Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Nanzhi began making something called the “Kite Box.”

She said it was a birthday gift for Xiaoman.

The box wasn’t large. It was made of wood, with a cat carved into the lid. Inside were eighteen little envelopes, each marked with an age: one, two, three… all the way to eighteen.

I asked her why she was preparing it so early.

She smiled. “I’m afraid I’ll get too busy and forget later.”

I didn’t press her.

Back then, I came home late every day, and I often saw her sitting on the study carpet, recording audio. Her voice drifted through the door, very soft.

“Xiaoman, at two years old, you’ll probably be walking very fast by now. It’s okay if you fall. The floor doesn’t hate you that much.”

“Xiaoman, when you’re five, if you don’t want to perform, you can say no. Mommy never knew how to say no when she was little, so she suffered a lot for it after she grew up.”

“Xiaoman, when you’re sixteen and you like someone, don’t hurt yourself to prove your love. Love isn’t bleeding, and it isn’t endurance.”

Once, I pushed the door open and went in. She hurriedly shut her laptop.

“I’m preparing a surprise for the child,” she said.

I laughed at her for thinking too far ahead.

She smiled too, but she didn’t look at me.

Only later did I learn that she hadn’t just left eighteen letters for Xiaoman.

She had also left a program for me.

It was a little thing she had made with an engineer friend from her company, called Fengli. On certain dates, in certain weather, at certain locations, it would send me messages she had written in advance. It would remind me to eat, send me a recording on Xiaoman’s birthday, and, when I hadn’t gone outside for several days in a row, push the sound of wind chimes from a nearby park to my phone.

She never told me.

Because she knew that if she had told me then, I would only have said, “Stop overthinking.”

The day Nanzhi went missing was the day before Xiaoman turned one hundred days old.

The financing meeting at the company dragged on into the night. The investors changed their terms at the last minute, and I was in the conference room arguing with Legal until my voice went hoarse. When my phone vibrated, I glanced at it.

Nanzhi: Can you come home earlier tonight?

I replied: I’ll try.

Nanzhi: I’m not doing very well today.

I replied: Have Mom stay with you. Don’t be alone.

Nanzhi: Yanzhou, I think I lost Xiaoman.

Only then did I realize something was wrong and called home.

My mother-in-law’s voice trembled with panic over the phone. She said Xiaoman was sleeping perfectly well in her crib, but Nanzhi was gone. She had gone out in slippers, with only her phone on her, and hadn’t taken a coat.

I rushed out of the conference room.

It didn’t rain that night, but the wind was strong. Surveillance footage showed Nanzhi leaving the residential complex and walking along the river toward the south of the city. She walked very slowly, as if she were sleepwalking. Her phone’s last location stopped beside the old goods market.

We searched the entire night.

At four in the morning, the police found her in the back courtyard of a closed wind chime shop.

She was sitting on the ground, holding a worn-out baby rattle in her arms, so cold that her consciousness was blurred. She hadn’t deliberately hurt herself, nor had she hurt anyone else. But her body was too weak. A postpartum infection and prolonged hypothermia had triggered complications.

The doctors tried to save her for eight hours.

I stood outside the emergency room, clutching her phone in my hand.

On the screen was an unsent draft.

She had written: It isn’t Xiaoman who is lost. It’s me. I can’t find myself.

There was another detail from that night, something I only saw later in the surveillance footage.

When Nanzhi reached the gate of the residential complex, the security guard asked where she was going so late. She stopped, smiled very politely, and said, “I’m going to bring the wind chimes back.”

The security guard thought she was talking in her sleep and tried to persuade her to go home. But she took a crumpled piece of paper out of her pajama pocket and showed it to him like a pass.

It was the Crisis Card I had long since forgotten.

She might have thought that as long as she took out that card, someone would know how to help her.

But the security guard couldn’t understand what was written on it, and he didn’t know who he was supposed to call. All he remembered was that her smile was very faint, and she said it was all right, my husband will be here soon.

I wasn’t there soon.

I was in a conference room, signing an investment agreement that would never even be executed.

Every time I think of it, I feel like fate is a cruel joke. That agreement ultimately fell through because the valuation adjustment mechanism couldn’t be settled, so it never took effect. But those few hours Nanzhi spent waiting for me can never be voided.