Chapter 6

“Are you looking for someone?” I blurted out.

She had clearly recognized me now and looked apologetic. “Yes, I was looking for your mother. I misread the room number. She’s next door, isn’t she? Sorry to disturb you.”

I told her it was fine, then asked as casually as I could, “Do you know my mother?”

“Not really. She’s been using our safekeeping service. I was bringing something back to her.”

My gaze flicked to her pocket, my expression darkening. “A phone?”

“Yes, that’s right,” she said at once.

I lowered my voice. “Could you give it to me for a moment? And please don’t tell my mother. I’ll transfer you three hundred yuan. Would that be all right?”

She hesitated, but soon agreed.

She didn’t think much of it. We were mother and daughter, after all. She took one of the phones out of her pocket and handed it to me.

I thanked her, went back to my room, and switched it on.

It was an old Android model that would have cost only a little over a thousand yuan.

My parents normally used Android phones that cost three or four thousand.

Strange. Why would Mom leave this phone in the hotel’s safekeeping?

Luckily, there was no lock-screen password, so I got into it easily.

There were very few apps on it, with nothing much in any of them.

It looked perfectly ordinary.

I refused to give up and opened every app to check again.

Sure enough, every app’s messages were empty. Everything except the phone app.

The call history showed lots of calls to the same number.

I checked them one by one. The earliest dated back two or three years. Anything older had probably been overwritten.

There was a pattern, too. A call roughly once every three months.

The inexplicable call history only made me more uneasy.

Who was Mom calling? Why did she have to hide the phone she used for it?

I knew my parents. Neither understood electronics particularly well, and both were careless with them. Sometimes they even needed my help to transfer money or make a video call.

Why would they go to the trouble of hiding a phone?

Unless someone was teaching them how.

Who was that person?

The thought brought back the strange person who’d messaged me.

They’d said God was watching them.

Could the person watching them be the same one Mom was secretly contacting?

I wrote down the number, checked the phone once more, and switched it off.

Then I returned it to the woman from reception.

I quietly pressed my ear to my door and heard Mom thank her.

There was no other sound outside.

After much hesitation, I still couldn’t bring myself to dial the strange number.

In the end, I called the police and told them everything, including the phone number, hoping they could give me an answer.

They worked quickly. The next day, they called me back.

But what they told me was the last thing I’d expected.

The number belonged to my aunt, Mom’s younger sister. She owned a women’s clothing shop.