By that time, he had already completed his master’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering at MIT and received an offer from a research-focused tech company in Boston.

Around the same time, Yan Sishi received word that his maternal grandmother, Dai Shufang, was coming to Beicheng to undergo surgery for a tumor.

He asked his grandmother to remain in Beicheng to recover.

During the period he spent accompanying and caring for her, several domestic tech companies reached out to him through various channels, extending invitations for him to return to China to work.

One of these was a studio with a strong background — its parent company was based in Silicon Valley — and it had just finished assembling its China research and development team.

Yan Sishi met with them several times and ultimately decided to accept their offer, joining as one of the core leads responsible for the team’s algorithms, overseeing research work related to artificial intelligence convolutional neural network algorithms.

Once his grandmother had recovered and returned to Chucheng, Yan Sishi flew back to Boston one last time, declined the offer there, settled his remaining affairs, and officially returned to China.

The apartment had been found for him by his childhood friend Wen Shubai — a place not far from the tech park, roughly a ten-minute drive.

On the day Yan Sishi arrived back in China, Wen Shubai personally went to the airport to pick him up. He took him to a restaurant he’d booked in advance for a welcome dinner, then drove him to his new place. The entire process was handled with thoughtful care and seamless attention.

Yan Sishi had known him for twenty years. This was the first time he’d ever seen him this reliable.

“Of course I’d be reliable. I was afraid you’d be dissatisfied and turn right around and fly back to America.” Wen Shubai punched in the door code and let them in, ushering Yan Sishi inside with all the flair of a seasoned real estate agent. “My father always says that someone like you leaving for overseas is a loss. So I suppose this time, I’ve made my contribution to the nation.”

Predictably, Yan Sishi did not respond to the joke.

Wen Shubai was used to it. He walked through the apartment, pointing out each area in turn.

“I lived here during my internship. Anything I wasn’t happy with has already been redone, and it’s just been inspected recently — no major issues.”

He helped himself to a glass of water from the kitchen, then made ready to leave, telling Yan Sishi to rest early and reminding him to change the door lock password when he had a chance.

Unlike Wen Shubai’s own extravagant taste, the apartment’s interior was surprisingly understated.

Not that it mattered to Yan Sishi either way.

The team had only just been assembled; the early period was mostly about settling in and finding their rhythm.

It wasn’t until after the new year that the project development work truly got underway.

The studio followed the tradition of its American parent company: two days off per week, clocking out on time, with overtime kept to a minimum.

Yet Yan Sishi had developed a habit of staying on in his private office for a while longer, after the building had emptied out.

As far as he was concerned, going back to the apartment made little difference.

He lived, in spirit, a life of solitary withdrawal.

That day, Yan Sishi had stayed behind in the office trying to streamline the current algorithm structure.

He worked until eleven o’clock at night, then left the studio, collected his car from the underground parking level, and drove out of the tech park.

There was a twenty-four-hour convenience store just outside the park.

Yan Sishi pulled over to the side of the road and went in to buy a few bottles of water.

After eleven, the tech park took on a different character — an almost complete silence, with only a handful of floors still lit up.

The convenience store was equally quiet. Apart from him, there was only one other customer, standing in the corner near the microwave.

He glanced over without much interest and continued toward the refrigerated beverage cabinet at the back.

He had a habit of drinking a particular kind of raw tea that was only available at Japanese-style convenience stores.

He knew exactly where it was kept. He pulled open the cabinet door and was just reaching for it when he heard a voice from the corner — someone on the phone.

His hand stilled.

The voice wasn’t loud, and it spoke in fluent American-accented English, with only the occasional word or phrase that fell slightly short of native.

There were plenty of foreign companies in this park; English wasn’t unusual.

What caught his attention was the quality of the voice itself.

Soft. Measured. Cool at the edges.

It overlapped, uncannily, with someone sealed away in his memory.

He looked up.

She was a young woman, dressed in a flowing ash-grey overcoat over a black sweater. Her hair was long, past her shoulders, with an effortless volume to it. Under the bright white store light, the ends held a natural chestnut warmth.

It appeared to be a work call. Her tone stayed consistently measured throughout, but as she laid out her position and defended her ground, there was a quiet firmness running beneath it — soft on the surface, with something firm underneath.

That subtle edge of steel sat in complete contrast to her voice, and to the gentle quality of her face.

At this point, Yan Sishi still couldn’t be entirely certain. In high school she had always worn a school uniform, and her hair had been cut to just below the collarbone.

Then the microwave dinged.

She turned, and as she did, she briefly lifted her eyes.

Those clear, bright eyes were identical to the ones in his memory. Not the slightest variation.

Yan Sishi had attended many enrichment classes as a child. Go was the one he had stayed with the longest, because he was drawn to the intellectual combat of strategy and calculation.

He had a kind of perfectionism in certain areas — he always washed his hands before touching the stones.

But his rules existed only for himself; he never imposed them on others.

After a game, he would drop the pieces into a white ceramic bowl filled with clean water.

He would rinse them three times. In the sunlight, the surface of the water would shimmer with a faint, fine light, and beneath the clear water, the black and white stones would settle, distinct and still.

In high school, the first time he had seen her eyes clearly, that image had come to him.

Even her name seemed to fit.

The shimmer of a river on a bright summer’s day.

The person across the store had picked up the heated bento box, ready to put it into her bag. As she turned her head, she seemed to sense his gaze and looked up suddenly.

Yan Sishi pushed the refrigerator door quietly shut and walked toward her without hesitation.

“Long time no see,” he said.

“Yan Sishi? Long time no see.”

She recognized him too.

He had felt no real apprehension. Yet when she said his name, something in him settled — quietly, inexplicably, like feet finally finding solid ground.

Yan Sishi held her gaze for a moment. “Just got off work?”

“Yes.” Xia Li seemed not yet accustomed to speaking with him at such close range; there was a slight sense of unreality about it, as though she were still dreaming.

One of the tests for whether something was a dream was whether you could trace how you had arrived there. But Yan Sishi’s appearance had been too sudden, too much like a fragment from a dream without context or cause.

After a pause, Xia Li smiled and asked: “Are you — working in this park?”

There were no residential areas nearby, which made it even less likely that he would simply be passing through.

Yan Sishi nodded.

“When did you come back to China?” “I officially returned last November.”

Two people working in the same park for over three months, and this was their first chance encounter. It hardly seemed like that remarkable a coincidence.

While talking, Xia Li put the bento into her plastic bag. “So you’ve decided to come back and develop here?”

“Yes.”

Xia Li had imagined, more than once, what state she would be in if she ever ran into Yan Sishi again. She had always assumed the emotion would well up so thick that it would clog her throat and leave her without a single word to say.

In the present moment, she felt only a faint wistfulness and a quiet sense of reflection — and something else, a gentle ache so slight it was almost imperceptible.

So she could do this. She could exchange ordinary pleasantries with him the same way she would with any other old classmate.

Xia Li held up the plastic bag. For a moment she hesitated — it was getting late, and Xu Ning was still waiting for her to bring food.

Yan Sishi spoke first. His gaze dropped briefly to her hand. “Do you live nearby?”

“Nearby is too expensive. I can’t afford it.” Xia Li laughed.

“I’ll drive you.”

Xia Li had no time to consider whether to decline or not, because Yan Sishi had already turned and was heading briskly for the convenience store exit.

She noticed that his hands were empty — he hadn’t bought anything.

A black SUV was parked outside the convenience store. Yan Sishi clicked the key, and the headlights flashed.

He walked to the passenger door, pulled it open, and held it with one hand.

The bitter wind left Xia Li only a second of hesitation before she walked over and ducked inside.

As she brushed past him, the cool, crisp scent that reached her on the night air carried a familiar quality she hadn’t encountered in a long time.

They say olfactory memory is the most enduring of all.

Yan Sishi closed the door gently and walked around the front to the other side.

Xia Li set her bag down on her knees and pulled the seatbelt across to click it in.

Yan Sishi got in, started the engine, pressed the SYNC button to match the temperature on both sides, set the air conditioning to 28 degrees Celsius, and then pulled away.

“Address?”

Xia Li gave the name of her residential complex. “Do you know the way? If not, I can open the navigation.”

“Which road?”

Xia Li said the road name. “Do you need directions?”

“No.”

After that, neither of them spoke. A long silence settled between them.

Yan Sishi glanced at Xia Li in the passenger seat. She seemed slightly elsewhere, her thoughts difficult to read.

He, for his part, found himself thinking back to the first time he had ever been in a car with her.

He had borrowed her earphones and pretended to be asleep while listening to music. Occasionally, when the vehicle hit a bump, he’d open his eyes and catch a glimpse of her sitting beside him — nervously, intently, staring at the screen of the MP3 player she had clutched in both hands.

To this day, he still had no idea what she had been looking at so fixedly.

A notification pinged on her WeChat. Xia Li snapped back to attention.

It was a voice message from Xu Ning, asking if she was on her way back. Xia Li held the phone to her ear to listen, then pressed and held the record button: “On my way, I’ll be there within twenty minutes.”

The voice message sent with a soft whoosh.

Yan Sishi seized the opening: “Roommate?”

“Xu Ning — do you still remember her?”

“Class Seven?”

“The one who wrote the Xi’an Incident screenplay.”

Yan Sishi nodded, then asked: “Who else is in Beicheng?”

“Two more people from Class Seven — you probably wouldn’t know them. Oh, and Ouyang Jing is here too. She graduated from the dance academy and is working at a dance theater company now.”

“Ouyang Jing is…?”

“…” Xia Li could hardly say: the girl who confessed to you and was turned down, and ended up in tears because of it. “Just a girl from the arts track.”

“I’m sorry — I don’t remember her.”

“What about Wang Chen? Are you still in touch with him?”

“We reconnected in the first half of last year.”

Xia Li expected him to elaborate, to say something more about Wang Chen.

He didn’t.

By now she had started to notice that Yan Sishi seemed genuinely uninterested in all these surface-level exchanges — the kind that skimmed past without depth. And that included the questions he had asked himself.

She turned to look at him.

She wouldn’t call him cold. He gave answers, after all; he wasn’t ignoring her.

But he was different from his high school self. Back then, he had perhaps simply found most social interaction tedious and chosen to opt out of the unnecessary kind — yet there had still been a trace of warmth: explaining problems to Nie Chuhang, teaching Wang Chen to play basketball, translating the stage play. Little things that showed he was still human in those interactions.

Now, after this whole car ride, all she felt was that he maintained an absolute, completely detached indifference toward everything and everyone, as though none of it had anything to do with him.

As though he were just passing through the world.

Xia Li fell quiet.

It seemed that question had quietly lost its relevance, too — Yan Sishi, why did you leave without saying goodbye?

After a stretch of silence, it was actually Yan Sishi who spoke again: “You were in Beicheng during your undergraduate years?”

“No.” Xia Li smiled. “I studied in Nancheng and moved here after I graduated. What about you — where did you go?”

“MIT.”

“Oh…”

The way she said it — a small, startled sound of comprehension — made Yan Sishi look over at her.

Xia Li shook her head, still smiling. “It’s nothing. Just — I ran into someone from Class Twenty here in Beicheng a while back, and in passing they mentioned where everyone had ended up. They said you went to Caltech.”

Caltech was in Los Angeles.

MIT was in Boston.

Whether that classmate had remembered wrong or simply mixed them up, there was no way to know now.

Either way, it had been a misdirection that led somewhere entirely different.

Yan Sishi said nothing for a moment, because after the last of her words fell away, there followed a quiet sigh — so faint it was barely there, carried softly on the air like a breath of yearning. And in the corner of his vision, the amber-yellow of a streetlamp swept across her face, then swallowed her into the darkness the next instant. She dropped her eyes. Her expression fell into shadow, unreadable.

This silence stretched on longer than the others.

Until, without either of them quite noticing, the car had arrived on the road where her residential complex stood.

Xia Li came back to herself. “Just ahead — another hundred meters.”

The car pulled up to the gate of the complex and stopped.

Xia Li unclipped her seatbelt and slung her bag over her shoulder. “I’m here. Thank you for the ride.”

“It’s nothing.”

A very familiar reply.

Xia Li felt a sudden flash of something — like a moment of déjà vu.

She reached for the door handle and thanked him again.

The door opened a crack; the cold air slipped in through the gap. She was about to push it open when Yan Sishi spoke: “Don’t you want to add each other on WeChat?”

Xia Li let go of the handle, and the wind instantly pushed the door shut again.

The hazard lights blinked at a steady rhythm.

Yan Sishi reached out and picked up his phone from the console beside him.

When he held it out to her, the lit screen displayed a contact QR code.

YAN

The profile picture was a stretch of deep, brooding blue ocean.