Chapter 10: The Sunday Visitor

Xiao Chen pressed play.

The line hissed, and then his own voice came out of the little speaker.

It was younger and steadier than he felt.

"Hello. Is this Shen Yan? Mr. Shen's son?"

A pause. A boy's breath.

"Yes. Who is this?"

"My name is Xiao Chen. I am working on your father's file. I don't think he did it."

Another pause, longer.

"I wanted someone in the family to hear me say so."

The recording went on for four minutes.

Xiao Chen did not hear most of it.

He was listening to the other voice, the soft, shaken one.

"Thank you. Thank you, I'll tell him if I see him. Thank you."

He stopped the file.

The kitchen was very quiet.

The pot on the stove had stopped bubbling, and the boy behind his chair had stopped breathing.

"I called you," Xiao Chen said.

"Yes."

"A week before the crash. I recorded it for the file, and I forgot."

He turned in the chair.

"You told me nothing. You stood in the market with a tray of bowls and let me introduce myself."

"I did."

"Why?"

Shen Yan's face was white and still.

"Because you didn't recognise my voice, and I thought, if I say it now, he'll think I'm asking for something."

"You said you knew me from the news."

"That was true too."

"But it was not the whole truth."

"No."

Xiao Chen stood up.

He was not a man who raised his voice, and he did not raise it now.

"I have spent a week believing I found you," he said.

"That I came into that market and picked you up out of the dirt. That I was the only one who gave a damn."

"You were."

"Do not tell me what I was."

Shen Yan flinched.

Xiao Chen took a breath.

He crossed the kitchen and stood in front of him.

The thing he had been turning over for days came loose at last.

"The nurse," he said slowly. "At the hospital. The night I woke."

Shen Yan's mouth trembled.

"She said a boy came every Sunday. Thin. He smelled of frying oil."

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