Shen Sixing should have understood that from a very young age.
Every transaction came at a price—sometimes a crushing one.
Whatever he gained from it, he would have to pay for and return in kind.
A transaction was always equal.
And the scales of fate never favored anyone.
Now, as he lifted the lid of that box, Pandora’s box gave a dull click beneath his fingers. The moment he saw what lay inside, he knew he could never go back.
The first thing to strike his ears was a recording of a man’s voice.
His own voice.
It was a message about the past.
When he heard the words “I love her,” an indescribable shudder ran through him.
Shen Sixing had never said those words to anyone.
The word love was too heavy. It seemed capable of crushing a person with ease, and he had always instinctively avoided it.
Yet the voice in the recording spoke so calmly, with a tenderness so unfamiliar that he hardly recognized himself.
Shen Sixing could not help pressing pause.
His fingertips trembled slightly. His Adam’s apple bobbed.
Should he keep watching?
He had a powerful premonition.
Once he finished, his current life—peaceful, happy, orderly—would be torn away in one piece like cheap wallpaper, exposing the cold, mottled truth beneath.
Shen Sixing had always been good at hiding his head in the sand.
He suddenly tightened his grip on the box, almost cowardly trying to run from it.
“Your dad really is hopeless. Your grandfather was right—he’s always been a coward,” the system judged coldly.
Shen Yi, however, was unconcerned. “Avoidance is human nature. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. In my eyes, he’s still a perfectly good father.”
No one knew what Shen Sixing had been thinking during the half hour he spent struggling before finally closing the box.
In the end, he still summoned the courage to continue watching.
The footage came in fragments. The picture was not particularly clear, grainy and slightly discolored in the distinctive way of old camcorders.
He watched one segment after another. Though the recording was incomplete, he could roughly piece together the truth.
The box contained a complete record of his eighteen-year-old self: at first, bewildered upon discovering that he would one day become a father, then gradually overcome by panic.
And finally, that panic transformed into a kind of tragic resignation.
At eighteen, he had begun preparing to raise an eight-year-old child.
Shen Sixing stared at the images. A reflexive laugh forced its way out of his throat, dry and humorless.
It was impossible to imagine.
How could he possibly have raised a child at an age when he could barely support himself? What would he have fed her? Would he have stuffed her beneath the shelves of the convenience store where he worked, letting her live like a little mouse, stealing scraps of food?
And yet—
He searched through every corner of his memory, dragging out each day of his eighteenth year and going over it again.
There was nothing.
There had never been such a child.
Shen Sixing was mildly face-blind, but not so much that he could forget someone over the course of so many years.
Especially not someone who had supposedly existed in his life for so long.
And yet, in the footage, there were even height marks for her drawn on the living-room wall. Whenever he tried to remember, however, all that rose in his chest was a sense of unfamiliarity.
Over the years, Wen Ya would occasionally space out. Sometimes she would suddenly say, “I always feel as though something is missing.”
Shen Sixing had assumed it was simply an emotional fluctuation after childbirth. Now, looking back, her fixation finally seemed to have an explanation.
A child from the future.
A child who had somehow been forgotten by everyone.
Was this the punishment of time and space? Or had she violated some kind of rule?
Shen Sixing folded his hands on the tabletop, flipping through the records as he speculated.
At first, he watched with a measure of indifference.
It was like reading a book unrelated to him, the kind he could skim while wondering what to eat for breakfast the next morning.
He quickly finished watching the missing memories from when he was eighteen. Most of them depicted the everyday life of a family of three, and they looked exceptionally warm.
No wonder his wife still remembered the child so vividly.
Shen Sixing watched it all with remarkable calm.
He had to admit that it seemed to have been a good period of their lives.
It was exactly like the family he had dreamed of.
Then—
The tone of the recordings changed abruptly.
Compared to the warmth of the earlier footage, the latter half felt more like a one-person play starring the little girl.
Her camera was often pointed at a single figure in an empty, uninhabited house; a bench by the roadside; a convenience store glowing beneath the midnight sky.
The surroundings made Shen Sixing frown. Had the girl been driven out of the house and left to wander the streets?
Shen Sixing opened one of the audio recordings.
The sound of wind filled it. Plane-tree leaves rustled in the breeze, occasionally joined by the distant hum of passing traffic.
He heard his own voice say, “You know, kid, I’m exhausted from work. I really don’t have time to listen to childish complaints.”
There was a brief silence.
Then the little girl’s voice came through.
“But I’m only a little lonely. I wanted to talk to you.”
“Lonely? Why?” Shen Sixing’s voice carried a hint of fatigue.
“Because…” She hesitated. Then her voice became calm. “Because in a few minutes, you’ll forget me and ask who I am all over again.”
Shen Sixing tightened his grip on the box, realizing that most of the later recordings and voice messages had been left behind by the little girl after she was forgotten.
He also found many recordings of Shen Yi talking to herself.
She really did seem very lonely.
“Lately, I’ve been talking to myself into a recorder all the time, but I’m not crazy.”
“I’m just too bored. Whenever I talk to other people, they quickly forget what I’ve said. One second they’re laughing, and the next they’re asking, ‘Who are you?’ So most of the time, I record things myself. At least then, the words I’ve spoken can stay here.”
Throughout those long years in which no one remembered her, Shen Yi accompanied them as they moved from place to place.
She would smile and walk past them as if they were strangers, pretending they had happened to meet and greeting them naturally.
Sometimes she disguised herself as a flower vendor, crouching at a street corner and offering Wen Ya a dewy rose with a smile.
Sometimes she climbed into a bulky mascot costume at a shopping mall and clumsily pounced on them for a hug.
Sometimes she sat by the window at the café they frequented, waiting for them to push open the door. When they entered, she would look up and smile, then strike up a conversation.
Every New Year, gifts would somehow appear at their front door.
Shen Sixing and Wen Ya would joke that they were thanks from a stray cat.
Laughing, they would put the gifts away in a cabinet, and neither of them ever looked too closely into the matter.
Over the years, the couple had traveled through countless places, and this girl had accompanied them through countless cities.
Rain-soaked lanes in the south. Snow-covered streets in the north. Dusky seaside evenings. Crisp mountain mornings.
To them, every meeting with Shen Yi was a first encounter.
Shen Yi never seemed disappointed. She would simply smile, wave at them, and then, the next time, pretend to be a passerby once more, returning to their side again.
As Shen Sixing watched the footage, he gradually realized that Shen Yi had been there all along—from the moment Wen Ya became pregnant with their first child.
In the delivery room, Wen Ya gripped the sheets tightly through the pain, while outside the door, Shen Yi crouched there, crying along with him. When the baby cried endlessly, Shen Yi would pick him up and soothe him, humming an off-key lullaby as she gently rocked him in her arms. Only after he had fallen asleep would she carefully place him back in the cradle.
When Shen Zhizhao was seven or eight and quietly shed tears after being brought to the Shen family home, Shen Yi would always stay by his side and wipe them away for him.
“Are you unhappy?” she asked.
Shen Zhizhao felt a little embarrassed, but in the end, he couldn’t help telling Shen Yi.
He was just a little lonely. He missed his parents.
His voice grew softer and softer, until the last few words were barely more than a murmur in his throat. The boy looked at her with dark eyes.
“Am I just useless?”
Shen Yi laughed softly and pulled him into her arms. All she said was, “It’s okay. I’ll be with you.”
“Until you grow into an adult who can stand on your own, I’ll come and spend time with you whenever I can.”
For Shen Yi, time was the one thing she had in abundance.
Shen Zhizhao froze for a moment, then looked up at her.
The next instant, he threw himself into Shen Yi’s arms, burying his face in the crook of her shoulder as his own shoulders trembled.
“Thank you, Sister.”
In truth, Shen Zhizhao had no memory of her at all.
And yet, instinctively, he felt close to her.
As though she were someone he had seen countless times in his dreams—
someone who had finally appeared before him one day.
