Tide*. Shen Qinghe had been dead seven years. All she had left him was a water-damaged manuscript.