The request was for a room, not a building.
Wanjiru made that clear before telling the family it had been approved. Investigators handling the missing-person inquiry had arranged a supervised examination of the service compound’s document-receiving office and associated records. They were not claiming authority to search every workshop, storage bay, or tenant area. The operator and contractor would make the relevant rooms and retained materials available under the agreed procedure.
“Will they look for his belongings?” Yanchuan asked.
“They will examine what is relevant to the inquiry. I cannot tell them what to find.”
An asked whether the inspection could verify the receipt of the packet associated with the transport charge. Wanjiru said the chain of custody would be among the questions pursued, but the physical packet might have been archived, transferred, or destroyed under a normal retention process. Each outcome would need a record, not an assumption.
The appointment was set for Thursday.
For the next three days Yanchuan kept seeing a door opening.
He had never seen the actual room. His mind supplied shelves of binders, a steel cabinet, a paper tray beneath a blinking printer. In some versions Yansheng’s folder waited in a drawer. In others the room contained nothing and the search ended for lack of another place to look.
At work Chen found him standing beside an unused meeting room, staring through its glass wall.
“You can’t stand in Kenya by looking at a door here,” Chen said.
“I know.”
“Then finish the capacity study. We have a client meeting tomorrow.”
Yanchuan turned on him. “You think I don’t know that?”
“I think you’ve been here for half an hour and don’t know what room you’re in,” Chen replied. His voice stayed low. “Take ten minutes. Then tell me whether you can do the meeting or whether I should give it to someone else.”
The offer made Yanchuan angrier than an order would have. He went back to his desk without thanking him.
Yanchuan returned to his desk. The study was about ordinary industrial demand in Shenzhen. The model’s first output proposed a smaller reserve than the maintenance team considered safe. He sat with the technician who had kept the manual log and asked how long the auxiliary chiller could be unavailable before the room became too hot for the process.
“Depends on what else is running,” she said.
He wrote down the dependence rather than asking for a universal number.
That evening Guo called to discuss the draft. He liked the structure of the reserve scenarios but wanted to know whether the uncertainty could be expressed as a single price.
“It can be priced under stated assumptions,” Yanchuan said. “The price changes if those assumptions change.”
“Everything does.”
“Not everything gets described as guaranteed.”
Guo was silent. Then he asked Chen for the cost of an independent site check before signing a larger agreement. It was not an answer Yanchuan expected from an investor trying to buy an attractive forecast.
He had begun to distrust Guo for reasons that had little to do with what the man had actually done. He wrote a note to himself: watch the contract, not the face.
On Wednesday An called from her son’s school. A teacher had asked whether the family wanted to share anything about his father for an activity on parents’ work. An had said no, not because Yansheng’s work was shameful, but because she did not want her son explaining an absence in front of classmates who could offer no help.
“What did he want?” Yanchuan asked.
“He wants to bring the bridge. He says his father taught him how to brace it.”
“Did he?”
“He did, on a video call. Before everything.”
They let him take the bridge, with the loose support attached by tape. The teacher agreed that he could talk about engineering without speaking about the search.
That night Wanjiru sent a reminder: any new information gathered during the inspection would first be evaluated by the investigating team. The family might receive only the portion appropriate to share. An acknowledged it immediately. Yanchuan stared at the message before replying.
He wanted to ask for a photograph of the room. He did not.
Thursday began with an ordinary failure. At his office the air-conditioning control reported a valve open while the room grew steadily warmer. The maintenance technician checked the position indicator at the valve and found that the command had been issued but the actuator had not moved.
Yanchuan watched her isolate the unit and arrange a repair. The incident had no connection to the missing-person case. He wrote the diagnosis in the work log because the control team needed it.
At noon he stepped outside with his lunch and called An.
“I don’t know what they’re doing right now,” he said.
“Neither do I.”
“Are you afraid?”
“Yes.”
He could hear traffic around her. She was between customers, carrying folders whose contents still needed her attention.
“Whatever they find,” she said, “we’ll read what they actually found.”
He put his food down. He had been preparing himself for a terrible revelation, then for relief, as though one of those emotional rehearsals could make the day manageable.
In Kenya, Amina went to her own shift. She had not been asked to attend the document-office inspection, and she did not try to enter. She sent An a message at the scheduled time: I am available after work if there is a technical question within my remit.
The family received no update before evening.
Jianming called to ask whether they knew anything. Yanchuan told him the inspection was underway and they had not been given a result. His father asked if he had eaten. He had not finished lunch, but he said he would.
At eleven, a message came from Wanjiru. The examination had taken place. The team was reviewing the records obtained and would communicate verified findings through the case contact.
No photograph. No description of the shelves. No promise of an answer.
Yanchuan put the phone face down and washed the bowl he had left in the sink.
At eleven thirty he got up to check whether his phone had lost its connection. The signal was full. He went back to bed and left the message unread a second time, because there was nothing new in it.