The unknown number had no name, no photograph and no message history.
Ye Xuan took a screenshot. Whoever had warned him about the waterfront believed he remembered something. But he did not remember this room, this city or the face reflected in its window.
Footsteps stopped outside.
“Xiao Ye,” Mrs. Tang called. “Two people are asking for you. One has a police badge. They’re waiting downstairs.”
He looked at the message again.
Do not tell the police before we speak.
“I’ll be there,” he said.
He found a clean shirt. In the pocket of a jacket hanging beside the door was a plastic card marked EAST RIVER MAINTENANCE. He laid it on the desk, afraid to invent an explanation for it.
In the bakery, a woman in a grey coat introduced herself as Detective Naomi Reed. The younger man, Jonah Park, worked for the city’s infrastructure safety office.
“Are you hurt?” Reed asked.
“I fell.”
“Hit your head?”
“I don’t know.”
“You should see a doctor. We can talk later.”
“What happened at the waterfront?”
“A technician named Mara Chen is missing. She was inspecting equipment near Pier Seventeen on Tuesday night. Your student card was used to enter that service area.”
The name meant nothing. But Ye Ming had disappeared three years earlier; Ye Xuan knew what a missing person did to a family.
“Is she alive?”
“We don’t know,” Reed said.
They sat by the bakery window. Mrs. Tang delivered tea, then withdrew a few steps.
“Where were you Tuesday evening?” Reed asked.
“I can’t tell you.”
“Why?”
“I woke up confused. There are things I can’t remember.”
“I need facts, not what you think I’d like to hear.”
She showed him a camera image from the pier entrance. A woman with an orange equipment case stood beside a Chinese teenager in a dark jacket. The young man’s face was half turned away.
“Is that you?”
“It looks like me.”
“Did you speak to Ms. Chen?”
“I don’t remember.”
Park displayed a photograph of a service door and a wet concrete floor.
“The maintenance system says the room was dry at eight. At ten the door sensor stopped reporting. Mara went to investigate, and we have no record of her leaving.”
“No exit record from a failed sensor doesn’t establish that she stayed,” Ye Xuan said.
“That’s why we’re checking other evidence,” the detective said.
She asked about his access card. He told her where he had found it. When she asked about his phone, he showed the anonymous message on its screen. Reed wrote down the number without taking the device.
“Don’t delete anything,” she said. “If this person contacts you, call me. Don’t meet them alone.”
She left a card with a direct number.
“Do you still attend Hudson Polytechnic?”
“As far as I know.”
He looked uncertain, then followed Reed outside.
Mrs. Tang set a warm roll before Ye Xuan.
“You were tired all week,” she said. “But you were never this forgetful.”
“Did anyone come looking for me?”
“A boy from your school. Tuesday morning. He said you’d taken on too much work.” She stared at him. “You really don’t remember him?”
Ye Xuan could not answer.
Back upstairs, he photographed the access card and opened the phone calendar.
Tuesday: Pier 17 — equipment survey, 18:00.
His email confirmed an unpaid student observation shift. Temporary access expired at midnight.
The mechanics textbook lay open on the desk. He understood every argument and could derive new ones. Yet he could not remember buying it.
He searched the camera roll.
Lecture slides. A subway map. Receipts. Then a photograph taken at 22:06 on Tuesday: a concrete wall with water spreading from a narrow seam. Someone had held a steel ruler against it.
Without measurements, he could not calculate the pressure behind the wall. But someone had taken the photograph for a reason.
Beneath it was a draft message, unsent.
The drawing says there is no pipe here. Mara says the drawing is old. Ask who approved the change.
The phone rang.
Unknown caller.
He let it ring twice and answered silently.
Street noise filled the line. Someone was breathing close to the microphone.
“You showed them my message,” a man said.
“How do you know?”
“Because the number they copied belongs to someone who’s been dead for six months.”
The call ended.
Ye Xuan stared at the number, ordinary digits on an ordinary screen. Then someone knocked at his door, three quiet taps, and waited.