Chapter 3

Chapter 3

“Hello?” I answered the phone.

“Eh? Why didn’t you call me ‘Honey’?”

I froze.

The voice belonged to Xiaoyu. Answering the phone and saying “Honey”-that was Xiaoyu’s rule.

“Hello? Honey, say something!” she urged from the other end.

“Who… are you?”

“Hahaha, are you crazy? I’m your Goddess!”

That playful tone of hers-there was no mistake!

“Li Tong, help me out with a lie in a bit…” she continued, talking to herself. “Oh, hold on a second, I have another call coming in.”

With a beep, the call disconnected.

I sat there stunned for a long while before hurriedly checking the phone.

Two percent battery.

No SIM card.

No signal.

In the recent calls log, there was only one entry:

Qiu Xiaoyu.

I tried to call back using the iPhone 7, but I realized that without a SIM card, the phone couldn’t make outgoing calls at all.

When I used my current phone to call Xiaoyu’s number, it went unanswered, just as it had for the past four years. Her SIM card had long since been stored away by me, kept along with many of her other belongings…

Suddenly, the iPhone 7 rang again.

I plugged in the charging cable while simultaneously answering the call.

“Hello?”

“Li Tong, are you off the plane yet?”

“Off the plane?”

“Yeah, the flight back from Shanghai. Weren’t you delayed?”

“Xiaoyu, where are you…”

“I’m at the Detrick Pharmaceuticals cocktail party.”