Faintly Remember You

After Gu Yang finished eating the dumplings and left, Lin Shen pulled the watercolor painting from the inner pocket of his coat, spread it out on the coffee table, and stared at it for a long time. The blue paint on the painting had been dry for two years, but tonight it looked—maybe a shade lighter than before.

Lin Shen didn't go to work the next day.

He messaged the firm saying he had a cold and took the day off, then wrapped the painting in three layers of plastic wrap and stuffed it into the innermost layer of his backpack. The feel of the pencil sketch rubbed against the access card in the backpack's inner pocket, reminding him with every step: this thing is still here.

He stood at the entrance of his apartment and took a deep breath.

The subway wasn't too crowded. He chose a seat with his back against the car wall, placed the backpack on his lap, and pressed his hands down on it. Across from him, a middle-aged man was looking at his phone; the screen reflection glinted off his glasses, revealing nothing.

When he got to his stop, he stood up too quickly. His knee knocked against the backpack, and the hard corner of the paper pressed against his chest through the plastic wrap. He instinctively reached in and felt for it—still there.

The "Nomad" café sat at the corner of a road lined with phoenix trees. The storefront wasn't big; the floor-to-ceiling windows were plastered with stickers from who knows how many years ago—a crooked coffee cup pattern, bleached pale by the sun. Half of the signboard tubes by the door were broken, leaving only the character "游" (wander) and half of "牧" (herd).

He stood at the door for about five seconds before pushing it open. A deep breath.

The copper bell on the door chimed.

"Welcome——" Xiao You looked up from behind the counter, saw Lin Shen, and paused. "You again."

The café looked exactly the same as it had two days ago. A row of four booths by the window, a square table in the middle, a few old photos hanging on the wall. The air carried the bitter, burnt smell of over-extracted coffee beans mixed with the aged scent of old wood.

Lin Shen didn't sit where he sat last time. He walked to the innermost booth by the window, placed his backpack on the seat beside him, and sat down.

This was the first time he'd chosen this spot. But Su Wan always sat here whenever she came.

"Oat latte," he said.

"Hot?"

"Hot. Less sweet."

As Xiao You turned to work the coffee machine, Lin Shen pulled the pencil from his backpack—the one Su Wan had given him, with "L&S" still engraved on the cap, though it looked shallower than yesterday. He rubbed his thumb over the cap, then placed the pencil next to the table menu.

When the coffee arrived, a burst of hot air hit his face. The warmth of the cup seeped through the ceramic into his palms. He held it with both hands but didn't drink right away.

After serving the coffee, Xiao You went back behind the counter and continued wiping cups. The two of them were the only ones in the café. A female jazz vocal played through the speakers, the sound fuzzy—like a tape that had been rewound too many times.

"Boss," Lin Shen called.

Xiao You looked up.

"Those photos on your wall—when were they taken?"

Xiao You set down the cup in his hand, came out from behind the counter, and looked up at the wall covered in photos. Most were black-and-white film, a few were Polaroids. The content was eclectic—a ribbon-cutting for the café's opening, Halloween party guests wearing masks, a few guitarists playing, a girl's profile as she held a coffee cup from the side of the counter.

"A few were taken in the opening year," Xiao You said, pointing to the leftmost row. "Those black film ones. Later I occasionally took some during events—Halloween parties, Christmas gift exchanges, stuff like that."

Lin Shen stood up and walked closer to the photo wall. His gaze swept from the top row to the bottom, left to right, very slowly. Every photo had a bunch of people, but not one of them was Su Wan.

No—it wasn't that she wasn't in the photos. It was that when he looked at every face, none of them felt right.

Not that they didn't look like Su Wan. It was that they didn't look like anyone he would know.

"Boss, do you remember—about a year ago—a Halloween party. A girl sang here."

Xiao You frowned. The same expression he'd worn when Lin Shen came last time, the same as before—not the kind of frown that says "I can't remember," but the kind that says "I feel like I should remember, but I really don't."

"Long straight black hair. A tear mole at the corner of her left eye. A dimple on the right when she smiled." Lin Shen shifted his gaze from the photo wall back to Xiao You, his tone steady, but his speech slower than usual. "She liked closing her eyes when she sang. After she finished, she'd shyly stick out her tongue."

Xiao You stared at the photo wall for a long time.

Long enough that the coffee cup in Lin Shen's hands had stopped steaming.

"Maybe…" Xiao You said two words, then stopped. He took down a photo from a corner of the wall, wiped the dust off the glass frame with his finger, and held it up to the light by the window to examine it closely.

It was a group photo from a Halloween party. About a dozen people in the frame, most wearing weird costumes, the lighting dim—only the row of small lights above the bar was on. On the right side of the photo, near the curtain, there was a blurred back profile—you couldn't really see the face, just a dark long ponytail and an arm reaching toward a microphone.

"This one," Xiao You said, pointing to the blurry figure. "This person—I'm not sure who it is. But when I took this photo, I remember someone sang an English song." He paused. "Sang really well. Everyone went quiet. I made a special drink that day and brought it to her. I remember she said—"

Xiao You stopped. There was a certain subtle blankness in his eyes, like he was searching for a piece of erased text and couldn't find anything.

"She said what?" Lin Shen asked. His voice had hardened a little. He pressed his thumb against his index finger joint, which made a faint cracking sound.

"I don't remember. I only remember she said thank you. Then she took a sip and laughed—said I put too much syrup."

Lin Shen raised the pencil. The end of the pencil tapped on the table.

Tapped again. A third time.

He put the pencil down.

"Can you look up her order history? What did she usually order?"

Xiao You went back behind the counter, pulled up a high stool, sat down, and opened the cash register's backend. He typed in a few criteria, the cursor on the screen blinked a few times, and a page popped up. He looked at the screen, his expression growing more and more uneasy.

"That's strange."

"What's wrong?"

Xiao You turned the screen to show Lin Shen. The page displayed a long string of order records, from early last year to two months ago—about forty-something entries. In every single order, the customer name field read "Lin Shen."

Every single one.

Lin Shen remembered those dates. Most of those days, he was working overtime and never came to the café. Su Wan had come alone. She liked to bring her sketchbook here around three or four in the afternoon and sit for two hours, ordering an oat latte, sometimes adding a slice of cheesecake.

But in the system, every order she placed was recorded under his name.

"I didn't place these orders," Lin Shen said.

"The system only recognizes membership cards. These were all swiped with your card." Xiao You scrolled a few more pages on the screen, going back to the earliest record—January 17th last year, 3:09 PM, oat latte, less sugar, customer name: Lin Shen.

Lin Shen stared at a small line of text beneath that record for two seconds. The line was in the "Notes" field, which the system defaulted to blank—but he wasn't looking at that.

It wasn't the notes.

It was the customer signature.

At the very bottom of that record, in the signature field, it wasn't Lin Shen's name. The digital screen preserved a scanned image of a handwritten signature, all crooked—like a child drawing with their left hand: a little sun. A circle in the middle, five rays shooting outward, one of them noticeably longer than the others. In the bottom right corner of the sun, there was an old coffee stain mark.

Lin Shen picked up the pencil and tapped it on the table.

"Can you check all the records? The earliest one."

Xiao You flipped back to the first page. The earliest was January 11th last year, name still Lin Shen. But the signature—another little sun.

"This signature isn't mine," Lin Shen said. His voice was flat, but Xiao You noticed his grip on the cup handle was turning his knuckles white.

Xiao You didn't say anything. He scrolled through more than twenty pages of records, almost every single one carrying that little sun signature. Some were already very blurry due to low scanning resolution, but the direction of the five rays never changed—top-left, top-right, bottom-left, bottom-right, the last stroke extending straight downward.

"She drew this on every note," Lin Shen said.

Xiao You put down the cup he'd been wiping clean—or not so clean—and pulled a stack of old paper receipt stubs from the counter drawer. He stopped when he got to October last year. On one receipt, at the signature spot, was a handwritten little sun.

He pulled out all the receipts with little suns, one by one, and lined them up.

Twenty-one in total.

The paper signatures matched the system scans. Some signatures were deep, some light—some done with a ballpoint pen, some with a gel pen. On one, the gel pen was nearly out of ink, the sun's circle broken in two places, but the start and end strokes matched—drawn by the same person.

"What's this person's name?" Xiao You placed the receipt in his hand flat on the counter, leveling his gaze at it as if trying to extract information from the paper's fibers.

"Su Wan. Su from Suzhou, Wan meaning dusk."

Xiao You read "Su Wan" once, pressing his lips into a thin line. He lifted the Halloween party photo from the wall again and looked at that blurry side figure once more.

"When you came last time," Xiao You said, hanging the photo back on the wall, "I thought you were talking nonsense too. But the last couple of days, I keep feeling like—there's something I've forgotten." He tapped his temple with his index finger. "I have an old problem. I took a fall on the back of my head when I was young, and now and then I lose some memory fragments. The doctor said it's not serious, doesn't affect daily life. But sometimes I feel like—there are things I should remember, but can't."

He turned to face Lin Shen. "Just now when you said she had a tear mole at the corner of her left eye—a scene flashed in my mind. When she was singing on stage, the light hit from the left side, and that mole was lit up."

Lin Shen set down his cup. The sound of it hitting the saucer was a little louder than expected.

"Thank you," he said. His voice was very soft, as if afraid of startling something.

Xiao You picked up the stack of receipts with the little suns, looked at them again, hesitated, then pushed them over to Lin Shen. Lin Shen folded the receipts one by one and tucked them into the inner pocket of his backpack.

Watching him put the receipts away, Xiao You suddenly said, "Wait. I think I remember something."

He went back behind the counter, bent down, and pulled a kraft paper envelope from the bottommost shelf. The envelope's surface was dusty, and judging by its thickness, it had something inside.

"Last November or so—"

He stopped abruptly, that blank look appearing in his eyes again. He turned the envelope over to check the address line—nothing written on it.

"This person—the girl you're looking for." He handed the envelope to Lin Shen. "She told me about a place. A warehouse in the old town district. She stored paintings there—an old camphor wood box or something."

Lin Shen took the envelope and opened the flap. Inside were three Polaroid photos. The first showed an old-fashioned wooden chest with a copper lock clasp that had turned green. The second showed picture frames stacked inside the open chest, with paint visible at the edges. The third—the third was a mark on a wall.

There was a piece of paper pasted on the wall, and drawn on the paper was a sun.

On the inside of the envelope, a tiny sentence was written in pencil—the kind of cheap school pencil that costs a few cents, the handwriting almost worn away from friction:

"76 Donghe Street, third warehouse at the back. Key under the flowerpot at the entrance."

Lin Shen held the envelope in his hand, pressing his palm against the spot where the small writing was.

Outside the window, the phoenix tree leaves shimmered in the sunlight. The light and shadow through the floor-to-ceiling windows swept a bright patch across the floor.

"Do you remember her telling you this?" Lin Shen asked.

Xiao You shook his head. "No. Just now when I was looking for coasters in the drawer, I found this envelope, and it seemed like someone had asked me to keep it—but I can't remember who."

He paused. "I only remember her saying that if someone came looking for her—to give this to him."

Lin Shen stuffed the envelope into his backpack, placing it next to the watercolor painting beneath his coat. Paper against paper, both carrying someone else's warmth.

He shouldered his backpack and walked to the door.

"Mr. Lin."

He turned around.

Xiao You leaned against the counter, still holding that rag, his expression a blur somewhere between drowsiness and sadness. His lips moved, but in the end, he only said:"The girl you mentioned—if she really existed."

"She exists." Lin Shen said amidst the sound of copper bells.